Shoe Dog

by Phil Knight

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.

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

we weren’t broke, we just had no money.

Anything was preferable to not bringing product to market on time.

I was persuasive because I was desperate.

He denied, fumed, bargained, got depressed, then accepted. The Five Stages of Jeff.

Grow or die,

You are remembered for the rules you break.

“Somebody may beat me—but they’re going to have to bleed to do it.”

Money wasn’t our aim, we agreed. Money wasn’t our end game. But whatever our aim or end, money was the only means to get there. More money than we had on hand.

“Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.”

Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand.

When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly.

Maybe the cure for any burnout, I thought, is to just work harder.

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the whole grand human drama. More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully, and if that’s business, all right, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.

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

All we have to do, I tell the students, is work and study, study and work, hard as we can.

But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.

Seek a calling. Even if you don’t know what that means, seek it.

Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius.

The harder you work, the better your Tao.

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.