Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 438

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "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 that trail often. It’s our birthright, he’d growl. Our character, our fate—our DNA. “The cowards never started,” he’d tell me, “and the weak died along the way—that leaves us.”

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. 

For that matter, few ideas are as crazy as my favorite thing, running. It’s hard. It’s painful. It’s risky. The rewards are few and far from guaranteed. 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. Whatever pleasures or gains you derive from the act of running, you must find them within. It’s all in how you frame it, how you sell it to yourself. 

Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death. 

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, and don’t give much thought to where “there” is. Whatever comes, just don’t stop. 

That’s the precocious, prescient, urgent 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.

Perhaps nothing ever revealed my mother’s true nature like the frequent drills she put me through. As a young girl she’d witnessed a house in her neighborhood burn to the ground; one of the people inside had been killed. So she often tied a rope to the post of my bed and made me use it to rappel out of my second-floor window. While she timed me. What must the neighbors have thought? What must I have thought? Probably this: Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared. 

And this: My mother loves me.

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. 

Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.

“This is—the moment,” I said. “This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else’s brand. No more working for someone else. Onitsuka has been holding us down for years. Their late deliveries, their mixed-up orders, their refusal to hear and implement our design ideas—who among us isn’t sick of dealing with all that? It’s time we faced facts: If we’re going to succeed, or fail, we should do so on our own terms, with our own ideas—our own brand. We posted two million in sales last year… none of which had anything to do with Onitsuka. That number was a testament to our ingenuity and hard work. Let’s not look at this as a crisis. Let’s look at this as our liberation. Our Independence Day.

 

“Yes, it’s going to be rough. I won’t lie to you. We’re definitely going to war, people. But we know the terrain. We know our way around Japan now. And that’s one reason I feel in my heart this is a war we can win. And if we win it, when we win it, I see great things for us on the other side of victory. We are still alive, people. We are still. Alive.”

I’d never witnessed anything quite like that race. And yet I didn’t just witness it. I took part in it. Days later I felt sore in my hams and quads. This, I decided, this is what sports are, what they can do. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people’s victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

On New Year’s Eve, 1977, I went around my new house, putting out the lights, and I felt a kind of fissure deep within the bedrock of my existence. My life was about sports, my business was about sports, my bond with my father was about sports, and neither of my two sons wanted anything to do with sports.

I think of the countless Nike offices around the world. At each one, no matter the country, the phone number ends in 6453, which spells out Nike on the keypad. But, by pure chance, from right to left it also spells out Pre’s best time in the mile, to the tenth of a second: 3:54.6.

In one sense our campus is a topographical map of Nike’s history and growth; in another it’s a diorama of my life. In yet another sense it’s a living, breathing expression of that vital human emotion, maybe the most vital of all, after love. Gratitude. 

The youngest employees at Nike seem to have it. In abundance. They care deeply about the names on the streets and buildings, and about the bygone days. Like Matthew begging for his bedtime story, they clamor for the old tales. They crowd the conference room whenever Woodell or Johnson visits. They’ve even formed a discussion group, an informal think tank, to preserve that original sense of innovation. They call themselves The Spirit of 72, which fills my heart. 

But it’s not just the young people within the company who honor the history. I think back to July 2005. In the middle of some event, I can’t recall which, LeBron James asks for a private word. 

“Phil, can I see you a moment?” 

“Of course.” 

“When I first signed with you,” he says, “I didn’t know all that much about the history of Nike. So I’ve been studying up.” 

"Oh?” 

“You’re the founder.” 

“Well. Cofounder. Yes. It surprises a lot of people.” 

“And Nike was born in 1972.” 

“Well. Born—? Yes. I suppose.” 

“Right. So I went to my jeweler and had them find a Rolex watch from 1972.” He hands me the watch. It’s engraved: With thanks for taking a chance on me. 

As usual, I say nothing. I don’t know what to say. 

It wasn’t much of a chance. He was pretty close to a sure thing. But taking a chance on people—he’s right. You could argue that’s what it’s all been about.