Best 78 quotes of Yvon Chouinard on MyQuotes

A real capitalist knows that $10 given today does a lot more good than $100 given 10 years from now.

At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.

But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.

Climbing for speed records will probably become more popular, a mania which has just begun. Climbers climb not just to see how fast and efficiently they can do it, but far worse, to see how much faster and more efficiently they are than a party which did the same climb a few days before. The climb becomes secondary, no more important than a racetrack. Man is pitted against man.

Doing risk sports had taught me another important lesson: never exceed your limits. You push the envelope and you live for those moments when you’re right on the edge, but you don’t go over. You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means. The same is true for a business. The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to ‘have it all,’ the sooner it will die.

Everything we personally own that’s made, sold, shipped, stored, cleaned, and ultimately thrown away does some environmental harm every step of the way, harm that we’re either directly responsible for or is done on our behalf.

Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward. Rather, returning to a simpler way allows us to regain our dignity, puts us in touch with the land, and makes us value human contact again.

Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward.

Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.

Growth isn't central at all, because I'm trying to run this company as if it's going to be here a hundred years from now. And if you take where we are today and add 15% growth, like public companies need to have for their stock to stay up in value, I'd be a multi-trillion-dollar company in 40 years. Which is impossible, of course.

Hire extremely independent, intelligent, and passionate people, not necessarily "experts." Maybe three or four of my employees have MBAs, and those guys aren't necessarily at the top of the food chain.

Hiring people with diverse backgrounds brings in a flexibility of thought and openness to new ways of doing things, as opposed to hiring clones from business schools who have been taught a codified way of doing business.

How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top

I believe the accepted model of capitalism that demands endless growth deserves the blame for the destruction of nature, and it should be displaced. Failing that, I try to work with those companies and help them change the way they think about our resources.

I drive old cars, all my Patagonia clothes are years and years old, I hardly have anything new. I try to lead a very simple life. I am not a consumer of anything. And I much prefer sleeping on somebody's floor than in a motel room.

If you want to understand the entrepreneur, study the juvenile delinquent. The delinquent is saying with his actions, ‘This sucks, I’m going to do my own thing.’

I live for the moment. I'm basically a Buddhist-type person. I'm just here right now, and I don't think about what's going to happen a hundred years from now. I try to concentrate on what's going on right now. But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.

I'm the company philosopher and the burr in the saddle. I'm the one who says we need to try harder, improve the quality of our products, become a part of the political process, help elect people who are good for the environment.

I never wanted to be a businessman; I was a craftsman and good at working with my hands. At some point, I decided that this company is my best resource. Patagonia now exists to put into practice all the things that smart people are saying we have to do not only to save the planet but to save the economy.

I purposely try to hire people who are really self-motivated and good at what they do, and then I just leave them alone.

I say the last 10 percent of the way to perfection takes so much of your life that it isn't worth the effort. This overzealous attitude is what creates religious fanatics, body Nazis, and athletes who are exceedingly dull to converse with.

Is climbing, as a passion and as a sport, better off now than it was in the past? We can do harder climbs now in faster times - techniques are more refined and equipement more sophisticated - but are we really any better off?

I think risk is important. I don't care if it's a great financial risk or a physical risk. You only get out of something what you put into it and the fact that you are willing to risk something means that you are going to get a lot more out of it.

I took a dozen of our top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wild lands, we asked ourselves why we were in business and what kind of business we wanted Patagonia to be. A billion-dollar company? Okay, but not if it meant we had to make products we couldn't be proud of. And we discussed what we could do to help stem the environmental harm we caused as a company. We talked about the values we had in common, and the shared culture that had brought everyone to Patagonia, Inc., and not another company.

...it's always been difficult for us to lead an examined life as a corporation. I've always felt like a company has the responsibility to not wait for the government to tell it what to do, or to wait for the consumer to tell it what to do, but as soon as it finds out it's doing something wrong, stop doing it.

It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.

...it's the same with business. If you focus on the goal and not the process, you inevitably compromise. Businessmen who focus on profits wind up in the hole. For me, profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!

I've always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession that doesn't appeal to me. Once I reach 80 percent level I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product like - and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.

I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.

Just why is Yosemite climbing so different ? Why does it have techniques, ethics and equipment all of its own ? The basic reason lies in the rock itself. Nowhere else in the world is the rock so exfoliated, so glacier-polished and so devoid of handholds. All of the climbing lines follow vertical crack systems. Every piton crack, every handhold is a vertical one. Special techniques and equipment have evolved through absolute necessity.

Mainly, my job is to be on the outside and bring ideas into the company and forge change. Most people hate change—it’s threatening. I thrive on it.

Mastery... is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge, hard work, and skill.

Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.

My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They're both saying: "This sucks and I'm going to do it another way." You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.

No young kid growing up dreams of someday becoming a businessman. He wants to be a fireman, a sponsored athlete or a forest ranger The Lee Iacoccas, Donald Trumps, and Jack Welchs of the business world are heroes to no one except other businessmen with similar values.

Once you educate yourself, you're left with choices.

One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis. We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two at a time.

Personally, I would rather climb in the high mountains. I have always abhorred the tremendous heat, the dirt-filled cracks, the ant-covered foul-smelling trees and bushes which cover the cliffs, the filth and noise of Camp 4 (the climbers' campground), and worst of all, the multitudes of tourists which abound during the weekends and summer months.

Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.

Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac.

So all of these companies that are going for the big growth, if it continues for any length of time, will outlast their resources and outlast their customers and go belly-up. And that's why these huge companies have massive layoffs all the time.

Surfing and climbing are both useless sports. You get to be conquistadors of the useless. You climb to the summit and there is nothing there. And you could hike to the top from another direction. How you get there is the important part. It's the same with surfing.

The climbing as a whole is not very esthetic or enjoyable; it is merely difficult.

The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.

The goal of climbing big, dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth, but this won't happen if you compromise away the entire process.

The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.

The more you know, the less you need.

The reason it was so scary was that there was only one climber capable of rescuing us, and that was Layton Kor, and he was in Colorado.