Dirtbag Billionaire: Why Calling Isn't "Found", It's Uncovered

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

There's an assumption that many people carry that calling is something we have to find, like a lost treasure hidden somewhere out in the world. If we just look hard enough, listen to enough podcasts, take the right assessment, we'll eventually stumble across it. But in reality, a calling is rarely found. More often, it's revealed. It's revealed in the midst of the work that we're already doing. Most people who seem called didn't begin with a grand vision. They began by doing something that mattered to them, something that they couldn't not do. Then by paying attention to patterns that emerged over time.

Todd Henry [00:00:39]:

Those patterns, what you care about, what angers you, the problems you can't stop thinking about, these are all things I wrote about in my book, louder than words. And they begin to form a kind of through line, or what I call productive passion, that quietly points to where your deepest contribution might lie. But here's the thing. You only notice those patterns, those notables, when you're paying attention, when you're not just rushing from project to project, but taking time to reflect on what's working, what's draining you, and what seems to spark life, curiosity, or an insatiable desire to act through your work. Sometimes our calling hides in the very tension between what we love and what frustrates us the most.

Todd Henry [00:01:19]:

Right?

Todd Henry [00:01:20]:

You notice an inefficiency, a gap, a way that things should be. It arises a kind of compassionate anger, anger on behalf of the way that things should be. And instead of shrugging it off, you follow it. You take small steps in that direction. And over time, those small, faithful acts of curiosity begin to form the shape of something bigger, the thing that you are wired to do. And that's why I'm fascinated by stories of people who never set out to change the world, but ended up doing it precisely because they were attentive to their work, to their values, and to their conscience. They were willing to let what they noticed change them. And that's exactly what today's conversation is all about.

Todd Henry [00:02:02]:

David Gelles is a journalist and author whose new book, Dirtbag Billionaire, tells the story of Yvonne Chouinard, the reluctant founder of Patagonia, one of the most principled companies in the world. Now, Chouinard started not as a businessman, but as a climber. He loved the outdoors so much that he began forging his own climbing gear, literally in a coal fired forge behind his trailer. He wasn't trying to start a company, he was trying to solve a problem. But in doing so, he discovered a deeper calling, one that would eventually shape not Only a business, but an entire philosophy of how work and life can align around purpose at every key moment. When profit and principle collided, Chouinard chose principle. When he realized his gear was damaging the rock faces that he climbed, he stopped selling it, even though it represented most of his revenue. When his clothing line's cotton production was harming the environment, he re engineered it from the ground up, despite the higher costs.

Todd Henry [00:02:56]:

And when the success of Patagonia threatened to make him the kind of billionaire that he distrusted, he gave the company away to ensure its mission could outlive him. Each of those moments was born not from strategy, but from awareness, from paying attention to what his work was teaching him and refusing to ignore what he saw. In this conversation, David and I talk about how Chouinard's story embodies this principle that the path to meaningful work often emerges from the work itself. We explore what it looks like to lead with conviction, how to hold success and integrity, and how values compound over time into something that can endure. If you've ever wondered how to discern your own calling, what's being called out of view, not in theory, but in practice, this episode is for you. This is Daily Creative. For 20 years, we've served up weekly tips for how to stay brave, focused and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry.

Todd Henry [00:03:51]:

Welcome to the show.

David Gelles [00:03:57]:

A lot of people hear the word dirtbag and they think, oh, you must not have liked the guy. Quite the contrary. You know, dirtbag is a word that Yvon Chouinard uses to describe himself.

Todd Henry [00:04:08]:

That's David Gelles, award winning journalist for the New York Times and author of the new book Dirtbag Billionaire.

David Gelles [00:04:14]:

Because in the rock climbing community from which he came, dirtbag is like the highest compliment. It refers to someone who's so uninterested in money that they're literally content to sleep in the dirt if it means they're that much closer to their next climb. And so he's still, to this day. He's 86 years old, he calls himself a dirtbag. But when he heard about the title of this book, he was pissed off. Not because of the word dirtbag, but because of the word billionaire. Because that same aversion to money that made him a dirtbag in the first place still animates his philosophy. And he really believes that billionaires should not exist.

David Gelles [00:04:53]:

And that's why he gave away all his money. At the end of the day, this.

Todd Henry [00:04:55]:

Is such a fascinating contradiction. Throughout the entire book, it almost feels like even in the throes of success, he is constantly Trying to find ways of shedding off money and returning to principle. I want to go all the way back to the beginning because so many of these stories are for in the early years of someone's life. Talk about how he discovered his love of rock climbing and how that eventually led to the first business that then became Patagonia. Ultimately.

