Surfing the wave properly: why excuses slow you down, commitment speeds you up and selling remains essential

The big waves that life sends racing towards us, inflation, technological leaps and skills shortages, do not become smaller when we look away.

We are only at their mercy if we refuse to put the board under our feet. Successful entrepreneurs surf. They accept that the sea keeps moving, they learn to read the current, and they use the power of the water for speed instead of fighting against it.

On excuses and responsibility

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.

The quote captures the difference between an explanation and an excuse. Anyone who reads a wave as a catastrophe starts looking for reasons why nothing can be done. Skilled workers are scarce, the economy is sluggish, the competition is aggressive.

Yet the world is never objective, it is always what we see in it. The moment excuses take over, we hand away responsibility and with it control.

Entrepreneurship begins where excuses end. Growth has always been a question of the inner decision to recognise and exploit possibilities, rather than a question of external circumstances.

Every upswing emerged in the middle of a crisis, because a minority saw opportunities where others saw obstacles. The question is therefore less whether the wave is coming, and more:

What is still holding you back?

Swim with the current, or better still, surf it?

Financial freedom sounds like a dream, yet it is within reach for most people once they understand that time must not be traded one to one for money.

Anyone who only sells hours limits their income to the number of hours in a day.

Entrepreneurship lifts that limit, because processes, systems and people work at the same time while the founder steers strategically.

Investments amplify the effect: money flows into assets, projects or holdings, which in turn generate cash without requiring additional space in the calendar.

There is a clear order to this. First comes a profitable, focused core business.

Once that scales reliably, it creates the capacity to direct capital into other business models such as real estate, precious metals, digital assets or company holdings.

That way the money keeps working while the core brand grows. After all, you only surf a wave with confidence once you can hold your balance on the board.

Concentrating on what matters

In a stormy sea the inexperienced surfer tries to take every wave and falls in the process. Focus is the lifeline.

True commitment means concentrating energy on one project, one product, one goal, instead of spreading it across several half-hearted efforts.

Diversification matters, yet operationally it only works once the first branch is strong enough to carry the others.

A frequently cited example is the platform strategy.

Jeff Bezos built Amazon by perfecting online bookselling first, transferring the processes he gained to further categories and only then opening new markets, rather than starting in fashion, streaming, cloud computing and space travel all at once. Expansion followed success, and not the other way round.

Anyone who touches everything at once inevitably loses sight of the greatest growth potential.

Successful entrepreneurs check whether a project contributes directly to the strategic main wave. If it does not, it gets delegated, sold or never started.

Beliefs that slow you down, and how to break them

A good product sells itself.

Hardly any other sentence keeps German founders small for longer.

Demand does not appear in a vacuum. It is created through branding, storytelling and consistent marketing. Only once a market knows why it needs something do salespeople step in to turn interest into revenue.

Here lies another obstacle: the mistaken belief that sales exist only to push inferior goods.

The opposite is true.

An outstanding offer deserves to be presented in an outstanding way.

You always have to sell. No matter how good the product is.

Anyone who internalises this truth builds sales and marketing processes systematically rather than sporadically.

What follows is a simple chain: branding creates trust, marketing awakens desire, sales closes the deal, and commissions or bonuses anchor personal accountability in the team. The result is a self-reinforcing system that turns demand into revenue independently of economic cycles.

Milestone by milestone: why proof counts

Entrepreneurial successes are the measurable notches in the board that you can hold on to when the next wave rolls in.

The bare figures of the Dirk Kreuter universe show an exponential curve: millions of podcast downloads, tens of millions of video views, more than 80,000 online courses sold, revenue beyond forty million euros.

These figures are more than an end in themselves. They prove that systematic selling, focused branding and consistent commitment deliver results.

Every number is a wave that was surfed, and every wave prepares the next one.

The invitation: surf your wave

Waves cannot be stopped, yet anyone who masters the board does more than glide across them. They use their power to move forward faster than any swimmer in the water.

In business terms that means: use turning points instead of resisting them. Question excuses, focus on what drives growth most, invest wisely and sell consistently.

The Jetstream Membership is a network of entrepreneurs who act exactly that way. Here you learn to see every new market movement as a springboard, accompanied by people who paddle rather than complain.