03/10/2021
At the time, New West KnifeWorks founder Corey Milligan’s wife was working at Patagonia in Ventura, California, and the founder of the company stopped by for a visit. Chouinard himself got his start in the metal business, forging pitons for Yosemite climbers out of a tin shed before reluctantly venturing into retail. When he met with Milligan and took a look at his knife collection, he gave him two pieces of advice:
The first: if you want to surf, you can’t schedule it for 2pm on a Thursday. The wisdom being to craft a business around your life, not the other way around. Life is short, he said, and if you don’t want to be stuck in a meeting when the surf is good, you need to build your business in such a way that you can abandon it when it’s time to play.
The second: Hire good people and let them do their jobs. “So many people like to make themselves feel important,” says Milligan. “They have to lord over everybody, and always be there, and everything has to go through them. That’s just not the way. Not just for my piddly small business, but for all businesses.”
This, Milligan takes to heart, allowing his staff to take on the lion’s share of the work, so he can turn his focus on the lion’s share of the ideas. And as any creative can attest: you must live first, and create from that life. So does Milligan, spending at least two hours every day up in the mountains.
“It’s like a meditational thing, where a big idea just pops into my head, and I can turn it over and over again in my mind as I march up the hill.”