David Gelles [00:05:26]:

Yeah, there's a lot in there and I'll just try to do Cliff's notes version here. He was born in Maine, moved to Southern California when he was a kid, fell in with a group of falconers, people capturing and training birds of prey, then became a rock climber because he was rappelling down cliffs to reach these nests. And then he was like, what's it like to climb up the walls? So he became a pioneering rock climber, summiting the first big walls in Yosemite and the Tetons. He found he needed better gear than he could buy. And so he starts making it himself. He buys an anvil, he buys a coal fired forge from a junkyard, and he starts making his own climbing equipment. It's so much better than anything else out there that everyone else starts buying it from him. Much to his surprise, he becomes a business person in his early 20s.

David Gelles [00:06:16]:

That business continues for a decade before he turns his attention to clothing and the company that would become Patagonia. But that's the origin story. It all came out of his love for rock climbing, his insistence on making and using the absolute best quality gear he could find. Ultimately, there were some other pieces in there, like, you know, a commitment to taking good care of the planet, a thing, some thinking around how he was going to run a company if he had to, that are still informing the kind of company Patagonia is today.

Todd Henry [00:06:48]:

Well, let's talk about one of those key moments, because he at one point discovered that the equipment he was creating was actually damaging the granite that he would climb on. He so loved the outdoors, he didn't want to do damage. So how did that, what happened in that moment and how did that perhaps even instill the ethic that eventually lived on in further manifestations of the company moving forward?

David Gelles [00:07:12]:

Yeah, well, you homed right in on it. This was this moment in the 1960s when rock climbing is becoming much more popular, thanks in part to the chouinard equipment gear, he was making it accessible. Other people were trying to emulate his exploits on the wall. And as they were climbing, they were using these things called pitons, which were basically like metal spikes that you would drive into the cracks in the wall and Then use to secure your carabiner, your rope to, and then do the next pitch. What Chouinard and his friends discovered was that all those little pitons, all those little insertions in the cracks, were actually pockmarking this 10,000, 20,000 year old granite. And in a matter of just a couple years, rock walls that had been untouched for millennia were getting destroyed and defaced. And this was the signature moment to Chouinard. He said, I can't accept that he made this foundational decision.

David Gelles [00:08:10]:

He said, we're gonna stop making pitons, full stop. At the time that represented 90% of the company's sales. They had no path forward. They didn't know what was gonna come next. But he knew that continuing with that way of doing business, even if it was a harm to the planet, was unacceptable. So he said, no more. They found an alternative. That pattern repeats itself in Patagonia's history.

David Gelles [00:08:35]:

When they realize they are doing some damage, when they realize they are polluting in some way, they make sometimes drastic steps to reverse that, because they don't want to be a part of that, if that's what it means to stay in business.

Todd Henry [00:08:54]:

Okay, let's step back for just a second. What strikes me the most about this story isn't just the courage to make a hard decision. It's the awareness that preceded it. Yvon Chouinard noticed something that most people probably would've ignored. I mean, the business was doing well. They were selling something that he loved. He was right in the flow of what he always wanted to do and what he wanted to be. He was hanging out with people who also loved climbing.

Todd Henry [00:09:18]:

But he was also paying attention to the ripple effect of his work, to the way his success was leaving marks quite literally on the world that he loved. I think that's one of the most difficult disciplines of doing meaningful work. It's to stay awake to the impact that we're having. It's so easy to get swept up in the excitement of building, of achieving, of optimizing, that we stop noticing the side effects. This is true in leadership as well. We make decisions, we move big rocks around figuratively. And those big rocks often have effects that we're not paying attention to because we're so swept up in the decisions that we're making. But we have to notice the toll that our work is taking on people, on the environment, or even on ourselves.

Todd Henry [00:10:02]:

So maybe this is an opportune moment to pause and ask, where might my good intentions be leaving unintended marks on my team, on my clients on the people around me or on the world at large, as was the case with Chouinard? What might it look like for you to pay closer attention to those second and third order impacts? All right, let's get back to the conversation. May I work with some phenomenal organizations, but it's so rare that you find a company willing to say, hey, listen, we have these principles that matter more deeply to us than the bottom line. And at the end of the day, if that means we have to pivot to find a different way to make money, we're going to do that. You spent extensive time with key leadership, including Yvon Chouinard himself. Did you have conversations about the calculus? Because that had to have been a very difficult decision. It wasn't no brainer for them financially. That had to be financially devastating at that point in the company.

David Gelles [00:10:58]:

I talked to them a lot about this. I talked to the current leadership team, I talked to former CEOs, and they all described it as sort of a creative tension or a paradox. What I would add to their sort of more academic interpretations is that they were able to make those kind of iconoclastic decisions because they didn't care about growth in the conventional way. They didn't care about expanding their market share, and they didn't care personally about getting rich. And that freedom from the traditional metrics by which you measure business success gave them the freedom to make those kind of decisions. And so you have to understand those kind of radical, risky decisions in the context of the overall framework they were existing in. And a foundational part of that is a disregard for the conventional measures of success. Chouinard said to me, and it's one of the first quotes I include in the book, I realized I was never gonna win if I played someone else's game, but if I invented my own rules, I could always win.

