Shoe Dog

by Phil Knight

On paper, I thought, I’m an adult. Graduated from a good college—University of Oregon. Earned a master’s from a top business school—Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army—Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty-four-year-old man in full . . . So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?

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.

As my young heart began to thump, as my pink lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, I saw it all before me, exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play.

To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.

So that morning in 1962 I 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.

wanted to experience what the Chinese call Tao, the Greeks call Logos, the Hindus call Jñāna, the Buddhists call Dharma. What the Christians call Spirit.

Every runner understands this. Front runners always work the hardest, and risk the most.

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.

I read in my guidebook that a torii gate is usually a portal to sacred places, and so I basked in the sacredness, the serenity, trying to soak it all in.

Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing—

Confucius—The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones—

Of course, he was deeply flawed. But he knew that. You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.

All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert.

If you get simple beauty and naught else, you get about the best thing God invents.

After our chance meeting at Occidental, I’d sent him a pair of Tigers, as a gift, and now he wrote to say that he’d tried them on and gone for a run. He liked them, he said. He liked them a whole lot. Others liked them, too. People kept stopping him and pointing at his feet and asking where they could buy some neat shoes like those.

Again and again I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure.

Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

needed a sense of community, even if it was a community of just two.

The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.

My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of alone time and team time. Exactly what I had now.

I’m speaking from theory, faith, and bluster, like every groom. And every bride.

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.

clean shave was one of my few concessions to The Man.

Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.

MacArthur came to mind. You are remembered for the rules you break.

“Why you do such a thing?” Ito demanded. “Because I think Blue Ribbon could be great success,” Sumeragi said, “maybe $20 million account. I shake hands many times with Mr. Steve Prefontaine. I shake hands with Mr. Bill Bowerman. I go many times to Trail Blazer game with Mr. Phil Knight. I even pack orders at warehouse. Nike is my business child. Always it is nice to see one’s business child grow.” “So then,” Ito said, “you hide invoices because . . . you . . . like these men?” Deeply ashamed, Sumeragi bowed his head. “Hai,” he said. “Hai.”

And he had forgiven me my sins, including my secret factory. “There are worse things,” he said, “than ambition.”

it. I remembered that the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it, so we both benefited from my transferring everything I knew about Japan, Korea, China, and Taiwan to Gorman’s brain.

You are remembered for the rules you break.

Buttface referred to both the retreat and the retreaters, and it not only captured the informal mood of those retreats,

But in fact we were more alike than different, and that gave a coherence to our goals and our efforts.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6.

For instance. One of the worst things about a shoe factory used to be the rubber room, where uppers and soles are bonded. The fumes are choking, toxic, cancer-causing. So we invented a water-based bonding agent that gives off no fumes, thereby eliminating 97 percent of the carcinogens in the air. Then we gave this invention to our competitors, handed it over to anyone who wanted it.

Another thing I often heard from those same professors was the old maxim: “When goods don’t pass international borders, soldiers will.”

All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can. Put another way: We must all be professors of the jungle.

“What does that mean?” they whispered. “It means your original eight-thousand-dollar loan to Phil is worth $1.6 million.” They looked at each other, looked at Woodell. “I don’t understand,” his mother said. If you can’t trust the company your son works for, who can you trust?

Because mothers are our first coaches.

Not being a good enough manager to avoid layoffs. Three times in ten years—a total of fifteen hundred people. It still haunts.

I’d tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time, and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years.

I’d tell men and women in their midtwenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt.

Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.