Is There Anyone Cooler Than Stacy Peralta…?
Stacy Peralta is a legendary skateboarder, an industry-defining entrepreneur, and an exalted film director who has been shaping surf and skate culture for over 50 years.
From his home on the Central Coast, Stacy explains, “The universe creates itself by working through us — all of us. Getting in touch with what you love, is getting in touch with what’s right for the world. When we don’t use it, it goes to someone else. The universe doesn’t wait around.”
Locals Only
Venice born and Santa Monica raised, Stacy and his friends surfed most mornings. They mounted newly invented urethane wheels to pieces of wood, ideating, and innovating modern-day skateboards. “We didn’t know skateboarding was going to be popular one day, but we loved doing it,” he asserts. The crew conquered backyard pools and rode asphalt waves down Bay Street to the Zephyr Shop where owners Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom formed the infamous Zephyr Skateboard Team.
Early Bert-Turn Source; Stacy Peralta Ig. Original Photo by C. R. Stecyk III.
While allies like Jay Adams and Tony Alva electrified the burgeoning 70s vert-skate scene, Stacy stood out for his style, aesthetic, and work ethic. “I realized, ‘Wow I’m very lucky, and this could be a doorway to the world, so I took it very seriously’,” he shares. Big sponsors swooped in, filled his pockets and flew him around the planet. Peralta’s skills went prime time on the hit show Charlie’s Angels, and much later as a technical consultant on the cult-classic film Gleaming the Cube.
Two Voices
By the late 70s the teenager was ranked #1 by Skateboarder Magazine. There were demos and merch, appearances, autographs, and arrests. “I had done everything I wanted to do and more” he discloses. “And so the question I asked myself was, ‘Do you still love doing this?’ and the answer was, ‘No.’ I also asked myself, ‘Can you continue doing this?’ The answer was, ‘Yes I can, but I don’t love it’.”
Instead of being sponsored, Peralta wanted to be the sponsor. “I hadn’t gone to college, so my brain was telling me, ‘You have no right to start a business,’.” he confesses. “But my heart was telling me, ‘That’s what you need to do.’ And so, I learned at a very young age, that there’s two different voices in me, one my heart, which speaks very quietly and very abstractly, and one my brain, which never shuts up.”
At the top of his game, the pathfinder shocked the sports world when he listened to that quiet voice within and quit.
Future Primitive
The 19-year-old partnered with product designer George Powell to co-found Powell Peralta Skateboards. They had a strong start but by 1982, the sport’s popularity waned. Skateparks shut down and pro-skaters were out of work. “We barely stayed in business,” Stacy admits. Then he noticed something intriguing. As kids were leaving skateparks, they were practicing vertical skateboard tricks off curbs, onto benches, against mailboxes, and the like. “The more I watched, the more I thought that is the most democratized form of skateboarding,” Stacy observed. “We had to pivot to save the sport, and figure out what the sport wanted to be.” Powell-Peralta over-invested their financial and energetic capital into the evolution. “People thought we were crazy” he chuckles.
In the tradition of the Zephyr Shop, the born leader curated a team of unrelenting underdogs to rep the brand. With creative collaborator Craig Steyck, Peralta produced and directed the first-ever skateboard video, The Bones Brigade Video Show. The coveted VHS tape not only introduced street skating to next-gen groms, but showcased up and comers like Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain, and a teenaged Tony Hawk. Stacy looks back, “We made the first video thinking we’ll probably sell 300. We sold I think 30,000. It was unbelievable. They became manifestos.”
Tony Guerrero Cracks Open the Consciousness of 80s Kids in Future Primitive.
Over the next 15 years, Powell, Peralta, and co learned about cash flow, product strategy, manufacturing, team management, and much more. Their evocative approach to advertising was groundbreaking, award-winning, and a lot of fun. “George was the only adult in the room, so we didn’t have anybody above us, telling us that we couldn’t do things.” Stacy smiles. He and Craig lit cars on fire, painted faces, succeeded, failed and tried again. They were OG content creators in the time of random-access viewing. From the brink of bankruptcy, Powell-Peralta revenues rose to upwards of $30 million dollars annually. Christmas 1990 was projected to be their most profitable quarter yet. Stacy once again listened to the abstract whispers of his heart, and at the height of their success, left.
Dogdays In A Dogtown
The consummate seeker did the Hollywood hustle as a screenwriting student, spec script writer, shorts producer, commercial shooter, and television director for nine years. Amidst doubt and disappointment Peralta had to dig deep and ask himself what unique thing he had to offer. “There is a loneliness that comes with following your heart,” Stacy notes. “But when you start feeling lonely, more insecure and uncertain, and you’re not sure what that next step is, it gives you the strength to keep moving forward.” When a good friend saw a rough cut of his passion project, she insisted he submit it to a career-making (or breaking) film festival. He resisted. She persisted. He surrendered.
Dogtown and the Z-Boys premiered at Sundance in January, 2001. The biographical love letter to his hometown, the guys he grew up with, and the culture they created won the Audience Award. And for his feature film directorial debut, Stacy Peralta won the best documentary director award.