David Gelles [00:12:16]:

And that's the clearest example of it.

Todd Henry [00:12:18]:

I think often what a company truly values, regardless of what it says. I mean, you walk into any company and you see these nice platitudes on the wall, their value statements, their mission statements, the whole thing. But the reality is always born in the decisions that they make and the sacri that they make for what they say they believe. This story is inspiring on so many fronts. I know we're going to fast forward a little bit here, but just for the sake of time, the company does pivot. They begin making clothing. The company grows tremendously. And then they have another pivotal moment.

Todd Henry [00:12:49]:

You know, I mean, obviously there are always pivotal moments, but there's Another almost like devastating moment in 1991. Take us to that moment and tell us what happened.

David Gelles [00:12:59]:

I think you probably were referring to the layoffs, what came to be known as Black Wednesday. This was a moment when the company was enjoying multi double digit growth. At one point, I think 50% year over year growth, it was going gangbusters on the sales front. Chouinard, in an effort to anticipate and meet what he expected was more demand in the future, staffed up. The company went on this hiring spree and really expanded the infrastructure inside the company, expanded the functions, positioning for real growth. Then overnight, the savings and loan crisis hits, the stock market gets wobbly, there's this little mini recession in 91 and all that demand evaporates. All of a sudden, Patagonia literally can't make payroll. And it is a existential moment for the company.

David Gelles [00:13:55]:

They flirt with bankruptcy and he makes what he describes as one of the hardest decisions of his career. They lay off about 20% of the staff as the first and only mass layoffs in the company's history. It's absolutely gutting. What it tells Chouinard is that he had started to live out of accordance with, with his values. I described earlier that lack of care for traditional metrics like growth. Right. But he had sort of gotten caught up in it in the late 80s and early 90s and he was chasing it. This was, in his telling, sort of a vivid reminder of why that's the wrong thing to do.

David Gelles [00:14:35]:

It also instilled in him this real deep belief that if you are going to grow, you have to grow responsibly. That means not only having a responsible supply chain, but deliberately restraining your growth year over year to ensure that nothing like that ever happens again. To this day, Patagonia throttles its own growth every year. They could sell more clothes than they do every year. They could have higher profits than they do. But it is in the service of trying to run a responsible company. They don't chase growth to the maximum.

Todd Henry [00:15:11]:

And also in the quality of their products. Right. The decision to use 100% organic cotton was a very difficult decision. That was a decision that most companies would look at and say, well, that's silly to do that because it's way more expensive, it's way more scarce, it's difficult to do. Yet that is completely consistent with their ethic, their desire to create quality products that don't harm the environment or harm users.

David Gelles [00:15:34]:

That's right. So that came almost 25 years or so after that initial piton episode that we talked about. And yet it was almost the same thing. They realized that a core part of their product line was having a negative impact on the planet. They said, we're done. At that point, it was like 20% of revenues, but it had a real impact on the top and bottom line. Even today, they're wrestling with this. In recent years, Patagonia has keyed into the fact that their waterproof fabrics included pfas, these forever chemicals, and they got really uncomfortable with that.

David Gelles [00:16:05]:

And so over the last several years, they've actually worked to develop waterproof materials that don't have PFAs. But there was a moment four or five years ago where Chouinard and the leadership team said to the product team, if you guys cannot figure this out, we're going to have to stop selling waterproof products. That would be really hard for a company like Patagonia to do. And so it was that ultimatum that made people figure it out. And so that innovation is actually. You can trace it to the values.

Todd Henry [00:16:34]:

I want to fast forward again because I want. I want to. At the end of this, I really want to get your perspective, like what your learnings as an author, as somebody who's researched this. Obviously, the big punchline, the big story at the end. Well, it's not at the end yet, but it's getting close. Close to the end, I guess, of the story is 2017. Forbes wrote an article that included Chouinard as in its list of billionaires, which he found absolutely blasphemous, absolutely horrible that he was included in this list. What impact did that have? And let's talk about the decision that was made to find a new way of structuring the company so that it was more consistent with his values.

David Gelles [00:17:13]:

Yeah, you nailed it in 2017. That was the seminal moment that set in motion this whole series of events. Important to understand that Chouinard and his family never gave away any equity in this company. They bootstrapped this whole thing. As a result, come 2017, even 2022, as the year starts, they are the sole owners of a company that has an enterprise value of between 3 and $6 billion. At one point, they had a $6 billion check on the table, and they said no to it. Chouinard needed, though, to figure out what was going to happen to this company after he died. And they came up with a solution that accomplished a bunch of goals that they shared simultaneously.

