Live as Though You're Going to Die Tomorrow
Patagonia's Rick Ridgeway shares life-lessons with our graduates.
Thank you to the faculty and staff, to the Board of Trustees and to Michael, for this privilege to speak to all of you on this milestone event. Tomorrow is your day—well, your day as long as you don’t screw it up in the next 24 hours. But assuming you don’t, tomorrow is going to be your day and it’s going to be about your story as you move forward into your next chapter. I’m totally aware of that, so I had to put some thought into a decision to stand here and tell you my story. My goal, though, is to share with you some lessons I’ve learned along the way, and in doing that I hope that my story can somehow, some way—maybe even a little bit—leave you thinking about the direction your own story might take, after you graduate tomorrow.
With that disclaimer, then, here it is, in 15 minutes, starting with my own graduation from high school when my sights were set on being an oceanographer. So, I chose the University of Hawaii because it had a strong oceanography program. In full disclosure, however, there was a parallel attraction that, in no initial priority, included surfing, sailing and girls. Sailing turned out to be a big pull, though, so the first thing that happened to the oceanography thing was meeting a guy with a 36-foot sloop that invited me to sail with him and four other guys—all in our late teens and early 20’s—to Tahiti. Tahiti in the 1960’s, Tahiti, where I had my 20th birthday. Tahiti, where the surfing and girls part came into play. Tahiti, which caused me to be late getting back to the University of Hawaii. So, I doubled down on my courses, went to night school, caught up on my credits and even got good grades. Something else happened in Tahiti, though, that changed things. I became fascinated with Polynesian culture and its interplay with island geography, and I realized that it was a fascination that was eclipsing oceanography. I switched my major from oceanography to cultural anthropology and geography. Looking back at it now, I realize that this switch happened because of things I had experienced outside of school.
Lesson Number One: Never let school get in the way of your education.
After that trip to Tahiti, I had a second fundamental change, and this one did happen at school. It was a class I took just because I liked the course title, Literature of the South Pacific. It wasn’t the content of the class, though, that shifted things, it was the teacher, Mrs. Sinclair. She was my Mrs. Mulligan, my Mr. Robinson. She was in her late 60’s, about the same age I am now. She was in her last year before retiring, and she went on to a live a long and fulfilled life. I know that because we stayed in touch, writing letters, for years. She brought into focus three things that have stayed with me, that are still central to the way I’ve lived my life, every year, every month. The three things are reading, writing and keeping a journal. Have you guys seen that website The Burning House that went viral a few years back? Your house is on fire. You only have time to grab one thing. What’s it going to be? For me, it’s the journals that now take up most of a bookcase. The journals that I refer to all the time because they are a lot more reliable than memory, the journals that have helped me relive my life in a way that has helped me know where to go by helping me remember better where I’ve been.
Lesson Number Two: Keep a journal.
I spent my junior year studying in Latin America, and there I discovered a fourth interest, to add to surfing, sailing and girls. Mountaineering became a core focus, although not to exclusion of my schooling, although I admit it slowed the process down. I still graduated, even if it took an extra year, and I still took postgraduate courses because by then I had decided I wanted to go into academia. I wanted to be a university professor, in cultural geography. I worked my butt off, and I got into a PhD program in one of the leading schools in the world on the subject, UC Berkeley. Two weeks before school started, my climbing partner called me. “I got us on an expedition to the Himalayas!” “The Himalayas?” That had been my dream. Someday, somehow, some way, to climb in the highest range in the world. “What’s the peak?” I asked him. He paused, which I later realized was for dramatic effect, and said, “Everest.” This was 1975, back when China was still closed and the only approach to Everest was through Nepal which restricted the mountain to only two expeditions a year. The waiting line was 12 years, and there had only been one American team that had ever succeeded in climbing the peak. What was I going to do? It was this huge fork in the road. Academia, a PhD, a career as a teacher, maybe as a professor. Something that I really wanted. And the other road. Everest. Where would that lead?
Lesson Number Three: This one comes from St. Thomas Aquinas. Trust the authority of your instincts.
