"Carpe Aqualis"
(car' pay ah' kwa lis)
Taking full advantage of skills, talents, abilities and attitudes to convert challenges into opportunities and victories.

Source: Frank F. Lunn

"Carpe Aqualis!
7 Essential Surfing Skills to Revolutionize Your Business and Personal Life"

By Frank F. Lunn
Copyright 2006
Frank F. Lunn
Kahuna Empowerment Inc.,
Bloomington, Ill.
Paperback, 160 pages
ISBN 0-9728300-7-3

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eeling overwhelmed by how quickly everything in life, from technology to communications and business, is changing? There is a simple solution: Learn to surf.

This is the advice of author Frank F. Lunn in his new motivational book titled "Carpe Aqualis! 7 Essential Surfing Skills to Revolutionize Your Business and Personal Life." Lunn is from Indiana, so his surfing expertise comes into question. Fortunately for readers, he uses surfing as a metaphor.

Change, he says, whether in business or in our personal life, is like the ocean's waves: constant and unpredictable. There are really only two types of waves, challenges and opportunities; these will either wipe you out or take you for the ride of a lifetime.

It's up to you to "Carpe Aqualis," and seize the wave.

In "Carpe Aqualis!" he coins the term Terro-Phoria. This is an emotion that lies somewhere between terror and euphoria, much like what people feel riding roller coasters or surfing big waves. The phrase describes opportunities so big that they simultaneously scare us and excite us.

Even if Lunn is only an amateur surfer (his bio states he surfs for fun in Hawaii), he knows a thing or two about overcoming challenges and seizing opportunities. He has spearheaded a number of business ventures, including Kahuna Business Group, an ATM cooperative he founded in 1995.

Kahuna Empowerment Inc., a division of Kahuna Business Group, is a publisher of motivational products to help raise money and awareness for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. (In 2002, his son Frankie was diagnosed with leukemia.) He is also the author of "Stack the Logs! Building A Success Framework To Reach Your Dreams" (2004).

In "Carpe Aqualis!" following a preface and introduction titled "Chapter 0," Lunn lays out a strategy for pursuing and achieving success. Each chapter is tied to the theme of surfing, and includes several epigraphs, called Surf-Titude.

Readers are surfers and surfing instructors and have entrepreneurial surfer organizations. They make surfer affirmations in the hope of achieving surf-cess.

He offers the S.U.R.F. Strategy:

• Survey the situation
• Understand your options
• Respond based on your goals
• Forward focus in action and attitude

He also provides seven essential "surfing skills" described in detail in subsequent chapters. Some of these include:

• Your competition is not the other surfers; it's only you.
• Great surfers strengthen others.
• Surf the waves that come, but be prepared for the big one.
• Surf your passion and your strengths.

His insight on competition, preparation, team building and learning from mistakes is familiar but invaluable. For example, in Chapter 10, "Go Big or Go Home! To Be Great You Have to Be Willing to Wipe Out," he writes:

Skill development happens through practice, trial and error ... when you begin you will fail more than you succeed. [It] will start off ugly. Over time your skill will grow and your results will improve. ... Each failure pays off in experience while sowing future seeds of opportunities.

For those who have not read his "Stack the Logs," in Chapter 11, Lunn provides a refresher on his S.T.A.C.K strategy.

The book contains many rousing points, and if you don't mind the surf-theme, which becomes a little much at times, it's a fun and an inspiring read.