Growth in Let My People Go Surfing and Infinite Upside

A business memoir can be read for what its author thinks growth should accomplish. Put a statement about size beside the purpose the writer gives it. The relationship between those sentences can be more revealing than the size alone.

This reading pairs the preface below with the memoir’s opening and ending.

A larger company than first intended

In his second-edition preface to Let My People Go Surfing, dated September 8, 2016, Yvon Chouinard recalls a book intended for employees. The company had become larger than he had wanted.

He presents continued values and greater responsibility alongside that unexpected scale. He connects the revised book to the company’s environmental aims.

Company size is unwanted while a purpose is still actively defended. Read those as two claims with a relationship to explain.

Still wanting to build

The beginning of Infinite Upside places enthusiasm for business beside a pleasure that changed through it. Sheth remains drawn to making an arrangement work, bringing together people with different capabilities and benefiting as a useful operation develops. He also wants the life around those arrangements to remain enjoyable.

The closing chapter keeps that enthusiasm. Substantial growth remains something he wants. The family day at the football game does not arrive as a declaration that the company has reached its final size or that business has ceased to interest him.

Look at the order of the ending. More work will follow, but that particular day has already been spent with family. Its value is present while projects remain unfinished. The book can therefore give ambition and enjoyment a place without making one the reward postponed until the other is complete.

The opening’s Camaro matters in this reading too. The author has greater access to cars, yet one car retains a particular pleasure. A bigger collection is a poor substitute for explaining which experience he still wants. The reading on enough without stopping follows the connection through the ending.

Read the purpose beside the scale

An updated preface explains a continuing purpose for the business. A memoir’s closing shows what business leaves available in a life. Notice what each passage is trying to finish.

For Infinite Upside, try describing the day that further capacity should protect. A general wish for freedom becomes more precise when a visit, an activity or somebody’s need for your presence can remain possible. Then return to the book: which arrangements make that availability real, and which still ask the author to supply more?

This is also a useful question for a group that initially divides into readers who admire growth and readers who distrust it. Take one passage at a time. Identify what its writer wants to continue, what has changed and what kind of responsibility the account gives to the business. A judgment about size can then become a discussion of the actual purpose being defended.

Use the connection between capacity and life to return to Infinite Upside, or bring the two identified readings to a book-club conversation. Ask what evidence within each passage would make you revise your first description of its ambition.