My Favorite Quote About Entrepreneurship Is That

Growth Isn't Central At All, Because I'm Trying To Run This Company As If It's Going To Be Here A Hundred Years From Now. And If You Take Where We Are Today And Add 15% Growth, Like Public Companies Need To Have For Their Stock To Stay Up In Value, I'd Be A Multi-trillion-dollar Company In 40 Years. Which Is Impossible, Of Course.

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 Wild Lands, 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.

We've Teamed Up With Some Japanese Companies To, Basically By 2010, Make All Our Clothing Out Of Recycled And Recyclable Fibers. And We're Going To Accept Ownership Of Our Products From Birth To Birth. So If You Buy A Jacket From Us, Or A Shirt ,or A Pair Of Pants, When You're Done With It, You Can Give It Back To Us And We'll Make More Shirts And Pants Out Of It.

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.

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.