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The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong - that's when adventure starts

Yvon Chouinard

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Yvon Chouinard
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: November 9
Businessperson
Environmentalist
Mountaineer
Rock Climber
Lewiston
Maine
Everything
Overused
Gotten
Starts
Adventure
Travel
Goes
Word
Wrong
Patagonia

More quotes by Yvon Chouinard

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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich otherwise you're just crazy.
Yvon Chouinard
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The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life it’s so easy to make it complex.
Yvon Chouinard
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At Patagonia, making a profit is not the goal because the Zen master would say profits happen 'when you do everything else right'.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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Most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.
Yvon Chouinard
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Going back to a simpler life based on living by sufficiency rather than excess is not a step backward.
Yvon Chouinard
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You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.
Yvon Chouinard
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To do good, you actually have to do something.
Yvon Chouinard
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Who are businesses really responsible to? Their customers? Shareholders? Employees? We would argue that it’s none of the above. Fundamentally, businesses are responsible to their resource base. Without a healthy environment there are no shareholders, no employees, no customers and no business.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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There's no difference between a pessimist who says, Oh it's hopeless, so don't bother doing anything. and an optimist who says, Don't bother doing anything, it's going to turn out fine anyways. Either way, nothing happens.
Yvon Chouinard
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The more I make the more I can give away.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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You ask me about the past, you ask me about the future, the only way to be happy is to be living right now.
Yvon Chouinard
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You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard
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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.
Yvon Chouinard