Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE

by Phil Knight

In our coming battles, with Onitsuka, with whomever, we’d be like Pre. We’d compete as if our lives depended on it. Because they did.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.

We were fighting against conformity, against boringness, against drudgery. More than a product, we were trying to sell an idea—a spirit. I don’t know if I ever fully understood who we were and what we were doing until I heard myself saying it all that day to Strasser.

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.

My favorite, naturally, is the one about the day we went public. He sat his parents down and told them the news. “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?

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.

And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.

Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them: 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.