let my people go surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard.

4/5 rating. 232 pages.

Book #1 of 2022. Read January 4, 2022.

What a great book to start 2022 with! This is all about Yvon (the founder of Patagonia)’s reasons for the way he runs the company.

This is the second book of Yvon’s that I have read and it was another phenomenal one. Patagonia is one of those companies that has a cult following. When you read not only how much care is put into the company, but also all of the good that is trying to be done in the world through it, it is really easy to see why.

If all companies could be run like Patagonia, the world would be such a better place. They are truly looking for ways to leave the world better than they found it: through environmental giving, responsible governance of their impact on the climate, and through their interactions with their workers and suppliers.

This book was filled with great quotes that do a good job of giving some idea of what Yvon discusses.

• “If we could all come to see our consumer products as tools that help us to live our real lives—rather than as substitutes and surrogates for that life—we would need many fewer products to be happy. And we would keep the ones we already have for longer.”
• “In fact, our family considers our bottom line to be the amount of good that the business has accomplished over the year.”
• “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
• “Yet 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.”
• “We are the people we have been waiting for.” —Navajo Medicine Man

Simply READ THIS BOOK!

Quotes:

“Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on Earth, including human life.”

“To know and not to do is not to know.” —Wang Yang Ming

“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.” – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

“How could anyone be bored with so many good things to see and feel! This unity with our joyous surroundings, this ultrapenetrating perception gave us a feeling of contentment that we had not had for years.” – American Alpine Journal

“If you just ask people for help—if you just admit that you don’t know something—they will fall all over themselves trying to help.” – Kris McDivitt

“I taught classes in snow and ice technique for much-needed income and because I thought the best way to learn to communicate a craft was to try and teach it. With each class I learned to describe the techniques with fewer words.”

“Yet you can’t wait until you have all the answers before you act.”

“Mark taught us two important lessons: A grassroots effort could make a difference, and degraded habitat could, with effort, be restored.”

“Make the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.”

“I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. . . .” – Thoreau

“As individual consumers, the single best thing we can do for the planet is to keep our stuff in use longer.”

“Cotton fields, representing 2.5 percent of cultivated land, use 22.5 percent of chemical insecticides and 10 percent of pesticides used in agriculture. About one-tenth of 1 percent of these chemicals reaches the pests they target.”

“Shipping goods by rail or by boat uses 400 BTUs per ton for each mile shipped. Truck freight uses more than 3,300 BTUs per ton, and air cargo uses 21,670 BTUs, to move a ton of goods one mile.”

“Writing fiction is so much more difficult than nonfiction. Fiction requires creativity and imagination. Nonfiction deals with simple truths.”

“We believe the best way to get press is to have something to say.”

“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.”

“Anyone who thinks you can have infinite growth on a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.” —Kenneth Boulding

“David Pimentel, at Cornell University, has estimated that if all the world ate (and farmed) the way the United States does, we would exhaust all known global fossil fuel reserves in just over seven years.”

“A study by the UK’s Medical Research Council in 1991 showed that vegetables had lost up to 75 percent of their nutrients since 1940, meats had lost half their minerals, and fruits had lost about two-thirds.”

“At Patagonia the protection and preservation of the natural environment aren’t just something we do after hours or when we finish our regular work; they’re the reason we are in business. We’d have the same environmental philosophy if we were a cabinet shop, a winery, or a building contractor. I believe, as do most of our employees, that the health of our home planet is the bottom line, and it’s a responsibility we all must share.”

“The climate change deniers who think they are smarter than 99 percent of the world’s climate scientists are either crooks or dumb asses. Why would you want to vote for them?”

“They found that the economic benefits of intact nature, in climate regulation, soil formation, nutrient cycling, and fuel, food, fibers, and pharmaceutical products from wild species, outstripped exploitation by a conservative estimate of a hundred to one.”

“‘What would be the economic value of increasing the world’s paltry annual outlay of $6.5 billion for habitat preservation to $45 billion, enough to create meaningful contiguous wildland reserves?’ They estimated nature’s resulting gift back to the economy at $440 trillion to $520 trillion.”

“Uncurious people do not lead examined lives; they cannot see causes that lie deeper than the surface. They often believe in blind faith, and the most frightening thing about blind faith is that it in turn leads to an inability, even an unwillingness, to accept facts.”

“Sometimes the most impactful solutions are the simplest ones, and we don’t need a technological savior.”

“As an example, we had a big chunk of land in Nevada declared a wilderness, and this happened during the antienvironment Bush administration. It began when we moved our warehouse from Ventura to Reno, Nevada, and many of our Ventura people decided to move too. When they got there, they realized that although Nevada had a lot of wild country and was 83 percent federal land, it didn’t have much designated and protected wilderness. So they did an inventory of land and found twelve million acres that qualified. They started with the easiest, the Black Rock Desert area. Four employees came to us and said, ‘Look, if you continue paying our salaries and give us a desk, we think we’ll have a wilderness bill within a couple of years.’ They joined up with the Nevada Wilderness Coalition, and as a result, 1.2 million acres of wilderness were protected for about ten cents an acre. In 2004 the coalition added another 768,000 acres of new wilderness.”

“If you ask people today what they want for their children, they’ll say they want to leave the world a better place, and they want to give their kids the things they didn’t have when they were growing up. But people aren’t making the choices necessary to make this rosy future happen.”

“But you are what you do, not what you say you are.”

“If the United States were to start taxing polluters, stop subsidizing such wasteful industries as oil, timber, and industrial agriculture, put levy taxes on all nonrenewable resources, and correspondingly reduce the taxes on income, it would be the biggest step we could make toward becoming a sustainable society.”

“Estimates vary, but even the low end of the spectrum suggests that a global switch to regenerative land husbandry would sequester our total annual emissions back underground. Which means we could reverse the trends of global warming simply by changing the way we farm and ranch.”

“The Rodale Institute found that organically managed soils can actually sequester more carbon than they release. They found that if all cropland were converted to the regenerative model, it would absorb 40 percent of annual carbon dioxide releases, and if ranching lands were to do the same, those lands would absorb an additional 71 percent. As we confront global climate change, increasing drought, and a diminishing supply of fossil fuels, it’s clearly time to rethink our agricultural practices.”

“Looking for somewhere to start? Go plant a tree. Only an optimist would do that.”

“The original definition of consumer is ‘one who destroys, or expends by use; devours, spends wastefully.’”

“It seems to me if there is an answer, it lies in these words: restraint, quality, and simplicity. We have to get away from thinking that all growth is good. There’s a big difference between growing fatter and growing stronger.”

“I believe the way toward mastery of any endeavor is to work toward simplicity; replace complex technology with knowledge. The more you know, the less you need.”

“From my feeble attempts at simplifying my own life I’ve learned enough to know that should we have to, or choose to, live more simply, it won’t be an impoverished life but one richer in all the ways that really matter.”

#patagonia #yvonchouinard #letmypeoplegosurfing #books #bookrecommendations

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