by Chip Wilson
Discovering My “Act”
With three of us growing and swimming, we were also burning an astronomical number of calories. The practical side of this hit hard after my parents’ inevitable divorce (I was thirteen at the time). Once the divorce was final, my dad basically had to fund two households on his small income as a Phys-ed teacher.
I came home for lunch one day, and there was nothing in the fridge. My mom was away working one of her many odd jobs, but her family allowance cheque had come in the mail. So, I forged her signature on the cheque, cashed it at Safeway, bought groceries, came home, and ate.
From this situation, I (or at least my subconscious child) learned that I couldn’t count on anybody else in my life to take care of me, including those who loved me. I had to be self-sufficient if was to survive.
As I got older, my self-sufficiency appeared whenever I perceived myself to be in any situation where my survival was threatened. When I would find myself in tight spots in business or relationships, I would often shun everybody around me and think, “I’ll fix this by myself, I can’t count on anyone to help me.” I came to the immature conclusion that there wasn’t much point in asking others for help.
With my first company, Westbeach, I believed I could never go on vacation, take days off, and that I had to be in on every single move and decision. I would make a lot of mistakes trying to do it all on my own and not recognizing that people love to help someone who’s passionate and working hard.
Later in my life, through the Landmark Forum self-development course, I would learn how every person develops an “Act.” An Act is learned early in life when a child faces a perceived moment of survival and develops a strategy to help them survive the situation. For the balance of a person’s life, their Act—effective or not—subconsciously kicks in whenever the person perceives themselves to be in a threatened position.
Changing Circumstances
It’s counterintuitive, but looking back, I think my parents’ divorce was a turn of good luck for me and my siblings. Despite his roots as an Albertan (a province known for its oil business conservatism), my dad was very much a hippie at heart. He wanted someone who would be a partner and talk with him about everything. My mom, on the other hand, wanted to take care of the house and wanted to defer most of the decision-making and leadership to her husband.
My parents just weren’t suited to each other, but after they split, they both married people who turned out to be their perfect partners.
Remarriage also changed my parents’ respective financial situations. My mom married an intellectual geologist named Frank Conrad. Our living situation changed dramatically. We moved from Lakeview to the upper-class neighbourhood of Mount Royal in Calgary. The neighbouring families were all well-off, but they also had a strong work ethic. I learned a lot from the parents of the new friends I made. And, I found those friends welcomed me with open arms.
My dad, meanwhile, married a woman named Cathy Lyness, who worked as a flight attendant with Air Canada. This worked out to be an amazing opportunity. As family members, my siblings and I were entitled to five free trips per year anywhere in the world, to be used until we were age twenty-five if we were still in school.
Before I turned twenty-five, I would take the opportunity to travel the world. By the age of twenty-five, in 1980, I might have been the most well-travelled person my age anywhere.
The Purple Shirt
When I was maybe thirteen or fourteen, I went on a date with a girl who came from the small cow town of Stettler, Alberta. I had bought a very cool Jimi Hendrix-style purple shirt, a sign of what would become a lifelong love of design and fashion. But then when I went to meet her at her house, she looked at the shirt, and my adolescent brain interpreted her facial expression as, “Wow, ugly.”
The two of us went to a party at a schoolmate’s house, and it didn’t get any better. It seemed everyone was making fun of my shirt. That had a profound effect on me—for the rest of my life, I never bought another purple shirt. As I grew, I had more bad experiences with many other shirt colours. Eventually, I would go to buy a shirt and, although there were ten colours, I would only really have a choice between white and white—which is no choice at all. I believe we do this with cars, shoes, business processes, and even spouses.
We all have experiences in our past that cut us off from our future potential. This is something personal development has helped me better understand. Our past experiences subconsciously confine what we believe is possible in life. If something didn’t work when I was thirteen, it doesn’t mean it won’t work at another time in my life.
Imagine if I had been in a car accident at age thirty and suffered complete amnesia. With no memory of my past and $100 to buy a shirt, I would have free choice of all colours, including purple. The point is, later in life, once I became able to understand how to free myself from past experiences, I gained the ability to embrace a future of multiple new ideas. My past stopped confining my future. This realization was life changing.
First Forays into Mindfulness
The second instructive event from my youth was my introduction to mindfulness as a discipline.
This initially had more to do with my dad than it did me. I would never say I am like Steve Jobs, but my dad was. Like Jobs, my dad had the weird diets, communes, yoga, gestalt psychology, and the like, down to an art form. He was always looking for the meaning of life but was also determined not to find it, because if he did, he was worried his life would no longer have a purpose.
By the early 1970s, my dad went to San Francisco and took an Erhard Seminar Training (EST) course, which was the precursor to Landmark. I remember my dad coming back and telling me he’d discovered the meaning of life. “It’s living in the moment,” he said.
At the time, I thought my father was a bit of a nutcase.