I remember the weather was perfect. Blue sky, no wind. I was at about 24,000 feet on the side of Everest, helping the camera crew who was filming a television documentary on our climb, and I had an epiphany. They were doing the same thing I was doing. We were both climbing on the highest mountain in the world. Except there one difference, one big difference. They were getting paid. I became a filmmaker, and through that a photographer, adding both things onto the other commitment inspired by Mrs. Sinclair, to be a writer, and between the three I figured out how to make a living. Avocation became vocation, and a couple of years later I was invited to join a team attempting K2, the second highest mountain in the world, and far more difficult than Everest. It took 68 days from the base camp to the top, but four of us reached the summit and we became the first Americans to climb K2 and the first ever to do it without oxygen. We did it by taking one step, and then another and another, never giving in and never giving up. Sometimes today, when people hear that with my three buddies we were the first Americans to climb K2, they say, “Wow, isn’t that the hardest mountain in the world to climb?”, and I say, “Yes, but it was a good thing we didn’t know that back then.”
Lesson Number Four: Never let what you think you CAN’T do get in the way of trying and then discovering what you CAN do.
Two years after K2 I got my first assignment with network television, producing and directing the first American team of climbers allowed into China since the Communists had taken power in 1949, the year I was born. We traveled through an area in eastern Tibet where no outsiders had been in over 50 years. I was with some of my best friends, including Jonathan who was not just a close friend, but my career partner: I was the writer/producer and he was photographer/cinematographer, and as a team we had won our first assignment not just with the network, but with National Geographic. After our climb in China we were on our way to Nepal, to finish a National Geographic Story on Mt. Everest National Park. One day on the climb—another perfect day, blue sky, no wind—coming down from carrying supplies to our high camp, Jonathan and I, with two other friends, triggered an avalanche. The slope broke away from under our feet, and roped together, we were swept down the peak and over a cliff. We fell about fifteen hundred vertical feet before the avalanche fanned out and we came to a stop. We were alive, but injured. One had a concussion and broken ribs. Another a blown knee and several broken vertebrae. I was the least injured, with torn muscles, but Jonathan was in the worse shape. I held him in my arms, breathing into his mouth, talking to him, keeping him alive until he died, while I was holding him. The next day we buried him, on the side of the mountain at about 20,000 feet in elevation. We went home, and I would spend the rest of my life thinking about how we had been roped together, side-by-side all the way through the avalanche, and about why I had lived and he had died. The answer to that was a lesson that for many years didn’t have a number. Jonathan left behind a one-year-old daughter,a wife and parents who asked me to return to Nepal, to finish the story for National Geographic that he and I had started. Back then, the Geographic used to put you on what now seems like an impossibly generous expense account, so I checked myself into the best hotel in Kathmandu, the Yak and Yeti. I was in the bar and I saw her across the lobby, sitting by herself, so—what actually was out-of-character for a dirt-bag climber—I had the waiter send her a gin and tonic, and then I introduced myself. She said her name was Jennifer, she lived in New York, worked for Calvin Klein, and was in Asia buying silk fabric but had missed her connection in Delhi, and had come up to Kathmandu for a short visit while waiting for the next flight. She asked where I lived, and I told her I had quaint beach cottage just south of Montecito, which sounded better than the reality of the surfer’s shack I lived in just north of Oxnard. I guess the line worked, because when we were both back in the US we started dating, and I started asking myself, is she the one? I haven’t known her that long? Can you really, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, trust the authority of your instincts? Six months after we met, I proposed, and less than a year after we met, we married, and less than a year after that, we started our family.
Lesson Number Five: Commit, and then figure it out.
