Shoe Dog

by Phil Knight

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.

Like it or not, life is a game.

I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas.

It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself.

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.

How can I leave my mark on the world, I thought, unless I get out there first and see it?

He wore thick glasses and read books. Good books. He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to—equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.

See an open shot, take it—that was Carter.

The junk merchant doesn’t sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product.

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.

To study the self, said the thirteenth-century Zen master Dogen, is to forget the self.

Inner voice, outer voices, it’s all the same. No dividing lines.

You are capable. You are confident. You can do this. You can DO this.

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

You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.

Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then.

Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results. Of all the great generals, he was the most shoe-obsessed: A soldier in shoes is only a soldier. But in boots he becomes a warrior.

When their diametrically opposed personalities caused problems, my parents would fall back on the thing they had most deeply in common, their belief that family comes first.

Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared.