Off-piste
The JC loves skiing. Say what you like about his privileged, stale, pale, male, out-of-touch ass. I have mixed feelings about the “off-piste” metaphor.
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The JC gets all figurative
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In skiing it means to ski away from commercial ski-fields — typically, like miles away from them, and lifts, cafes and so on; ski-touring, with skins, avalanche gear, a rucksack and a day’s worth of food, spending more time walking up than skiing down. This is awesome, of course, but but more narrowly, being “off-piste” means skiing on commercial skifields, using normal lifts, cafes and what not, but just keeping off from the groomed, marked-out runs. But for every acre of groomed snow, there are three that aren’t. They'll feature trees, ditches, and skanky, crusty snow that hasn’t been lovingly gardened for les gens to elegantly swish down on their way to that midmorning stop at the sunny café. On a good day they’ll have plenty of unspoiled powder. Skiing off-piste is no cakewalk: you have to have your wits about you. You have to have a decent game. You have to work it.
For dilettantes like the JC, skiing “off the side of the piste” is less dangerous and a whole lot less of a hassle back-country ski-touring, however fabulous that is in concept. Still, it requires enough technique to deal with powder, crud, moguls, avoid trees and whatnot. This is technique that 90% of skiers don’t have, and as a result, they stick to the pistes. But one of the worst things about skiing is people getting in your way. It sucks. And it’s dangerous.
Okay, some maths. If one quarter of the skiable area of a given ski-field is pisted and there is three times as much unpisted skiing, and if 90% of skiers are on a piste at any time — I have no data but I reckon both these are conservative — then by my feeble calculation there are 27 times as many skiers per hundred yards on the piste as there are off it. That in itself is enough reason to learn how to ski crud. Plus pistes get rucked up, mogulled and tend to be more icy when everyone has been drilling them all day.
Pistes: not particularly challenging, until you hit flat ice or some useless lump hits you, whereupon it becomes terrifying. There are a ton of people taking the best lines — and often not taking them, but traversing shittily across them, meaning you can’t take the best line either.
Being in business is a bit like skiing. Sticking to the piste is like chasing the same margin and the same business everyone else is chasing. It’s like, dude, look to the side. There’s plenty of good stuff there, if you only engage with it, and you’ll get a lot more out of it if you do.