Business columns rarely draw their central metaphor from the ocean, but that’s exactly where JP Conte starts. In a Forbes Business Council piece published this spring, the founder and managing partner of his family office, Lupine Crest Capital, uses outdoor pursuits like surfing and sailing as a way to explain how leaders should approach uncertainty at work.
The comparison isn’t decorative. Conte spends much of the piece unpacking what separates a confident wave rider from a reckless one, and applies the same test to entrepreneurs entering unfamiliar territory. Both, he argues, need enough preparation to understand the conditions without waiting for perfect certainty that never arrives.
Reading Conditions Before Committing
“Smart risk requires understanding what you’re getting into while accepting incomplete information,” Conte wrote. That single sentence captures the balance he is after. A surfer studies swell direction, tide, and wind before paddling out, but no amount of study eliminates every variable once in the water. Business decisions work the same way. Market research, financial modeling, and competitor analysis narrow the unknowns considerably, yet a founder who waits for all of them to disappear will wait indefinitely.
Conte connects this directly to his own background moving between industries over a long investing career. The specific mechanics of an unfamiliar sector, he writes, matter less than whether proven fundamentals can be applied, things like data read carefully, the right team built, and people held accountable to results.
Discipline Learned Outside the Office
What makes the piece distinct from typical leadership advice is its insistence that this discipline gets built outside of work as much as inside it. Time spent sailing or surfing, in Conte’s telling, doubles as decision-making practice, just in a setting with faster and more visible consequences.
Preparation Has a Limit, and Knowing It Is the Point
Where the surfing comparison earns its place in Conte’s column is in showing that preparation and certainty aren’t the same thing. A sailor can check a forecast, study a chart, and still meet conditions the forecast didn’t fully predict. Conte argues business decisions carry the same ceiling on preparation. Additional research past a certain point stops reducing risk and starts merely delaying a decision that already has enough information behind it to be made responsibly.
Conte, whose public profile spans his Forbes Business Council column, his LinkedIn presence, and his family office’s own site, has returned to this theme in more than one piece of writing: that the instincts sharpened through hobbies pursued seriously often transfer directly into a boardroom. The full column, linked below, lays out his reasoning in more detail alongside his broader body of published commentary on leadership and decision-making under uncertainty.