David Gelles [00:17:59]:

They wanted to rid themselves of the label of billionaires. They did not want to own the equity. They wanted to ensure that Patagonia, the company could survive more or less as it was to this day. And they wanted to make sure as much money as possible was going out the door to grassroots environmental activism and large scale land conservation. The upshot is they found a solution. It took them several years, but they found a solution that allowed them to do all those things and astonishingly, divested this family, including the children, willfully, of a fortune worth at least $3 billion. How many people do we know? How many of your clients are going to say, you know what, I'm good, Just take it all away.

Todd Henry [00:18:43]:

How did this story impact you as you think about your life and your work and what you're trying to build in your own world?

David Gelles [00:18:50]:

I have never been one to do a project or take a job because I think it's the right thing to get me to the next job that I think I might want. I really always try to do work that I want to be doing in the moment, period. That's the only way I know how to live. And so I'm fortunate to be able to say that I've mostly been able to do that in my career. And this was another one of those cases. It obviously was a natural counterpoint to my last book, the man who Broke Capitalism, which was about the dark side of American business and an avatar of what I think is really irresponsible ways of thinking about the economy and our place in it. Jack Welch. And so Dirtbag Billionaire was an effort to answer the questions I got about who's doing it.

David Gelles [00:19:40]:

Well, what's the answer? If that's such a messed up situation, how do we do it better? Well, Patagonia is not perfect, and Yvon Chouinard's not a perfect guy. But in these pages, I believe there are some of the answers to those kinds of questions. And now I have to figure out what I'm gonna do next.

Todd Henry [00:19:57]:

I've been reading Andrew Raul Sorkin's new book, 1929, in parallel with reading this book. It's just so interesting. So much of the panic of 1929 was the result of corporate greed, of the greed of wealthy people taking advantage of people who maybe didn't have the same information and sort of, you know, pumping and dumping stock and all of that. I feel like your book is one of those books that almost is the story for our times, because I think that we're at a pivotal moment right now where we have to decide who are we going to be? Are we going to be the kind of people who live by principle or the kind of people who live for the moment, who live for whatever we can get, whatever I can claim is mine, which unfortunately seems to be more and more where things are trending. I find that to be unfortunate. It's almost religiously insane to see somebody who lives by such principle and like you said, not perfect, but someone who is willing to make decisions based upon a core set of values, not based upon what's in it for me.

David Gelles [00:20:56]:

I really think about the stories we've talked about as an unresolvable paradox. There are inherent tensions. This is a man who never wanted to be a businessman and became a billionaire. This is a man who cares deeply about protecting the planet and yet runs a company that has a really negative toll, a negative impact on the environment just by virtue of its operations. Here's a man who has supported grassroots activism with his own money and yet has been the target of activist campaigns who have said that he's not doing enough and that his supply chain's messier than it ought to be. It's a man who has made a huge point of trying to be a good employer, taking good care of his people. Let My People Go Surfing was the title of his own book, and yet never shared equity with his own employees. The point here isn't perfection.

David Gelles [00:21:52]:

The point here is this is a man and a group of executives who understood what they believed in and kept coming back to it at every decision, big and small for a half century. And the compound interest of that values led leadership bears incredible dividends over time, just as it does with capital. Staying true to your principles also has outsized impacts if you stick with it.

Todd Henry [00:22:25]:

David Gelles new book about Yvon Chouinard called Dirtbag Billionaire is available now wherever books are sold. And if you want to hear our full interview, you can do so for free@dailycreativeplus.com as I've been sitting with this conversation over the last handful of weeks, I keep coming back to one simple but challenging idea. Your calling is often revealed in what you notice. It's not something that appear fully formed. It's something that takes shape over time as you pay attention to the patterns around you. Ivan Chouinard didn't set out to build Patagonia or to become a billionaire, or to give it all away. He just kept noticing the damage to the granite, the waste in production, the compromises that just didn't sit right. And he acted on what he saw.

Todd Henry [00:23:04]:

The truth is, we're all leaving marks. The only question is whether we're paying attention to them. Are they marks of exhaustion of consumption, of expedients or marks of stewardship or contribution and care. If there's one takeaway from this story, it's that awareness and integrity compound just like money does. Just like David said right at the end of the interview, every time you choose to align your actions with what you value even in small ways, you're investing in a legacy that will outlive you. You are making echoes. So as you go about your work this week, pay attention. Notice the patterns.

Todd Henry [00:23:36]:

Listen for where your effort meets need because your calling might not be waiting out there somewhere, it might already be unfolding right in front of you. Hey thanks so much for listening again. If you want to hear all of our full interviews you can do so@dailycreative plus.com My name is Todd Henry. You can find my books, my speaking and much more@todhenry.com until next time. May you be brave, focused and brilliant. We'll see you.