Top highlights from Let My People Go Surfing
“The more you know, the less you need.”
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“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.”
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“Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.”
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“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.”
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“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.”
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“the worst thing said about him is that he was "uncurious.”
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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.”
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“…most of the damage we cause to the planet is the result of our own ignorance.”
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“It's okay to be eccentric if you're rich; otherwise you're just crazy.”
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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'.”
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“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.”
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“Doing risk sport 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.”
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“There's no difference between a pessimist who says, 'It's all over, don't bother trying to do anything, forget about voting, it won't make a difference,' and an optimist who says, 'Relax, everything is going to turn out fine.' Either way the results are the same. Nothing gets done.”
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“I don't really believe that humans are evil; it is just that we are not very intelligent animals. No animal is so stupid as to foul its only nest, except humans.”
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“We want customers who need our clothing, not just desire it.”
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“Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface.”
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“What we take, how and what we make, what we waste, is in fact a question of ethics.”
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“Good design is as little design as possible.”
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“Reusing something instead of immediately discarding it, when done for the right reasons, can be an act of love which expresses our own dignity. —”
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“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. —L. P. Jacks Patagonia’s”
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“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness. Studying”
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“Even if he or she isn’t aware of it, every individual spends an entire lifetime creating and evolving a personal image that others perceive.”
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“If you focus on the process of climbing, you’ll end up on the summit.”
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“After we had pondered our responsibilities and financial liabilities, one day it dawned on me that I was a businessman and would probably be one for a long time. It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious. I also knew that I would never be happy playing by the normal rules of business; I wanted to distance myself as far as possible from those pasty-faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I had to be a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms. One”
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“use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”
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“It was also clear that in order to survive at this game, we had to get serious.”
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“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.”
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“It’s okay to be eccentric, as long as you are rich; otherwise you’re just crazy.”
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“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation.”
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“To re-create the entrepreneurial atmosphere of the sort we’d had at Chouinard Equipment, we broke the line into eight categories and hired eight product czars to manage them. Each was responsible for his or her own product development, marketing, inventory, quality control, and coordination with the three sales channels—wholesale, mail order, and retail.”
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“when we consider the purchase of anything, to ask ourselves, both as producers and consumers: Is this purchase necessary? Do I really need a new outfit to do yoga? Can I do well enough with something I already have? And will it do more than one thing?”
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“But you are what you do, not what you say you are.”
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“Once you lose the discipline of functionality as a design guidepost, the imagination runs amok.”
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“you”
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“Work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.”
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“Sometimes good ideas spring from having a sense of where you want to go, of having a vision of the next level of products.”
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“Patagonia brings to mind, as we once wrote in a catalog introduction, “romantic visions of glaciers tumbling into fjords, jagged windswept peaks, gauchos and condors.” Our intent was to make clothing for those rugged southern Andes/Cape Horn conditions. It’s been a good name for us, and it can be pronounced in every language.”
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“Looking back now, I see that we made all the classic mistakes of a growing company.”
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“We needed philosophical and inspirational guides to make sure we always asked the right questions and found the right answers.”
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“The goal was to teach every employee in the company our business and environmental ethics and values.”
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“You have to be true to yourself; you have to know your strengths and limitations and live within your means.”
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“The sooner a company tries to be what it is not, the sooner it tries to “have it all,” the sooner it will die.”
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“I took a dozen of my top managers to Argentina, to the windswept mountains of the real Patagonia, for a walkabout. In the course of roaming around those wildlands, 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. We also 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 to another company.”
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“Function must dictate form.”
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“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both. —L. P. Jacks”
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“Patagonia’s image is a human voice. It expresses the joy of people who love the world, who are passionate about their beliefs, and who want to influence the future. It is not processed; it won’t compromise its humanity. This means that it will offend, and it will inspire.”
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“So in 2013, Patagonia launched a venture capital fund to invest in environmentally and socially responsible for-profit start-ups. We wanted to apply the many lessons we have learned in trying to conduct our business more responsibly to applications beyond the outdoor apparel industry. We were willing to sacrifice short-term returns for long-term financial and environmental gains. Tin Shed Ventures serves as a vehicle for the third pillar of Patagonia’s mission statement: “ . . . use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” But it also serves to do good in the world: providing funding for people who have business ideas that could help solve the environmental crisis. It is really the small private businesses we hope to influence. It is the tens of thousands of young people who dream of owning their small farm someday. All of us working together can create the change that we need.”
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