Just before my dad could legally retire from teaching, he phoned in permanently sick and moved to California to become an assistant gardener at the Esalen Institute. Esalen is a non-profit retreat centre founded by a pair of Stanford graduates in the early sixties. Numerous human potential practises—including meditation, yoga, and alternative medicine—have been explored at Esalen since its inception. During his time there, my dad even went into seclusion and did a lot of soul-searching for a while. If you saw the last scene in the series finale of Mad Men, you saw Esalen.
Imagine me, at age sixteen, rolling my eyes, wondering why my dad was into all this weird stuff. Of course, I did not understand how much mindfulness and Esalen-style teachings would become a big part of my own life.
Esalen seemed to have a new context for health and the health care system. For example, if a person had an illness in the kidneys, a doctor would usually prescribe a solution to fix the kidneys. At Esalen, however, they were asking, “Why did the kidney get sick in the first place?” This context would set me up for the foundation of lululemon’s personal development in 1998.
Meanwhile, I reflected on the ridiculous number of lengths I swam each day while looking at nothing but a black line at the bottom of the pool. Using the lessons my dad had taught me, I coped with physical pain by taking my mind away while my body took itself beyond its limit. In retrospect, this was Mindfulness 101. I now understand those twice-daily workouts taught me how to be present.
The runner’s high is a sensation that occurs after thirty-five minutes of a sustained, high-rate heartbeat. The brain releases hormones which take the athlete into an energized mental and physical space. The sensation usually lasts for about four hours. The amazing thing about an athlete’s high is the person’s past disappears and is irrelevant.
During that high, as the past becomes blank, so too does the future. We can only think of the future based on what we know from our past. When we don’t focus on the past, and the future is eliminated, all that is left is the present. The present is where all life really occurs. This was the origin of “The meaning of life may be living in the moment,” which became a key part of lululem
on’s Manifesto (more on that later). I have my eccentric father to thank for introducing me to it.
Chapter 2:
The 70s
Thank God for Swimming
I graduated from high school in 1972 at age sixteen, because I had skipped the second grade. Even after skipping a grade, I was always the biggest kid in my class. But, I was also a mediocre student. People seemed to expect more out of me socially than I could deliver. I remember a group of guys coming up behind me and saying, “Big like bull, dumb as a refrigerator.” I now know that every child has their insecure moments, but it didn’t feel like that then. My insecurity manifested as my inability to be social at school.
That’s why I thank God for swimming. Fifty percent of the swimmers were girls, who became my absolute best friends—even surrogate family members. Through competition, we lived and travelled with each other for years. Some of the girls I swam with went on to become Olympic athletes. Our coach, Ted Thomas, became Canada’s Olympic swimming coach.
What I knew of female drive and competitiveness came from these friendships. One thing that struck me was the girls’ constant complaints of strap location and rashes developing under their armpits from thousands of stroke rotations. The girls were always coming up with new ideas for strap designs, but there was never anyone at Speedo to whom to give these ideas.
When the time came to move to university, I had a couple of swimming scholarships to consider. These were critical because my parents had no money to offer me. By that point, I’d reached a turning point in my time as a swimmer. I was six foot three and about two hundred twenty pounds—150 percent the size of an average swimmer at that time. I learned that it meant I was a sprinter.
Competitive swimming had for a long time been mainly 50- and 100-metre events but was now changing to consist mostly of 200-metre and 400-metre events, especially in the lead up to the 1976 Olympics. Without enough events for a sprinter being offered, I knew my competitive swimming career was ending.
There was also a big part of me that didn’t want to be told what to do anymore, having spent much of my life in a highly-structured training routine. I decided not to go with the scholarships.
University of Alberta
I went to the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, 200 miles away. Far enough away from my parents for independence but not so far away that I couldn’t get my laundry done and have a home-cooked meal every now and again.
Once I started at the university, I played football. I still swam, although the swimming was on my own terms now. At the varsity level, swimming and football were an unusual combination of sports. I’d go into the football season in August weighing 240 pounds, then football ended in November. By February I would have to be trimmed down to 190 to be ready for the swimming nationals. Once the nationals had finished, I’d have to lift weights and eat like crazy to get back up to my football weight. But that’s what you can do with your body when you’re eighteen years old.
My major at university started off in science electives because I loved biology. For a time, I thought I might pursue a career as an ocean marine biologist at Scripps in San Diego. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me long to realize there was no way I could afford to study at Scripps.
The Pipeline in Alaska
I was close to the end of my second year of the University of Alberta when I realized I had no passion for anything outside of athletics. I didn’t know what I would do with the rest of my life. Then one day I was at the Edmonton Airport, coming back from Calgary, and I ran into the mother of a friend. We struck up a conversation.
“I’m going up to Alaska,” she told me. “My husband is a project manager on one of the five sections of the Alaska oil pipeline. Too bad you’re not American,” she added, “or you could go up and work there if you were interested.”
