Zaturdays With Zitzer: Rodney Mullen is a Genius, You Might Be Too

Rodney Mullen is a Genius, You Might Be Too

I’ve always claimed it takes a genius to change or influence skateboarding in any significant way. Mark Gonzalez, Tom Penny, Hawk, Blender, Daewon, and of course the movement’s posterboy, Rodney Mullen. All geniuses. If you missed it, Wired magazine just came out with a truly great and inspirational article on Rodney, with a focus on his involvement in Silicon Valley of all things. It’s great to see a serious piece of mainstream journalism about someone we all love that tells us more than we already knew. I learned from the article that Rodney is now something of a hero to the tech crowd, and that being a hero is kind of a full time job, but he’s also skating a lot. You owe it to yourself to read the full story. Here’s the link: Maybe a distinction should be made between the physical type and the mental type of genius, but I don’t think so. They’re the same in my opinion. Skateboarding takes physical talent obviously, but I’d argue that what we call “talent” is a direct result of an intensely focused and talented mind. Skateboarding requires singular concentration, but we can take it a step further and say that it’s exclusively the mental components that determine the difference between being so-so and being the best ever. Instead of 50% mental, or even 90% mental, could it be that skateboarding is actually 100% mental? Yes it could. These skater geniuses aren’t physically constructed differently than the rest of us, so what other reason could there be that so many of these amazingly great skateboarders perform so differently than us? All this talk brings to mind an article from a few years back, also published in Wired, titled “What Kind of Genius Are You?” “Me?" I said out loud to the page when I first read it. “A genius? Stop it, you’re embarrassing me.” I’m only joking, I didn’t really say that stuff, out loud… The article highlighted research by economist David Galenson, about people we think of as geniuses [Frank Lloyd Wright, Mozart, Picasso] and how the influence and creativity of people like them typically follow one of two types of trajectories. The first being the ones that “make bold, dramatic leaps in their disciplines,” and then tend to quickly fizzle out. Galenson refers to these people as “conceptual innovators.” The second type enjoys a slow and steady upward momentum, they’re the “experimental innovators.” Once again, I find myself trying to apply these types of things to skateboarding. I could go on and put each of our skater geniuses into a category, but you might want to try it yourself. And remember to ask yourself which group you fall into. Oh, and me? Yeah, I’m an experimental innovator. Using the term loosely. - Paul Zitzer