“There is no adventure without risk,” Yvon said. “You get something important from committing to whatever you do. And if you don’t risk your neck, you haven’t made a big enough commitment. We climb for our own pleasure or to become a better person; otherwise it’s just a sport. But climbing is really a passion. And the commitment isn’t random. Every climber I know has had a fucked-up experience with their father or almost-father. Mine was an alcoholic. I was never close to him. It was a traumatic household. I spent a lot of my life just getting away from that. And I was never on the typical career path where you go to college and you learn something, then you go work at that and you know what’s expected of you. I had to find my own way of dealing with life. Climbing, for me and my friends, it saved our lives. It gave us a purpose even though it was a meaningless purpose. Every time we’d go out to do something, we gained confidence in ourselves.”
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“I’ve been a student of Zen Buddhism for a lot of my life,” Chouinard said, “and it’s taught me that with business as with everything else, if you do everything the right way, profits will come. So you don’t focus on profit. You focus on intent. Climbing is the same way. So is cooking. Simplicity of intent forces creativity, and creativity is where we find pleasure. I did a little film about this eighty- year- old guy in Italy who fishes with a big old bamboo rod and makes his own horsehair lines and ties his own tiny flies by hand. He doesn’t use anything fancy, but you can’t out fish this guy.
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I’ve always believed that you achieve perfection through simplicity. It’s so easy to complicate your life. It’s so much harder to simplify it. That’s why I don’t have a Yvon Chouinard computer. I don’t have a cell phone, either. I don’t have any of that shit ’cause I don’t want it. Just say no. And I’ve applied that principle in all kinds of places. Once, I had the idea to kayak the Gros Ventre River without a paddle. It was pretty serious water. My friend lost his boat, and it ended up all the way down in the Snake River. But I had learned how to roll a kayak upright with just my hands—in case I lost my paddle—and it gave me this wild idea to try the whole river that way. A paddle is a powerful thing. You can see a rock coming and just do one deep stroke to get around it. Without a paddle, you have to look much farther ahead and prepare. The boat becomes like a pair of skis that you have put on edge to turn. I found that I had to sit way down low in the boat and turn by putting the boat on edge with my hands. I had been kayaking all over South America and New Guinea and doing first descents, but that was the day I really learned to kayak.
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In fact, right now, we’re trying to get Patagonia back to that initial intention. Every company needs a revolution every ten years and we’re going through a big one right now. Because a while back, I was sitting at my desk and a bunch of people came roaring in and said, ‘Guess what? We just hit a billion dollars in sales!’ And I just went, ‘Fuck.’ I was so bummed out because I knew that running a billion-dollar company was a lot different from running a little climbing hardware company and that we could easily become the bureaucracy, the behemoth, that we didn’t want to be. And in fact, it was turning out that way.
I had a CEO at the time who was opening up new accounts in general sporting goods stores and department stores. We were making a 20 percent net profit but selling out—just like The North Face did when they hired Kim Kardashian to do a skiwear line. Because they exceeded the size they should be. So we cut way back. We killed all our department store accounts. And that’s about living within our limits. And I mean, what happens when you’re free soloing and you exceed your limits? You die. That’s what we were facing. I want Patagonia to be a company that grows maybe 5 percent a year. Maximum. Just to keep up with inflation and make a decent profit and have a good culture. Keep a good lifestyle. And I don’t see any examples of anyone else who has done that. Name one company that’s purposely restricted its own growth. But that’s what Patagonia is about now. We’ve been in business fifty- four years. So what are the next fifty years going to be about? I have four thousand employees around the world. They’re all dependent on the company’s survival and yet our products are getting knocked off by everybody else.
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I don’t think you can be an excellent company or make excellent products by getting bigger and bigger. You lose control. The average age of an American corporation before it goes belly- up is less than eighteen years. If we decided, at Patagonia, to start making watches and sunglasses, that would be suicide for what we wanna do. There’s a limit to everything. I don’t care what it is. Everybody dies, no exceptions. Every empire collapses, usually after 200 to 250 years.
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In 2022, Yvon gave Patagonia away—the whole company, I mean. He gave it to a nonprofit foundation that he created with one goal: environmental conservation.
“I gave Patagonia away three or four years ago because I didn’t see any other way,” he said. “My kids didn’t want to inherit the company. They have simple lives like I do. I didn’t want to take Patagonia public because we’d end up killing the company’s values. I didn’t want to bring in an Yvon Chouinard investor or a partner, because those relationships always fall apart, just like most marriages. And I didn’t want to sell for the same reason—there was no way to sell and still be sure that the values endured.”
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“But giving it away worked out great,” Yvon told me. “You’ve seen my lifestyle. I don’t need any money. You’ve seen my place in Jackson. I’ve been in that house for fifty years, and half the electrical wiring is burned out.”
- Excerpts from the new book Rules to Live By: How Extraordinary Lives Define What Really Matters by Jimmy Chin (profiles the founder of Patagonia Yvon Chouinard)
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