And another mystery to consider: if I hadn’t sent Jennifer that gin and tonic, Cameron, CdeP 2003, wouldn’t be sitting here with us this evening, or at least she wouldn’t be here in her current incarnation. In the mid-1980’s I started my own business, representing outdoor adventure and nature photographers and filmmakers, licensing reproduction rights to advertising agencies. At the same time, I continued to go on expeditions and produce television shows, write books and sell my own photography to my wife Jennifer, who was by then the founding co-director of Patagonia’s marketing department. I sold my company in 2000, and focused on conservation work, culminating in an arduous trek across Northwest Tibet to discover and document the calving grounds of an endangered species, the Tibetan antelope, or chiru—an effort that catalyzed the creation of a 15,000 square-mile reserve. I was then offered a job at Patagonia, to manage the company’s environmental initiatives. I’m still there, and now I’m the company’s main spokesperson. I speak at conferences, where I explain Patagonia’s business model to build the best product we can, to do that causing no unnecessary harm—either to planet or to its people—and then to use our business to implement solutions to the environmental crisis. I tell them how we give 1% of our sales back to environmental groups, and how on Black Friday last year—in response to the elections—we decided to give 100% of everything we made that day back to the environment, and how the sales ended up being 5 times more than we ever imagined, a total of $10 million dollars that I am here this evening to tell you guys is going in large part to groups committed to fighting climate change. I spend a lot of time speaking to senior executives at other companies who at first dismiss Patagonia, saying we are privately held so we can do what we want, and being public, they can’t follow our lead. I then tell them how all our commitments to environmental protection are creating business value for us, as they would for them. They ask, how is that? And I answer that the main reason is that unless they make these commitments, the best and the brightest young people coming out of our universities and colleges are going to refuse to work for them. I know this, because I also speak frequently at universities and colleges, and I’ve had thousands of young people tell me they have made this vow. They only want to work for companies that are committed to giving back, to protecting the planet and society.
So, Lesson Number Six: The power is in your hands. Only work for companies committed to giving back, and if you end up working for ones that don’t, go inside and be the agents of the change you want to see.
While I’m on this topic of universities and colleges, one more thing. In addition to speaking at them, in the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to teach classes at them, including recently at both Harvard and MIT. Remember that fork in the road I spoke about? That big dilemma: I could either be a professor, or go to Everest?
Lesson Number Seven: What you think might be a fork in the road often ends up just being a detour.
Several years ago, just after I sold my business, a young woman got ahold of my wife and me and said she was coming out for the summer, on an internship at Patagonia, and hoped she could stay with us. Her name was Asia, and her father had given her that name because it was his favorite place in the world, the place where he had his greatest adventures and learned some of his most profound lessons. Her father was Jonathan, my close friend and my partner, who had died in my arms on that remote mountain in Tibet. I had stayed in touch with her over the years, and now I was looking forward to getting to know her better. I also anticipated she would want to know more about how her father had died. After the avalanche, her mother had withdrawn, closed off from her life her husband and her daughter’s father, and Asia had grown up not knowing that much about him. The last day of her visit, she asked if she could sit on our porch and talk. Just as I anticipated, she wanted to know about how he had died. So, I told her, and I didn’t spare details. I thought she would be ready for that, and she was. But then she asked a question I hadn’t anticipated, a question that took me completely off-guard. She said the real reason she had come out for the summer, the real reason she asked to stay with us, is that she had a request. She said she wanted me to take her to that remote mountain in Tibet, to climb its flanks to 20,000 feet, to find her father’s grave. I didn’t say yes, but that I had think about it. I told Jennifer, and I asked her what she thought I should do. “There’s no doubt what you should do,” she said. “You’re taking Asia to find her father, because what she is really asking—what she’s telling you—is that she needs a father.” I decided we would go to that remote mountain in Tibet in a roundabout way. First, we trekked to the base of Everest, with the same Sherpas her father had hired, who had become his close friends. I knew that if he were still alive, her father would have taken her on an adventure, so we went to a remote corner of western Tibet and climbed an unclimbed mountain. We crossed Tibet to the remote mountain where he had died, and started up the side. I wasn’t sure I could find the grave. It had been 20 years. It was such a remote place. We kept pushing onward, and landmarks became familiar. Frighteningly familiar. We crested a ledge, and there it was, his grave. And in those interim years some animal, probably a snow leopard, had disassembled the rock grave, and his bones were scattered. So, the two of us, silently—having to pause to reinforce each other—we gathered his bones and we reburied him.
During this trip—not a trip but a pilgrimage—I told Asia many of the lessons her father would have shared with her had he lived, and many of them are the stories and the lessons I’ve shared with you this evening. Then I told her the final one, the lesson that has two parts. The first part is easy, and it’s to learn as though you’re going to live forever. But the second part is not easy. It’s the lesson that I have considered for all these years, the lesson that her father had passed to me because he had died while I had lived.
