Syd Meyer

The part that started it all

I got into the Carlson School of Management, one of the top public business schools in the country. Straight-A student, fully funded, handed a golden ticket to success. On paper everything looked perfect.

The first month was exciting. New people, new place, new possibilities. Then everything stopped.

I had surgery on a fully torn ACL and meniscus. While everyone else was building their shiny new college identities, I was lying on my back staring at a ceiling, asking my mom to help me use the bathroom. I couldn't walk by myself. I couldn't feed myself. And I wasn't making new friends coming back to campus in a wheelchair.

People talk about rock bottom like it's abrupt. Mine was a slow pile of small moments. The nights the pain wouldn't let me sleep. Being hungry or thirsty with nobody around to help. The humiliation of losing every ounce of autonomy.

Syd, don't ever forget this feeling. The helplessness. The frustration. The loss of independence. And most of all: when you're capable, don't take it for granted. You won't have it forever.my journal, from the hospital bed

When I finally healed and went back to normal, nothing fit. I felt like an outsider collecting data on a life I wasn't meant to live.

Stop the car

My sister was thinking about moving to Charleston, so her best friend and I tagged along for a long weekend to feel the place out. Three girls exploring a city one of us might call home.

Then Friday at noon hit.

One second we were window-shopping like normal tourists. The next it felt like we had slipped straight out of the matrix. A huge colorful trailer with an interior like a spaceship. One-wheelers and floaties scattered about. An astronaut suit. A man in a yellow dress yelling "hang loose" like it was urgent. And at the front of the white school bus pulling the trailer, an astronaut statue draped in 25 silent disco headphones.

Stop the car. We have to meet these people.

On that random roadside they invited us into a world more alive than anything I had known. Jenny explained kiteboarding like this: you are attached to a giant kite in the sky, standing on what is basically a wakeboard, and you use the wind to pull you across the water.

I said, "I NEED to film this."

She said, "If you ever come back to the coast, I'll teach you." I laughed. A part of me did not.

The midterm

Back at school I couldn't get that weekend out of my head. It followed me everywhere, like my brain kept tapping me on the shoulder going: you saw something, don't ignore it.

So I messaged Jenny. If there is ever an opportunity to come film you guys, let me know. She replied immediately: "Outer Banks. Soon. Come down."

I had never traveled alone. I knew nobody in North Carolina. And I had a midterm that same week.

I debated my entire seventy-five minute accounting lecture working out how to ask Professor White to skip it. How to phrase it so I wasn't lying but it still sounded legitimate. At the end of class I was almost shaking walking up to his desk. The good girl in me was screaming at the thought of missing a test.

I said it anyway: "I have a unique business opportunity I can't reschedule. Can I make up the midterm?"

He said yes. He had no idea he had just green-lit the most unhinged, life-altering business opportunity of my twenties. I booked the flight from inside that building.

The first kite

After a weekend of filming they finally hooked me up to a kite, just for a brief moment. The lines tightened, the wind grabbed hold, and my body braced against the pull.

I knew then this wasn't just a sport. This was communication with Mother Nature. Adrenaline. Clarity. Fear. Freedom. All at once.

It felt like the universe spoke a language I didn't know that I could learn. That moment burned itself into my ribs.

The bet

For three months I collected advice from every smart person in my orbit. Mentors, entrepreneurs, friends, adults. The consensus was identical: finish the degree, go in two and a half years.

I explained it to the head of the entrepreneurship program I was in, thinking if anyone had seen a student leave to build something it would be him. He said, "No one has dropped out of the entrepreneurship program."

I think he saw how badly I wanted permission. He paused, then added something that stuck: "Listen, I am not going to cheer you on in this. As a dad, I would fear for my daughter's safety and sanity too. But try it for six months. If it doesn't work, you can always come back."

It was just enough permission to let the idea breathe. But logic still held the most weight in my brain.

Then one night I crawled into bed exhausted, and the second my body went still my mind did not follow. The apartment was dark. Just the hum of the fridge and traffic outside, the kind of quiet that makes your thoughts louder than they need to be. My breath caught, and I remembered exactly what I had written in that hospital bed.

I left.

The unglamorous part

Bri and I shared a single room in a short-term rental for six months so we each paid four hundred and fifty dollars. It was the only way to stretch the budget.

The wind doesn't cater to your schedule, you cater to it. So I built my life around wind and momentum instead of a clock. I practiced when the wind called and worked at night, alone, teaching myself everything I didn't know. Sitting in front of a laptop for hours, wide-eyed and lost, trying to build a website I had no idea how to build. Trying to make videos I didn't yet have the skill set for. Photoshop, Illustrator, business terminology, every hat there was.

Then I started couch-hopping. Strategically. Because paying to be comfortable in my own space was a luxury I was willing to ditch so every spare dollar went into assets. Tools. Experiences. Skills. I dog-sat whenever I could, two birds one stone. I bought flights that expanded my worldview and gear that hurt to pay for, each purchase thousands of dollars with no guarantee it would pay off.

Rent is money down the drain. Tools are assets. Experiences are assets. My skills are assets. Comfort wasn't the priority. Momentum was.

When it got hard, I reminded myself it was a great story in the making. I knew that even then.

The sparks

I walked into Sealand Sports and pitched a trade: kite gear for content. The owner saw something in me and it worked well enough that a few months later he moved me onto the team as a rider.

I finished Wind Bound, the project I began to prove to myself I could do big, hard, scary things. A short film about power, belonging, and finding yourself in places where you did not think you belonged, because the world never showed you that you did. Something I needed to hear as much as anyone watching it.

I got booked by keynote legends like Tim Gabrielson and Simon T. Bailey, people I had admired from a distance. I filmed a campaign on a superyacht in the Red Sea, because my skills paid the fare.

My aligned life wasn't luck, or privilege, or chance. It was built on risk. Sacrifice. Self-belief. And choosing honesty over the version of me that was easier to explain.