Quote

True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.

Yvon Chouinard

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yvon Chouinard
Age: 85
Born: 1938
Born: November 9
Businessperson
Environmentalist
Mountaineer
Rock Climber
Lewiston
Maine
Goes
Wrong
True
Everything
Begins
Adventure

More quotes by Yvon Chouinard

Image
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.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
I purposely try to hire people who are really self-motivated and good at what they do, and then I just leave them alone.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich otherwise you're just crazy.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
You climb to the summit and there is nothing there.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
We took special pride in the fact that climbing rocks and icefalls had no economic value in society...We were like a wild species living in the edges of an ecosystem - adaptable, resilient and tough.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
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.’
Yvon Chouinard
Image
Evil doesn’t have to be an overt act it can be merely the absence of good. If you have the ability, the resources, and the opportunity to do good and you do nothing, that can be evil.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
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.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
The secret to happiness is to be working at your passion. If you want to be miserable, lead a desperate life like everybody else where they drag their asses to work everyday because they hate their job.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
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.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
...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.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
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
Image
The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life it’s so easy to make it complex.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
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.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
Mastery... is to work toward simplicity replace complex technology with knowledge, hard work, and skill.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
There's a movement for simplifying your life: purchase less stuff, own a few things that are very high quality that last a long time, and that are multifunctional.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.
Yvon Chouinard
Image
The solution may be for a lot of the world's problems is to turn around and take a forward step. You can't just keep trying to make a flawed system work.
Yvon Chouinard