I was meant to sign up for soccer but it was on the wrong day, so we went down to the beach where my brother was meeting up with the Quiksilver guys to get sponsored. Somehow I got sponsored as well. And that was it, I never went back to soccer.

Growing up in Ballina (Australia), surfing was not as user-friendly. Once I moved to the Gold Coast aged 12, everything just seemed easier. The parking was amazing, the waves were easy to get to, and then, the warmth of the water all year round is just incredible. I remember thinking to myself, 'God, if I moved here earlier, surfing probably would've taken over my life a lot earlier'. But it happened when it happened, and it all turned out pretty good.

The coastline has helped shape Australia and within that, surfing and swimming. Everyone that doesn't live at the beach wants to live at the beach so we're very lucky for the coastline that we have.

Where I live, the waves we have, the climate, the accessibility to airports, just makes life so easy for a surfer. The training grounds, as in the waves, are some of the largest in the world, they’re so consistent and world-class. It's pretty much the perfect place for me.

My street-smarts are probably more than some people because I had to learn from a young age how to get myself around the world, deal with travel and different personalities and cultures. It’s stuff you can't be taught in school. I remember when I first traveled to France on my own, I was 17, couldn’t speak French, and I was just trying to figure out where to go. It was truly wild.

When I was younger, I learned that sport doesn't last forever. Your body gets old and it gets broken, and it can disappear quickly through injury. So how am I going to protect my future? I came from nothing, where my parents worked just to put food on the table and have a roof over our heads. So I invested in real estate. I do get into the stock market but I love to be able to see something and feel something and know that I own it. I always went down the real estate route because if a house burned down, I've still got the land, whereas if the stock market crashed, you’d have nothing.

I’ve always had a creative side. It was probably put on hold due to the fact that I was competing. Think of it like an F1 driver who wants to make sure that their racing car is the fastest thing on the road, but they also love going and playing with other cars. That's the way I look at surfboards.

Oh my, it was incredible. Truly beautiful. It is a place where you get a culture shock. Coming from Australia we don't see that type of poverty. You see it as soon as you get out of the airport. South Africa is probably the place that I've traveled to the most, and I’ve just fallen in love with everything about it. If I could get on a plane tomorrow and go somewhere, it would be J Bay (Jeffreys Bay). That's a place I absolutely love. From the waves, to the animals that are just so prehistoric. It's an incredible place.

I look at that as just a bad incident in 20 years. It just happens. It can't always be roses, but yeah, I came together with nature all right. We can learn from these things or run from them, and I just decided 'Okay, I want to go learn about sharks and find out why those things happen'. So that was my journey.

You learn really quickly that the ocean is a powerful thing and it humbles you each and every day. As you grow up, the more information you consume, the more places you travel, you see the way different countries use the ocean. And to be honest, there's some places out there with rubbish through the ocean. When you're paddling through rubbish in the line up, for lack of a better word, it's fucking disgusting. The more you learn, the more you understand how much we need to protect the ocean, and how much we need to care for not only the quality of the water, but the quality of the animals and the vast numbers of animals in the ocean. You need every species to create the ecosystem that animals need to survive. It wasn't until around my mid-20s that I became a lot more knowledgeable about ocean conservation and realised I needed to use my platform to really care for this thing. Because if you don't do it, no one will.

I think it's just repetition. Surfing, in a sense, is a bit like dancing. You've got to decide on what your dance is going to be once that wave comes in. That's the beauty of surfing; no one does it the same and no one has the exact same likes or dislikes.

I learned so much, from working relationships to the way that businesses are run. The amount of hard work just to get a small business off the ground is next level. But I think the biggest thing was creating a culture within the business of no one being better than anyone else. It was just a matter of everyone had to roll up their sleeves when push came to shove.

One thing that goes across everything is just doing hard work and not being afraid of it. Whether it be sports or business, the amount of work you put in is the amount of success that's going to come out of it.

If anything, I just feel we're more open-minded. In the past, it was all about building these boards that were designed to perform, whereas now it's more about learning the history of it all and learning what works and what doesn't work in different conditions. Not having to go and compete on boards has really opened my mind. For example, the last few months I've just been playing around with different twin fins, and just seeing where they can and can't go, which is awesome. It’s like learning a new way of surfing.

The key to most brands that I align myself with is that I want to try and get the highest quality performance out of the products that I use. From fins, wetsuits, board shorts, they are all equipment that I use in the water every day, and are so specific to me. I’m constantly tweaking them. I don't know if it was me pestering the designers, or if brands like Rip Curl saw an opportunity to really run with it, but for other people to be able to use these products and get enjoyment out of them too, that's a huge bonus.

The Olympics are the pinnacle of sport. Growing up, wanting to be a runner or a softball player was the reference that you conjure up for the Olympics. It's definitely something that I always aspired to do as a young kid, so to have surfing in there now is a huge bonus for the sport. For the people that are competing, it’s such a unique experience and something they'll remember forever.

My two go-to's are Bambi Deluxe for the coffee, and then The Bread Social for bread and pies and doughnuts — they're so good. Then closer to home, Good Day Coffee and Caribou for breakfast. Balters is such a good place to go to just unwind and have a beer. There are good food trucks there too — a little bit of a different cuisine, but it's a good place to go and have a beer with a friend. Probably the place I go to the most is the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary. It's like two seconds away from the beach and has so many Australian animals right there.

In J Bay there’s a great place we always go to which is right on the beach called De Viswijf. 

Incredible.

Easy.