It’s Lesson Number Eight: Live as though you’re going to die tomorrow.
Back
With that disclaimer, then, here it is, in 15 minutes, starting with my own graduation from high school when my sights were set on being an oceanographer. So, I chose the University of Hawaii because it had a strong oceanography program. In full disclosure, however, there was a parallel attraction that, in no initial priority, included surfing, sailing and girls. Sailing turned out to be a big pull, though, so the first thing that happened to the oceanography thing was meeting a guy with a 36-foot sloop that invited me to sail with him and four other guys—all in our late teens and early 20’s—to Tahiti. Tahiti in the 1960’s, Tahiti, where I had my 20th birthday. Tahiti, where the surfing and girls part came into play. Tahiti, which caused me to be late getting back to the University of Hawaii. So, I doubled down on my courses, went to night school, caught up on my credits and even got good grades. Something else happened in Tahiti, though, that changed things. I became fascinated with Polynesian culture and its interplay with island geography, and I realized that it was a fascination that was eclipsing oceanography. I switched my major from oceanography to cultural anthropology and geography. Looking back at it now, I realize that this switch happened because of things I had experienced outside of school.
Lesson Number One: Never let school get in the way of your education.
After that trip to Tahiti, I had a second fundamental change, and this one did happen at school. It was a class I took just because I liked the course title, Literature of the South Pacific. It wasn’t the content of the class, though, that shifted things, it was the teacher, Mrs. Sinclair. She was my Mrs. Mulligan, my Mr. Robinson. She was in her late 60’s, about the same age I am now. She was in her last year before retiring, and she went on to a live a long and fulfilled life. I know that because we stayed in touch, writing letters, for years. She brought into focus three things that have stayed with me, that are still central to the way I’ve lived my life, every year, every month. The three things are reading, writing and keeping a journal. Have you guys seen that website The Burning House that went viral a few years back? Your house is on fire. You only have time to grab one thing. What’s it going to be? For me, it’s the journals that now take up most of a bookcase. The journals that I refer to all the time because they are a lot more reliable than memory, the journals that have helped me relive my life in a way that has helped me know where to go by helping me remember better where I’ve been.
Lesson Number Two: Keep a journal.
I spent my junior year studying in Latin America, and there I discovered a fourth interest, to add to surfing, sailing and girls. Mountaineering became a core focus, although not to exclusion of my schooling, although I admit it slowed the process down. I still graduated, even if it took an extra year, and I still took postgraduate courses because by then I had decided I wanted to go into academia. I wanted to be a university professor, in cultural geography. I worked my butt off, and I got into a PhD program in one of the leading schools in the world on the subject, UC Berkeley. Two weeks before school started, my climbing partner called me. “I got us on an expedition to the Himalayas!” “The Himalayas?” That had been my dream. Someday, somehow, some way, to climb in the highest range in the world. “What’s the peak?” I asked him. He paused, which I later realized was for dramatic effect, and said, “Everest.” This was 1975, back when China was still closed and the only approach to Everest was through Nepal which restricted the mountain to only two expeditions a year. The waiting line was 12 years, and there had only been one American team that had ever succeeded in climbing the peak. What was I going to do? It was this huge fork in the road. Academia, a PhD, a career as a teacher, maybe as a professor. Something that I really wanted. And the other road. Everest. Where would that lead?
Lesson Number Three: This one comes from St. Thomas Aquinas. Trust the authority of your instincts.
I remember the weather was perfect. Blue sky, no wind. I was at about 24,000 feet on the side of Everest, helping the camera crew who was filming a television documentary on our climb, and I had an epiphany. They were doing the same thing I was doing. We were both climbing on the highest mountain in the world. Except there one difference, one big difference. They were getting paid. I became a filmmaker, and through that a photographer, adding both things onto the other commitment inspired by Mrs. Sinclair, to be a writer, and between the three I figured out how to make a living. Avocation became vocation, and a couple of years later I was invited to join a team attempting K2, the second highest mountain in the world, and far more difficult than Everest. It took 68 days from the base camp to the top, but four of us reached the summit and we became the first Americans to climb K2 and the first ever to do it without oxygen. We did it by taking one step, and then another and another, never giving in and never giving up. Sometimes today, when people hear that with my three buddies we were the first Americans to climb K2, they say, “Wow, isn’t that the hardest mountain in the world to climb?”, and I say, “Yes, but it was a good thing we didn’t know that back then.”
