I saw this guy talk at TED. What a humble guy for all he has accomplished. Bottom line, it has to about the love of the game, because in the end, that's all you have. Not the glory, not the spotlight, just the passion.
My favorite quote from this talk is his comparison of the skate boarding community to the open source community (starts around 12:30)
"What is it to hack? It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do.
And they're not all bad. You can be a Linux kernel hacker, make it more stable, more safe, more secure. You can be an iOS hacker, make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to. Not authorized, but no illegal.
Then you have some of these guys. What they do is very similar to our creative process. They connect disparate information and they bring it together in a way that a security analysis doesn't expect. It doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, the heart of a creative community, an innovative community.
The open source community, the basic ethos of it, is take what other people do, make it better, give it back so we all rise further. Very similar communities, very similar."
If people are curious, I'd invite them to check out some of his skating that is on YouTube from the old VHS tapes that used to be sold in skateshops. His tricks involving skating on shopping carts and tipped over barrels always impressed the heck out of me.
