The Ramp: Risk, Innovation, and Teamwork

Some of the earliest moments that shaped how I deal with risk, failure, and responsibility didn’t happen under instruction or supervision. They happened in the margins. Quiet streets. Long afternoons. The kind of boredom that forces kids to invent something, whether it’s smart or not.

This was one of those days.

I don’t remember exactly how old I was, but it was sometime in the very early 1990s.

I remember the street more than anything.

Our neighborhood street wasn’t special. Sun-faded asphalt. Cracks filled with dirt. Curbs chipped from years of missed turns. Parents assumed nothing bad could happen because everyone knew everyone else, and kids had been riding bikes up and down the block forever without incident.

That familiarity is dangerous in its own way.

A few of us had gathered whatever materials we could find. A splintered plank of wood. A handful of loose bricks. We stacked the bricks under the board and stepped back to admire our work like we’d just solved a complex engineering problem.

It didn’t take a trained eye to see the flaws. The bricks weren’t anchored. The board wasn’t secured. The whole thing flexed if you stepped on it wrong.

Everyone knew it was unstable. No one said anything.

For whatever reason, I volunteered to go first.

I don’t remember making a conscious decision. It just felt natural. Someone had to test it. Someone had to see if it would work. And in that moment, the possibility of success outweighed the risk of failure.

I hit the ramp faster than I should have. I remember the sound of my tires humming across the pavement, the brief lift in my chest as the board rose under me.

For half a second, it felt like I was going to soar.

Then the bricks exploded outward.

The plank twisted. My front tire kicked sideways. I had already committed. There was no correcting it mid-air. I flew off at an awkward angle and slammed into the asphalt hard enough to knock the air out of me.

The world went sharp and quiet at the same time.

Elbows scraped. Knees burned. Skin met pavement and lost. There was blood, but not the kind that sends people running. Just enough to sting. Just enough to remind you that gravity always wins.

I lay there for a moment, staring up at the sky, lungs pulling in air in short, uneven bursts. Someone grabbed my bike. Someone else offered a hand. I got to my feet and brushed it off, laughing more out of embarrassment than toughness.

That should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t.

As I caught my breath, one of the other kids crouched down next to the ramp. He didn’t mock it. He didn’t mock me. He didn’t tell us how stupid the idea was. He just studied the bricks.

He noticed how they had shifted. How the plank had flexed. Without ceremony, he adjusted the placement, sliding the bricks inward, leveling them more carefully.

“Try it now,” he said.

I didn’t charge it the second time. I rolled in slower. The ramp held better, but the board still moved. We stopped again. Adjusted again. Less speed. More attention. Less bravado.

By the third or fourth tweak, it worked.

Not perfectly. But enough.

After one clean test run at full speed, the mood shifted. Confidence returned, this time earned instead of assumed. Bikes lined up. One by one, kids flew off the ramp laughing, landing clean, cheering each other on.

What started as a bad idea became a shared success, not because the risk went away, but because we paid attention to what failed and corrected it.

At the time, it felt like nothing more than a good afternoon. Looking back, it was a pattern. That same mindset showed up again and again as I got older. A DIY zipline strung between trees that absolutely did not work. I hit the ground hard enough to have the wind knocked out of me so badly I thought something was seriously wrong. Another time, I rode a bike down a dirt cliff that was nearly vertical, the kind of descent where control is more hope than skill. Somehow, I walked away from that one too.

Even the countless risky movements of skateboarding, failed tricks, broken boards, and hard slams reinforced the same lesson over and over again. You try. You fall. You adjust. You try again.

Those moments weren’t random acts of recklessness.

They were early lessons in responsibility.

When something broke, we didn’t blame the ramp. We fixed it. When something failed, we didn’t abandon the idea. We refined it. When someone got hurt, we learned why and made changes.

No adults stepped in to save us. No one handed us a checklist. We owned the outcome because we owned the decision.

That principle followed me into everything that came later.

Athletics taught me that talent without discipline collapses under pressure.

The Teams taught me that confidence without preparation gets people hurt.

Leadership taught me that enthusiasm without accountability is a liability.

Business taught me that ideas don’t matter if execution fails.

GRIT isn’t blind courage. It isn’t charging forward without thought. It’s intelligent effort applied consistently over time.

That day on the street taught me that failure is information. That progress requires humility. That the people you want around you aren’t the loudest voices, but the ones willing to kneel in the dirt and fix what broke.

Innovation showed up when someone chose analysis over ego.

Resilience showed up when we got back on our bikes instead of walking home.

Experience showed up in scraped skin and real consequences.

The ramp didn’t teach me to be fearless.

It taught me to respect risk, learn from failure, and take ownership of outcomes.

Those lessons didn’t fade with age. They sharpened. And they still apply today.

What are you charging at without thinking?

What have you written off as a failure that actually needs adjustment?

And who on your team steps forward to fix the problem when things go sideways?

Because progress isn’t about avoiding mistakes. It’s about building something that holds up the next time you hit it at speed.