#18 Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

**David Senra** (0:00)
I had always avoided thinking of myself as a businessman. I was a climber, a surfer, a kayaker, a skier, and a blacksmith. We simply enjoyed making good tools and functional clothes that we and our friends wanted. Melinda and my only personal assets were a beat up Ford van and a heavily mortgaged soon-to-be-condemned cabin on the beach. Now we had a heavily leveraged company with employees, with families of their own, all depending on our being successful.
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 of my favorite sayings about entrepreneurship is, 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. Since I had never wanted to be a businessman, I needed a few good reasons to be one. One thing I did not want to change, even if we got serious, work had to be enjoyable on a daily basis.
We all had to come to work on the balls of our feet and go up the stairs two steps at a time. We needed to be surrounded by friends who could dress whatever the way they wanted, even be barefoot. We all needed to have flex time to surf the waves when they were good, or ski the powder after a big snowstorm, or stay home and take care of a sick child. We needed to blur that distinction between work and play and family. So that is from part one of the book that I want to talk to you about today. And that is Let My People Go Surfing, The Education of a Reluctant Businessman by Yvon Chouinard. So I have to admit, I didn't know who Yvon Chouinard was before a week or two ago. I was listening to that podcast, How I Built This, and they republished an old episode of theirs, which was an interview with the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard. And within 20 minutes of hearing him speak, I immediately started liking the way he thought.
And he went on the podcast to promote the book that he wrote. And this book that I have in my hand was actually meant as just an internal company handbook for the employees of Patagonia. And it became so popular that he published it as a normal book, and since it sold a lot of copies of that as well. The book is split into two parts. It's the history, which is like a mini autobiography of how he got started doing what he does. And then the second half is the principles of his company, which he's put a lot of time into thinking. I think he's in his seventies by now, and he's founded Patagonia, I think almost 40 years ago. So he's had a lot of time to ruminate and to kind of come up with his own philosophies. And that's what I find most interesting. That's what I wanna talk to you about today. So one of the most interesting things I heard in the podcast with Yvon was that he is still the sole owner of Patagonia, along with his family. He never raised outside money, never took investors. And last year, they did $750 million in sales. So it's quite a success story. He founded it back in the seventies. So he's had over 40 years to really think about the principles and the philosophies that are important to him in running a business and more importantly, building a great product. So some of these are really fast and I'm just gonna go through in chronological order when share some of the highlights and ideas that I just found really interesting. So here's this quick one. It's called his idea of being an 80 percenter.
I always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn't appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level, I like to go off and do something totally different. That probably explains the diversity of the Patagonia product line and why our versatile multi-faceted clothes are the most successful. So I'm gonna skip ahead a little bit. I found this really interesting. They re-published an excerpt from Life Magazine in 2004 And the broadcaster or the anchorman, Tom Brokaw, was friends with Yvon.