Lesson Number Four: Never let what you think you CAN’T do get in the way of trying and then discovering what you CAN do.
Two years after K2 I got my first assignment with network television, producing and directing the first American team of climbers allowed into China since the Communists had taken power in 1949, the year I was born. We traveled through an area in eastern Tibet where no outsiders had been in over 50 years. I was with some of my best friends, including Jonathan who was not just a close friend, but my career partner: I was the writer/producer and he was photographer/cinematographer, and as a team we had won our first assignment not just with the network, but with National Geographic. After our climb in China we were on our way to Nepal, to finish a National Geographic Story on Mt. Everest National Park. One day on the climb—another perfect day, blue sky, no wind—coming down from carrying supplies to our high camp, Jonathan and I, with two other friends, triggered an avalanche. The slope broke away from under our feet, and roped together, we were swept down the peak and over a cliff. We fell about fifteen hundred vertical feet before the avalanche fanned out and we came to a stop. We were alive, but injured. One had a concussion and broken ribs. Another a blown knee and several broken vertebrae. I was the least injured, with torn muscles, but Jonathan was in the worse shape. I held him in my arms, breathing into his mouth, talking to him, keeping him alive until he died, while I was holding him. The next day we buried him, on the side of the mountain at about 20,000 feet in elevation. We went home, and I would spend the rest of my life thinking about how we had been roped together, side-by-side all the way through the avalanche, and about why I had lived and he had died. The answer to that was a lesson that for many years didn’t have a number. Jonathan left behind a one-year-old daughter,a wife and parents who asked me to return to Nepal, to finish the story for National Geographic that he and I had started. Back then, the Geographic used to put you on what now seems like an impossibly generous expense account, so I checked myself into the best hotel in Kathmandu, the Yak and Yeti. I was in the bar and I saw her across the lobby, sitting by herself, so—what actually was out-of-character for a dirt-bag climber—I had the waiter send her a gin and tonic, and then I introduced myself. She said her name was Jennifer, she lived in New York, worked for Calvin Klein, and was in Asia buying silk fabric but had missed her connection in Delhi, and had come up to Kathmandu for a short visit while waiting for the next flight. She asked where I lived, and I told her I had quaint beach cottage just south of Montecito, which sounded better than the reality of the surfer’s shack I lived in just north of Oxnard. I guess the line worked, because when we were both back in the US we started dating, and I started asking myself, is she the one? I haven’t known her that long? Can you really, as St. Thomas Aquinas said, trust the authority of your instincts? Six months after we met, I proposed, and less than a year after we met, we married, and less than a year after that, we started our family.
Lesson Number Five: Commit, and then figure it out.
And another mystery to consider: if I hadn’t sent Jennifer that gin and tonic, Cameron, CdeP 2003, wouldn’t be sitting here with us this evening, or at least she wouldn’t be here in her current incarnation. In the mid-1980’s I started my own business, representing outdoor adventure and nature photographers and filmmakers, licensing reproduction rights to advertising agencies. At the same time, I continued to go on expeditions and produce television shows, write books and sell my own photography to my wife Jennifer, who was by then the founding co-director of Patagonia’s marketing department. I sold my company in 2000, and focused on conservation work, culminating in an arduous trek across Northwest Tibet to discover and document the calving grounds of an endangered species, the Tibetan antelope, or chiru—an effort that catalyzed the creation of a 15,000 square-mile reserve. I was then offered a job at Patagonia, to manage the company’s environmental initiatives. I’m still there, and now I’m the company’s main spokesperson. I speak at conferences, where I explain Patagonia’s business model to build the best product we can, to do that causing no unnecessary harm—either to planet or to its people—and then to use our business to implement solutions to the environmental crisis. I tell them how we give 1% of our sales back to environmental groups, and how on Black Friday last year—in response to the elections—we decided to give 100% of everything we made that day back to the environment, and how the sales ended up being 5 times more than we ever imagined, a total of $10 million dollars that I am here this evening to tell you guys is going in large part to groups committed to fighting climate change. I spend a lot of time speaking to senior executives at other companies who at first dismiss Patagonia, saying we are privately held so we can do what we want, and being public, they can’t follow our lead. I then tell them how all our commitments to environmental protection are creating business value for us, as they would for them. They ask, how is that? And I answer that the main reason is that unless they make these commitments, the best and the brightest young people coming out of our universities and colleges are going to refuse to work for them. I know this, because I also speak frequently at universities and colleges, and I’ve had thousands of young people tell me they have made this vow. They only want to work for companies that are committed to giving back, to protecting the planet and society.
