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

“No young kid growing up ever dreams of someday becoming a businessman.”

Right off the bat, Chouinard declares his long-standing disdain for businessmen. He criticizes them on the basis that children—innocent and uncorrupted by the adult world—don’t dream of becoming one. Business lacks the adventure or morality of being a fur trapper (Chouinard’s dream) or a doctor. Children, with their uncorrupted sense of right and wrong, see nothing heroic in the ubiquitous businessman as they do in other professions.

“I learned at an early age that it’s better to invent your own game; then you can always be a winner. I found my games in the ocean, creeks, and hillsides surrounding Los Angeles.”

The apparent success of this outcome belies the loneliness of these solo ventures. Chouinard’s experience in Burbank, California, which isn’t built for small, French-speaking boys like him, alienates him from his peers. Consequently, he finds a sense of belonging in in the outdoors, a home he keeps returning to into his eighties.

“I drove to Wyoming in my 1940 Ford, which I had rebuilt in auto shop class. I remember the great feeling I had driving alone through the Nevada desert, in hundred-degree temperatures, passing by the Oldsmobiles and Cadillacs stopped by the side of the road with their hoods up, overheating.”

This memorable experience of schadenfreude as a 16-year-old is a formative lesson in the superiority of simpler technology that one knows well. Chouinard in his old, rebuilt Ford sails smoothly through extreme conditions while others with newer cars are waylaid by their cars’ ostensibly more advanced constructions. Although he goes onto embrace new technologies in his life and his companies, Chouinard retains a piece of this luddism in his simple-is-better philosophy.