Many moons ago, when I was growing up on the potholed streets of Nairobi, I discovered Rodney Mullen through a friend who was a skater. My friend had a quarter pipe and lots of issues of Thrasher magazine he’d either bring back or have sent to him from Canada. We watched skate videos at his house whenever I was over. I even talked him into giving me a few skateboarder t-shirts. In a nutshell I was, in every way, a skater despite the fact that I couldn’t skate.

Now, so many years down the road I realize this wasn’t a dumb stretch of my imagination. As Rodney Mullen explains in his TED talk, skateboarding is just a different type of hacking.

There is an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it.

Not from this talk but there is another Rodney Mullen quote I've made into a personal mantra:

Fall in love with the simple motions of what you do