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In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few. —Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind
Maybe because I still hadn’t experienced anything of life. Least of all its many temptations and excitements. I hadn’t smoked a cigarette, hadn’t tried a drug. I hadn’t broken a rule, let alone a law. The 1960s were just under way, the age of rebellion, and I was the only person in America who hadn’t yet rebelled. I couldn’t think of one time I’d cut loose, done the unexpected.
Unlike my friends I didn’t know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure, if I was lucky. These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them, instinctively. But deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all… different.
I wanted to win. No, that’s not right. I simply didn’t want to lose.
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.
To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.
When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination. It’s not just that there’s no finish line; it’s that you define the finish line. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.
Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them. He liked being admired.
This trip, this Crazy Idea, would be one sure way of becoming someone other than him. Someone less respectable. Or maybe not less respectable. Maybe just less obsessed with respectability.
I wasn’t built for heavy doses of rejection. I’d known this about myself since high school, freshman year, when I got cut from the baseball team. A small setback, in the grand scheme, but it knocked me sideways. 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.
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 are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.
Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.
There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.
Everything my banker said, I ultimately accepted. Then I’d do exactly as I pleased.
Price Waterhouse boasted a great variety of clients, a mix of interesting start-ups and established companies, all selling everything imaginable—lumber, water, power, food. While auditing these companies, digging into their guts, taking them apart and putting them back together, I was also learning how they survived, or didn’t. How they sold things, or didn’t. How they got into trouble, how they got out. I took careful notes about what made companies tick, what made them fail. Again and again I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure.
One lesson I took from all my home-schooling about heroes was that they didn’t say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
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 single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.
Leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling, I tried to settle myself. I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.
How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.
Yes, I thought. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs.
No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.
Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.
Supply and demand is always the root problem in business. It’s been true since Phoenician traders raced to bring Rome the coveted purple dye that colored the clothing of royals and rich people; there was never enough purple to go around. It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.
More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit.
“There are worse things,” he said, “than ambition.”
He straightened his tie. “Such stupidity,” he said. At first I thought he was talking about me. Then I realized he meant the bank. “I do not like stupidity,” he said. “People pay too much attention to numbers.”
Pre was most famous for saying, “Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.”
I remembered that the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it,
Did you know that in China, when man marries woman, they throw red shoes on the roof to make sure all goes well on wedding night?
Did you know that in many countries, when someone starts on a journey, it’s actually good luck to throw a shoe at them?
Clearly the Buttfaces liked the culture I’d created. I trusted them, wholly, and didn’t look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn’t have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me.
didn’t care what he said or how he said it or how it went over. He was totally honest, a radical tactic in any negotiation.
We were more than a brand; we were a statement.
Imitation is flattery, but knockoff is theft, and this theft was diabolical.
Brown managed to dream up a campaign and a tagline that perfectly captured Nike’s philosophy. His ad showed a single runner on a lonely country road, surrounded by tall Douglas firs. Oregon, clearly. The copy read: “Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.” Everyone around me thought the ad was bold, fresh. It didn’t focus on the product, but on the spirit behind the product, which was something you never saw in the 1970s.
Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape. Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand.
I reminded Hayes, not for the first time, that there’s no shoe school, no University of Footwear from which we could recruit. We needed to hire people with sharp minds, that was our priority, and accountants and lawyers had at least proved that they could master a difficult subject. And pass a big test.
Then I spent the days leading up to our departure reading, cramming on Chinese history. The Boxer Rebellion. The Great Wall. Opium Wars. Ming dynasty. Confucius. Mao. And darned if I was going to be the only student. I made a syllabus for all members of our traveling party.
For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else. But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings. It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living—and
asked myself: What are you feeling? It wasn’t joy. It wasn’t relief. If I felt anything, it was… regret? Good God, I thought. Yes. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again.
But it’s not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can’t recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word. “Phil, can I see you a moment?” “Of course.” “When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn’t know all that much about the history of Nike. So I’ve been studying up.” “Oh?” “You’re the founder.” “Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.” “And Nike was born in 1972.” “Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.” “Right. So I went to my jeweler and had them find a Rolex watch from 1972.” He hands me the
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Today the factories that make our products are among the best in the world. An official at the United Nations recently said so: Nike is the gold standard by which we measure all apparel factories.
In one country, which shall be nameless, when we tried to raise wages, we found ourselves called on the carpet, summoned to the office of a top government official and ordered to stop. We were disrupting the nation’s entire economic system, he said. It’s simply not right, he insisted, or feasible, that a shoe worker makes more than a medical doctor.
Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.” Though I’ve been known to call business war without bullets, it’s actually a wonderful bulwark against war. Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.
It’s always a happy occasion to be walking a campus, but also bracing, because while I find students today much smarter and more competent than in my time, I also find them far more pessimistic.
We’re also finishing construction on a new athletic facility, which we plan to dedicate to our mothers, Dot and Lota. On a plaque next to the entrance will go an inscription: Because mothers are our first coaches.
Of course, above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. Maybe, if I had, I could’ve solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.
