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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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Yvon Chouinard
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: November 9
Businessperson
Environmentalist
Mountaineer
Rock Climber
Lewiston
Maine
Feet
Two
Stairs
Change
Enjoyable
Come
Basis
Even
Bases
Thing
Balls
Work
Daily
Time
Serious
More quotes by Yvon Chouinard
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
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.
Yvon Chouinard
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.
Yvon Chouinard
Remember: if you take bivouac equipment along, you will bivouac.
Yvon Chouinard
Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.
Yvon Chouinard
A real capitalist knows that $10 given today does a lot more good than $100 given 10 years from now.
Yvon Chouinard
It's not an adventure until something goes wrong.
Yvon Chouinard
You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.
Yvon Chouinard
Everything we make pollutes. The most responsible thing we can do is to make each product as well as we know how so it lasts as long as possible.
Yvon Chouinard
During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.
Yvon Chouinard
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
The more I make the more I can give away.
Yvon Chouinard
Yeah, leading an examined life, I always say, is a pain in the ass. It adds an element of complexity to business that most businessmen don't want to hear about. They just want to call a fabric manufacturer, and say, Hey, give us 10,000 yards of shirting.
Yvon Chouinard
You climb to the summit and there is nothing there.
Yvon Chouinard
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
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.
Yvon Chouinard
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.
Yvon Chouinard
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
The most important thing is to get the fish in quickly and leave it in the water. Forget the hero pose.
Yvon Chouinard
The climbing as a whole is not very esthetic or enjoyable it is merely difficult.
Yvon Chouinard
