Yvon Chouinard Quotes

My job is to make sure that 10 and 15 years from now, people aren't going to say, 'Oh, do you remember Merck?'

The present is never the mark of our designs. We use both past and present as our means and instruments, but the future only as our object and aim.

But I'm really trying to run this company like it is going to be here a hundred years from now. That's what's important.

In the light of our culture, these are not unreasonable questions and tactics, but if once again, we try to see the lens through which we look, we can see that there is far too great an emphasis placed on the future.

We're so used to thinking in the short term, and the minute you speak in more long-term language then you tend to get dismissed as utopian and so on. We have a real problem here in making long-term thinking respectable

Most humans live in the mindset that this moment is only important because it's getting them to the next one.

I believe in having a vision for the future but living each day at a time.

Many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment, and imagine living your whole live like that. Always, this moment is not quite good enough because you need to get to the next one.

Long-term planning is often undervalued by our indefinite short-term world.

In the UK what we've found is that even businesses which prided themselves already on their efficient management find that a really beady-eyed scrutiny of their resource management, with an eye to environmental best-practice and long term sustainability, produce fresh efficiency and fresh savings that actually shock those in the company

To abandon the present in order to look for things in the future is to throw away the substance and hold onto the shadow.

I don't think in the past. I don't think in the future. You grasp the moment.

Consciousness is observing your thoughts and actions so that you can live from true choice in the present moment rather than being run by programming from the past.

Business is all about learning to balance the short-term, medium-term and long-term and I think it's when things are going well it covers up a lot of mistakes and bad decisions because you're growing so quickly.

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.

Starving the future to feed the present is a mistake - it leads to obsolescence and stagnation. Sometimes it is hard to make this understood.

To those men and women in business, remember the ultimate end of your work: to make a better product, to create better lives. I ask you to plan for the longer term and avoid that temptation of quick and easy paper profits.

The present moment has always been available to spiritual seekers, but as long as you are seeking you are not available to the present moment. "Seeking" implies that you are looking to the future for some answer, or for some achievement, spiritual or otherwise. Everybody is in the seeking mode, seeking to add something to who they are, whether it be money, relationships, possessions, knowledge, status.. or spiritual attainment.

Of course we have to make a profit, but we have to make a profit over the long haul, not just the short term, and that means we must keep investing in research and development - it has run consistently about 6 percent of sales at Sony - and in service.

Don't let your thoughts run away with you, don't start planning to bail out because you're worried about the future and how much you can take. Don't look ahead to the pain. Just get through the day.

Beginning today, I will create a new future by creating a new me. No longer will I dwell in a pit of despair, moaning over squandered time and lost opportunity. I can do nothing about the past. My future is immediate. I will grasp it in both hands and carry it with running feet. When I am faced with the choice of doing nothing or doing something, I will always choose to act! I seize this moment. I choose now.

The more you are focused on time-past and future-the more you miss the Now, the most precious thing there is.

As youth lives in the future, so the adult lives in the past: No one rightly knows how to live in the present.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simmple, sel-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

People often overestimate what will happen in the next two years and underestimate what will happen in ten.