The Alaska pipeline was an 800-mile steel pipe through the heart of America’s last untouched wilderness. It was one of the biggest and most expensive private enterprises in global history. It was also something I’d never thought of before, and, unbeknownst to my friend’s mother, I was American, at least in the sense of my dual citizenship.
The day after my second year of university ended, I found myself on a plane headed for Alaska. I got to customs in Fairbanks, thought about it, and decided to tell the US border agent I was Canadian. The agent went through my bag, and it was all construction workwear, safety boots, and the like.
“I think you’re coming here to work and to take an American’s job, so I won’t let you in,” he said to me.
This was a problem. I had no money to fly back. All I had was my dual citizenship. So, I tried again, this time telling the agent I was coming into Alaska as an American.
“Great,” the agent said. “Step across.” I did as I was told and stepped over the line into American territory. “Report to your draft board first thing tomorrow morning,” he added.
Oh God, I thought. This is precisely what I had been trying to avoid when I told the border agent I was Canadian. This was the mid-seventies, just after the end of the Vietnam War, and I did not understand where I might end up if I reported to the draft board. So, I never reported to the draft board.
A couple of weeks later, I was working on the pipeline. Much of it was hard labour in deep cold. The camp, consisting of about two hundred to eight hundred men, was in the middle of nowhere, several hours east of Fairbanks. I often worked as a high-rigger, which meant climbing to the top of a crane to connect it to another crane in minus thirty degrees Celsius temperatures.
For my last year, I worked way out at a junction in the pipeline, monitoring a fan to make sure it didn’t run out of gas. This task led to long, long days, with nothing much to do but read—I’ll come back to that.
Life in the base camp was good, almost too good. Alaska, like Calgary, was going through an oil boom. That meant we had steak and snow crab nearly every night, movies to watch, and many other distractions—not all of them healthy. I worked with men mostly from the deep south; even today, if under the influence of a couple of beers, I have a decent Okie accent.
There was also a man in his fifties named Billy O’Callaghan, an unrepentant Irish alcoholic whose only goal was to eventually die in the arms of a sixteen-year-old at the Mustang Ranch in Las Vegas (this was an era when there was no political correctness). Billy kind of took me under his wing, and whenever I did something correctly—some task, repair, work, or whatever—Billy would say, “Fine as wine, partner, fine as wine.”
Billy’s motto, fine as wine, stuck with me after that and became something I mentally connected with quality craftsmanship.
I didn’t plan on being there for two years. At first, I thought it would just be for the summer, then I’d go back to school come the fall. On the other hand, I’d only made $3.50 an hour in Calgary doing various odd jobs, while on the pipeline I was making $13.50. I was also pulling eighteen-hour days, seven days a week, since there wasn’t much else to do. Anything over eight hours was double-time. Triple-time on holidays and Sundays. My first three days I made $600 working a holiday weekend—which was more money than I would’ve made all summer back in Calgary.
Besides the money, there was another experience that would shape me in later life. In the base camp, I was surrounded by a lot of drugs and alcohol, and a lot of men going through hard phases in their lives. I didn’t like the drinking and the drugs all that much, so I stayed away from them.
The Top 100 Novels
Around that same time, my mom sent me an article from the New York Times. (I believe the author was named Art Buchwald). The article drew connections between the human body and athletics and how the brain worked. There was research showing the brain improved from mental gymnastics in the same way the body improved from athletic conditioning—say, from swimming drills, for example.
You had to train the brain, Buchwald suggested, as you would your muscles, for it to work at full capacity. Even as a nineteen-year-old, I understood this clearly. For 1975, th
is was radical thinking.
I could use my time in Alaska to not only earn money but to train my brain as well. So, I stopped smoking marijuana and brought my teenage drinking to an end. I set myself a goal of reading a novel a day. There was more than enough time in which to do it.
I started off with a list of top hundred books of all time that I had seen in a newspaper. This undertaking made me likely one of the best-read nineteen-year-olds in the world. Two books, in particular, stood out: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, a comedy about living in the moment, and Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand.
(Full disclosure: I could not get through James Joyce’s Ulysses. Also, as I hope becomes clear throughout this book, I wish I’d had a chance to read Sun Tzu’s Art of War and Machiavelli’s The Prince while in Alaska.)
Atlas Shrugged is about a lot of things, but to put it most simply, it tells the story of a few visionary innovators on a quest to be great people and to produce a great product. There’s Dagny Taggart, the professional woman in her early thirties who keeps her family’s railroad empire running (despite her brother’s incompetence). There’s Dagny’s love interest, industrialist Hank Rearden, who invents a new metal alloy stronger than steel, and who must overcome the schemes of politicians and relatives who, unable to create greatness of their own, suck the life out of Hank.
Then there’s John Galt, the mysterious engineer and philosopher who remains mostly unidentified through much of the story. The question, “Who is John Galt?” is a major recurring theme in Atlas Shrugged and is a phrase that has since become a cultural touchstone of its own.