So, Lesson Number Six: The power is in your hands. Only work for companies committed to giving back, and if you end up working for ones that don’t, go inside and be the agents of the change you want to see.
While I’m on this topic of universities and colleges, one more thing. In addition to speaking at them, in the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to teach classes at them, including recently at both Harvard and MIT. Remember that fork in the road I spoke about? That big dilemma: I could either be a professor, or go to Everest?
Lesson Number Seven: What you think might be a fork in the road often ends up just being a detour.
Several years ago, just after I sold my business, a young woman got ahold of my wife and me and said she was coming out for the summer, on an internship at Patagonia, and hoped she could stay with us. Her name was Asia, and her father had given her that name because it was his favorite place in the world, the place where he had his greatest adventures and learned some of his most profound lessons. Her father was Jonathan, my close friend and my partner, who had died in my arms on that remote mountain in Tibet. I had stayed in touch with her over the years, and now I was looking forward to getting to know her better. I also anticipated she would want to know more about how her father had died. After the avalanche, her mother had withdrawn, closed off from her life her husband and her daughter’s father, and Asia had grown up not knowing that much about him. The last day of her visit, she asked if she could sit on our porch and talk. Just as I anticipated, she wanted to know about how he had died. So, I told her, and I didn’t spare details. I thought she would be ready for that, and she was. But then she asked a question I hadn’t anticipated, a question that took me completely off-guard. She said the real reason she had come out for the summer, the real reason she asked to stay with us, is that she had a request. She said she wanted me to take her to that remote mountain in Tibet, to climb its flanks to 20,000 feet, to find her father’s grave. I didn’t say yes, but that I had think about it. I told Jennifer, and I asked her what she thought I should do. “There’s no doubt what you should do,” she said. “You’re taking Asia to find her father, because what she is really asking—what she’s telling you—is that she needs a father.” I decided we would go to that remote mountain in Tibet in a roundabout way. First, we trekked to the base of Everest, with the same Sherpas her father had hired, who had become his close friends. I knew that if he were still alive, her father would have taken her on an adventure, so we went to a remote corner of western Tibet and climbed an unclimbed mountain. We crossed Tibet to the remote mountain where he had died, and started up the side. I wasn’t sure I could find the grave. It had been 20 years. It was such a remote place. We kept pushing onward, and landmarks became familiar. Frighteningly familiar. We crested a ledge, and there it was, his grave. And in those interim years some animal, probably a snow leopard, had disassembled the rock grave, and his bones were scattered. So, the two of us, silently—having to pause to reinforce each other—we gathered his bones and we reburied him.
During this trip—not a trip but a pilgrimage—I told Asia many of the lessons her father would have shared with her had he lived, and many of them are the stories and the lessons I’ve shared with you this evening. Then I told her the final one, the lesson that has two parts. The first part is easy, and it’s to learn as though you’re going to live forever. But the second part is not easy. It’s the lesson that I have considered for all these years, the lesson that her father had passed to me because he had died while I had lived.
It’s Lesson Number Eight: Live as though you’re going to die tomorrow.
More About Thacher
Interested in learning more about Thacher? Sign up for a virtual visit here.
A college preparatory boarding school for grades 9-12
Notice of nondiscriminatory policy as to students: The Thacher School admits students of any race, color, national, and ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs, and activities generally accorded or made available to students at the School. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national, and ethnic origin in administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship and loan programs, and athletic and other School-administered programs.