The movie played in select theaters across the country before being released on DVD. Yet a fourth generation was transfixed and transformed by the pioneers who preceded popular events like the X-Games and street skating in the Olympics. Throughout the process Peralta accepted, “You don’t have to understand what that thing is, you don’t even have to like it. Your job is to do it. And that’s something we don’t realize. We come at things wanting to know the outcome, you can’t know it.”
Over the following two decades Stacy made a career as a commercial, television, and documentary director. His films Riding Giants, Bones Brigade: An Autobiography and The Yin and Yang of Gerry Lopez became instant classics, positioning him as one of the preeminent surf and skateboarding filmmakers of our time.
Radical Transitions
From fan letters of the 70s to the ask-me-anything Reddits of today, infinite aspiring-everythings and top of their game, what-nowers have reached out to Stacy for insight and advice. He found a proper venue for this mentoring with Modern Elder Academy (MEA). A wisdom school dedicated to helping people reimagine and repurpose themselves during one of the most overlooked transitions….midlife. At a recent MEA event, Stacy shared, “Sometimes we have to carve out our own path and this requires doing things on a daily basis that helps put us in touch with ourselves and our purpose. To do this is going against the current, it requires taking a proactive stance in our life but the payoff is remarkable because you become more alive and you are more in touch with yourself and what you have to offer.”
Stacy Peralta’s 5 Things I Do Every Day
1. I meditate every single day.
I try to do at least an hour and when I’m really good, I do 2 hours and it makes a gigantic difference in my life. The effects of meditation; it centers me, it calms my brain and gives me a better a chance at hearing those quiet voices that are the true voices I’m looking for. Whenever you are in the middle of a true athletic moment and you the person dissolves and you’re just going with the action, the thing you experience at that moment is intense stillness. How is it possible that I could experience stillness when I’m riding a board going incredibly fast…? I believe based on everything I’ve studied, that that is our essence. Another reason why I meditate to give me a fighting chance to get back to that place.”
2. I exercise every day.
I don’t want to do it. People think because I’m a former pro-athlete, that somehow it’s easy for me, it’s not [he laughs]. I never wake up wanting to do it, but to live the life I want to live I have to do it. When I’m done I feel amazing all throughout the day. It takes about 40 minutes. I could burn about 40 minutes, doing social media in a heartbeat and get nothing from it. When I do this, I’m getting something from it.”
3. I do something creative every day.
Thanks to a friend traveling though town, Stacy recently began artistic an pursuit, he had wanted to try for over 40 years. Peralta explains, “He unlocked me. And when he left, I went out and bought a paint set and it was as if a dam broke. One of the things that I am continuing to relearn as an adult is putting myself in situations where I don’t know if I can do it.”
Peralta Paints at Home. Copyright / courtesy of Dana Shaw and Colin Norman.
4. I learn something new everyday.
That can also be a combination of the creative or the physical thing I do. For instance, I’ve taken up a new form of surfing, called hydrofoil. It is the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my entire life. Took me two and half years to get me where I am right now. So every time I go out, I’m learning something new about it. And if I don’t get to surf, then I’ll paint something that requires me to do something that I’m a little scared to do.”
5. I read non-fiction everyday.
I’m a heavy non-fiction book reader, because I want to understand myself, and the world, and how people become who they are. No one ever asks me what I’m reading; I wish they would! [he laughs]. I just finished a book, it was so amazingly beautiful that I’m in my third pass through it, it’s called “John and Paul; a Love Story in Songs” by Ian Leslie. It’s about the relationship between the two Beatles, and how they communicate with one another through the creative process. The author pulls it off so brilliantly, I can’t stop reading this book.”
Other recommended reading includes;
Quantum – Einstein, Bohr and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality by Manjit Kumar, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, Material World by Ed Conway, A Walk in the Park by Kevin Fedarko, Picasso’s war by Hugh Eakin, and Endurance by Alfred Lansing.
Against The Current
Stacy clarifies, “I’m not a freak about things though, I don’t wake up and drink raw eggs and orange juice. I’m very disciplined, but I’m loose with my discipline, because I have to live with myself, and make my life enjoyable. There’s a very famous saying and it says this, ‘We don’t decide our futures, what we get to decide are our habits. And our habits are what decide our future.’ It’s about asking, ”What life do I want to live, and then saying ‘This is what it’s going to take to do this.”
He pauses thoughtfully and continues, “One of my goals is to live with the heart of a teenager and the wisdom of an adult.”
Join Stacy Peralta and Teddi Dean at MEA’s Radical Transitions Retreat; The Courage to Reinvent Yourself in Baja.
More info on the retreat can be found here.
Follow Stacy + all he is up to on his IG here.
The only beach break where being a kook is encouraged. Stacy teaches surfing at MEA.
Author’s Note-
Thank you to Kari Cardinale and Teddi Dean at Modern Elder Academy – learn more here.
And to Dana Shaw and Colin Norman. Check out their work here, here and here…!
To Check Out Amy’s Work Go To; Sense + Color, You Can Reach Her At IG: Amy_V_Dewhurst + AmyVDewhurst@SenseAndColor.co #PutYourGoodWhereItWillDoTheMost