Shoe Dog

by Phil Knight

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.

Why is it always so hard to get started?

Why is it always so hard to get started?

“The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.”

If I tended to dwell on all the things I wasn’t, the reason was simple. Those were the things I knew best.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In college I’d read the analects of 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.

He weighed and hoarded words of praise, like uncut diamonds.

Part of his mind was always back in Fossil, which was funny, because there was something distinctly fossilized about him. Hard, brown, ancient, he possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that was rare in Lyndon Johnson’s America. Today it’s all but extinct.

Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. 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.

People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it.

I was putting in six days a week at Price Waterhouse, spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life—and wholly content. My life was out of balance, sure, but I didn’t care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance.

Yes, I thought. Confidence. More than equity, more than liquidity, that’s what a man needs. I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some. But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.

The thought crossed my mind that some of the hardest things ever said in our lifetimes are said softly.

“Thank you,” I said to Ito. “You will never be sorry that you defended us like that.” 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.”

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. It was the right tack for Patton and his GIs. But did that make it right for a bunch of Buttfaces? I worried. Maybe I should be more hands-on. Maybe we should be more structured.

Signing the lease, I remembered those nights, driving around with Woodell. I shook my head. But I had no sense of victory. “It can all disappear tomorrow,” I whispered.

Of course, there will always be the question of wages. The salary of a Third World factory worker seems impossibly low to Americans, and I understand. Still, we have to operate within the limits and structures of each country, each economy; we can’t simply pay whatever we wish to pay. 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.

I’d like to warn the best of them, the iconoclasts, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bull’s-eye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bull’s-eye. It’s not one man’s opinion; it’s a law of nature.

Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They’ve always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial, not more. A Harvard Business School study recently ranked all the countries of the world in terms of their entrepreneurial spirit. America ranked behind Peru.