Shoe Dog (Young Readers Edition)

by Phil Knight

There’s a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided. I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life.

I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?

Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.

At twenty-four I did have a Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future, and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their midtwenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I loved most—books, sports, democracy, free enterprise—started as crazy ideas.

told myself: Let everyone else call your idea crazy . . . just keep going. Don’t stop. Don’t even think about stopping until you get there, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop.

Before running a big race, you always want to walk the track. A backpacking trip around the globe might be just the thing.

But first, I’d need my father’s approval. More, I’d need his cash.

See an open shot, take it—that was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth.

It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.

More, I knew how to speak the truth. People seemed to like that.

Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop.

I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen, linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.

You cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself,

So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.

Running track gives you a fierce respect for numbers, because you are what your numbers say you are, nothing more, nothing less. If I posted a bad time in a race, there might have been reasons—injury, fatigue, broken heart—but no one cared. My numbers, in the end, were all that anyone would remember. I’d lived this reality, but Hayes the artist made me feel it.

None micromanaged. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. So I didn’t answer Johnson, and I didn’t pester him. Having told him what to do, I hoped that he would surprise me.

Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks—marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling—seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.

The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever defined Tao, I still go to Mass. Have faith in yourself but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it.

E. Do work that means something to you. Your goal should not be to seek a job, or even a career, but to seek a calling.

Where there is no struggle there can be no art. Six decades ago Frank Shallenberger, beloved professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, said the words that meant so much to me, the words that became the mantra for his class, and my attitude: “The only time you must not fail . . . is the last time you try.” * * *