#10 Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

What I learned from reading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.

The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of the Oregon Trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started, the weak died along the way—that leaves us.” [0:35]

Some outsized sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism. [1:03]

I found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all my friends I wanted to be successful. I didn’t know what that meant. [2:11]

Deep down I was searching for something else, something more. I had an aching sense that our time is short, shorter than we ever know. And I wanted mine to be meaningful. And purposeful. And creative. And important. Above all . . .different. [2:35]

I asked myself: What if there were a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing? [4:23]

The only answer was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed like a good fit, and chase it with a single-minded dedication and purpose. [4:47]

Maybe my Crazy Idea just might . . . work? Maybe. No, no, I thought. It will work. By God, I’ll make it work. No maybes about it. [5:29]

So much about those days has vanished. Faces, numbers, decisions that once seemed pressing and irrevocable, they’re all gone. [6:39]

What remains is this one comforting certainty, this one anchoring truth that will never go away. At 24 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 mid-twenties 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. [7:03]

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. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. [7:45]

That is the advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice — maybe the only advice — any of us should ever give. [8:08]

I knew Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. [9:00]

He was impressed. It took balls to put together an itinerary like that, he said. Balls. He wanted in. [12:01]

Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it—that was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled the earth. [12:14]

What Phil was doing was looked upon by most of his family as crazy and extremely dangerous. [12:37]

Go home, a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice equally emphatic, “No. Don’t go home. Keep going. Don’t stop.” [14:15]

Bill Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod. [15:55]

He always had some new scheme to make our shoes softer and lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. [16:42]

Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and more speed. Lightness was his constant goal. [17:11]

Frugality carried over to every part of the coach’s makeup. [17:56]

Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today its all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course, he was. [18:47]

Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a professor of competitive responses. His job, as he saw it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead. [19:41]

In my mind, he was Patton with a stopwatch. [20:00]

He had tested me. He had broken me down and remade me just like a pair of shoes. [23:31]

The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. [23:57]

He always went against the grain. Always. He was the first college coach to emphasize rest, to place as much value on recovery as on work. [24:12]

He [his Dad] said he hadn’t sent me to O...