Yvon Chouinard (born November 9, 1938) is an American rock climber, environmentalist, and outdoor industry billionaire businessman. His company, Patagonia, is known for its environmental focus. These motivational Yvon Chouinard Quotes will bend your mind and life.
Best Yvon Chouinard Quotes
- “The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life; it’s so easy to make it complex.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top” – Yvon Chouinard
- “It’s not an adventure until something goes wrong.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “The whole purpose of an adventure is to gain some spiritual or emotional insight. When you compromise the process, you compromise the gain.” – 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 every day because they hate their job.” – 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
- “Real adventure is defined best as a journey from which you may not come back alive, and certainly not as the same person.” – Yvon Chouinard
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“To do good, you actually have to do something.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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 Quotes
- “We’re a part of nature. As we destroy nature, we destroy ourselves. It’s a selfish thing to want to protect nature.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “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
- “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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“Once you educate yourself, you’re left with choices.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “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
- “There is a beginning and end to all life – and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I’m OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.” – Yvon Chouinard
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“Fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of all.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “Mastery… is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge, hard work, and skill.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “The solution maybe 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
- “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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“Going back to a simpler life is not a step backwards.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “The more you know, the less you need.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I’ll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can’t be sold on its merits. I’d be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. Remember, I’m the kid who couldn’t play competitive games. I’d much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition.” – 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
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“True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “The word adventure has gotten overused. For me, when everything goes wrong – that’s when adventure starts” – Yvon Chouinard
- “We’re not citizens anymore. We’re consumers. That’s what we’re called. It’s just like being an alcoholic and being in denial that you’re an alcoholic. We’re in denial that each and every one of us is the problem. And until we face up to that, nothing’s going to happen.” – 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
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“The revolution starts at the bottom.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “…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 Quotes
- “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.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “…there’s no such thing as sustainability. There are just levels of it. It’s a process, not a real goal. All you can do is work toward it. There’s no such thing as any sustainable economy. The only thing I know that’s even close to sustainable economic activity would be organic farming on a very small scale or hunting and gathering on a very small scale. And manufacturing, you end up with way more waste than you end up with finished product. It’s totally unsustainable. It’s just the way it is.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “Nature doesn’t like empires. It doesn’t like accumulation in one place, it doesn’t like monoculture. It’s always trying to make diverse species. It wants to spread everything out. And we’re constantly trying to hold everything in.” – Yvon Chouinard
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“You have to remember this was the ’60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “You have a whole life in the outdoors, you realize you have a sense of responsibility to protect these wild places.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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
- “…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.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “The rules of the game must be constantly updated to keep up with the expanding technology. Otherwise, we overkill the classic climbs and delude ourselves into thinking we are better climbers than the pioneers.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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 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. 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.” – Yvon Chouinard
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“Profit is what happens when you do everything else right.” – Yvon Chouinard
- “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!” – Yvon Chouinard
- “Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. Traveling is my form of self-education. Every stream I fish now is not as good as it used to be. If you keep your eyes open as you travel around, you realize we are destroying this planet.” – Yvon Chouinard Quotes
- “We grow by letting the customer tell us. So when the customer tells us that they’re frustrated, that they just got their catalogue and we’re already out of a product they wanted, then it tells me that we’re not making enough. We let the customer tell us instead of creating an artificial demand for our products. Any time you’re making products that people don’t need, you’re at the mercy of the economy, you’re at the mercy of whatever is going on. So we tried to avoid that situation.” – Yvon Chouinard
