Quote of October

Snuck this one in right at the end of October!

“If you focus on the process of climbing you’ll end up on the summit.”

I’ve read a lot of really exceptional books since The Glass Castle, the source of September’s Quote of the Month. The list includes: Into Thin Air, the epic tale of Jon Krauker’s Everest ascent; Managing Oneself, Peter Drucker’s monumental essay about finding your place in the world; The Design of Everyday Things, a very complicated book about designing simple things; Let My People Go Surfing, the autobiography of Patagonia, written by founder Yves Chouinard; and Both Ways Is the Only Way I want It, a collection of short stories by Maile Meloy. This quote is from one of those books, can you guess which one?

If you guessed Into Thin Air, you’re wrong. It’s actually from Chouinard’s book about the clothing company Patagonia. I purposefully misled you by only including the first sentence of this month’s quote. The rest of it is: “As it turns out, the perfect place I’ve found to apply this Zen philosophy is the business world.” This strongly resonates with me and is a verbalization of an abstract guiding thought in the development of Evan Webster Ink. There are certainly goals, specific and abstract, in both my big and small actions but I have an unflinching belief that if the process is devoted its due attention the results will take care of themselves.