- Via Founder’s podcast on Yvon Chouinard: Stress (change) is required for evolution. Those who do not believe in evolution see change as a threat as opposed to an opportunity to grow.
- How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top. You can solo climb Everest without using oxygen. Or you can pay guides and sherpas to carry your loads, put ladders across crevices, lay down 6 thousand feet of fixed rope, and have one Sherpa pulling you, and one pushing you. You just dial 10 thousand feet on your oxygen bottle. This is how your typical high-powered rich plastic surgeons and CEOs attempt to climb Everest. They are so fixated on the target, they compromise on the process. The goal of climbing, big dangerous mountains should be to attain some sort of spiritual and personal growth. But this won't happen if you compromise away the entire process.
- Nature is constantly evolving and the ecosystem supports species that adapt either through catastrophic events are through natural selection. A healthy environment operates with the same need for diversity and variety evident in a successful business and that diversity evolves out of a commitment to constant change.
Only on the fringes of an ecosystem, those outer rings, do evolution and adaptation occur at a furious pace. The inner center of the system is where the entrenched non-adapting species die off due to maintaining the status quo. Only those businesses operating with a sense of urgency, dancing on the fringe, constantly evolving open to diversity and a new way of doing things are going to be here 100 years from now.
- Bob Dylan: “He not busy being born is busy dying”
- My own belief is that any worldview that discourages our growth (growth is a culturally-loaded term, so be careful) is doomed because it is unnatural to our instincts.
- Learning is painful
Learning is the key to increasing agency. To being self-sufficient. To becoming a better version of yourself. But learning is often painful. If you are doing exercises and they are a breeze, you are reviewing. Learning often doesn’t look or feel like learning. Your brain hurts. And you want to give up. But when you come back to the task, it’s a touch easier. Like your brain actually absorbed or consolidated information when you slept. That’s because it did. Keep chipping away.