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.
I wanted to distance myself from those pasty faced corpses in suits I saw in airline magazine ads. If I was going to become a businessman, I was going to do it on my own terms.
The more I make the more I can give away.
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.”
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.
Traveling is my form of self-education.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is climbing, as a passion and as a sport, better off now than it was in the past? We can do harder climbs now in faster times – techniques are more refined and equipement more sophisticated – but are we really any better off?
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.
You climb to the summit and there is nothing there...
The future of Yosemite climbing lies not in Yosemite, but in using the new techniques in the great granite ranges of the world.
I’m the company philosopher and the burr in the saddle. I’m the one who says we need to try harder, improve the quality of our products, become a part of the political process, help elect people who are good for the environment.
Once you educate yourself, you’re left with choices.
My favorite quote about entrepreneurship is that to understand an entrepreneur, you should study a juvenile delinquent. They’re both saying: “This sucks and I’m going to do it another way.” You have to want to break the rules and prove that your way works.
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!
The most important thing is to get the fish in quickly and leave it in the water. Forget the hero pose.
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.
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.