A thank-you caught up with me

I gave Tony Hawk’s non-profit a domain name and an app with no strings attached. Four years later, a thank-you caught up with me.

My uncle once pulled aside a much younger me and told that scruffy skateboarder that if I wanted to get ahead in the world, I’d need to pick up golf and use it to network. I dismissed his guidance out of hand, as young people do. Neither of us were entirely wrong. I built my network out of things I truly loved instead, and it’s mostly worked out. This is a story about that network.

Lately I’ve been writing about what I call the intimacy economy : small unscored communities, where things get made and kept rather than posted and counted, quietly producing most of what turns out to matter. It’s nearly invisible to every metric we watch, which makes it a hard thing to argue. What follows is the closest I’ve come to being able to point at it.

That gift to Hawk’s non-profit, The Skatepark Project, led on my fifty-fourth birthday to a surreal session on Tony’s private vert ramp: him grabbing his pads to coach me over its iconic 8-foot gap. I don’t think any of it was meant as a thank-you, and that’s exactly why it was one. Real thank-yous arrive on their own schedule, can’t be requested, and can’t be repaid, which is what makes them worth more than the favor that occasioned them.

I’m aware of where I’m posting this: ground zero of the tracked relationship, the online version of the network my uncle was pitching, where every coffee gets a follow-up cadence. The most durable things in my working life came from the other ledger, the one nobody keeps: you do things you have an aptitude for, ideally things you love, you sometimes give one away and forget about it, and four years later it walks back in wearing a helmet and kneepads.

The whole story, including why there’s no video evidence: