Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

(New York: Simon and Schuster, 2016), 368

"I don't know how long I stood there, absorbing the energy and power of that mythical place. An hour, three? I don't know how long after that day I discovered the Aristophanes play set in the temple of Nike, in which the warrior gives the king a gift, a pair of new shoes. I don't know when I figured out that the play was called Knights. I do know that as I turned to leave I noticed the temple's marble facade. Greek artisans had decorated it with several haunting carvings, including the most famous, in which the goddess inexplicably leans down to adjust the strap of her shoe." (1:17)
"And I despised it to boot. I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds but I'd felt dead inside. So I 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. I believed these shoes were better than running. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided, is irresistible." (1:55)
"I was happy, maybe as happy as I'd ever been, and happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses." (2:00)
Many were future Olympians and yet I trained myself to forget this unhappy fact. People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that's only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I learned from track, was the art of forgetting and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, "Not one more step." When it's not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I fought over all the races in which my body wanted one thing and my mind wanted another: those laps in which I had to tell my body, "Yes you raise some excellent points but let's keep going anyway." (2:07)
"Everyone's an athlete. If you have a body you're an athlete." (3:04)
"...biographies of my three main heroes: Churchill, Kennedy, and Tolstoy." (3:08)
"My real furniture was shoes. My first-ever bachelor pad was filled from floor to ceiling with shoes." (3:14)
This goal kept flashing through my mind every day until it became my internal chant: "Fail fast." (3:17)
"The book about jogging was done and out in bookstores, a slight 100 pages. Jogging preached the gospel of physical exercise to a nation that had never heard that sermon before, a nation that was collectively lolling on the couch, and somehow the book caught fire." (3:56)
Marriage: "I'm speaking from theory, faith, and bluster, like every groom and every bride. It would be up to me and Penny to prove the truth of what we said that day." (4:44)
I told myself, "Life is growth. You grow or you die." (5:02)
"Phil and I were very different and yet our friendship was based on several key things we had in common. Each of us found pleasure whenever possible in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind and each of us recognized that this small task of finding a bigger office meant we were succeeding. We were making a go of this thing called Blue Ribbon, which spoke to a deep desire in each of us to succeed, to win." (5:07)
"Yes, confidence more than equity or liquidity, that's what a man needs. I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some but confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some and people were loath to give it to you." (5:44)
"Johnson phoned me first thing this morning. He said, apparently, a new name came to him in a dream last night. I rolled my eyes. A dream? He's serious. What else did he say? He's always serious. He says he sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of the night and saw the name before him. What else did he say? What is it? I asked, bracing myself. Nike." (6:27)
"The quarterback for Notre Dame wore a pair that season and it was a thrill to see him trot onto that hallowed gridiron at South Bend in a pair of Nikes." (6:32)
"I'd never heard of Center but Sumaragi assured me the man was a genuine head-to-toe shoe dog. I'd heard this phrase a few times. Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes. Lifers used the phrase cheerfully to describe other lifers, men and women who had toiled so long and hard in the shoe trade. They thought and talked about nothing else. It was an all-consuming mania, a recognizable psychological disorder, to care so much about insoles and outsoles, linings and welts, rivets and vamps but I understood. The average person takes 7,500 steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe. Shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey. Shoes were their way of connecting with humanity. What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge that joins each person to the world's surface?" (6:33)
"Such stupidity," he said. "At first I thought he was talking about me. Then I realized he meant the bank. I do not like stupidity," he said. "People pay too much attention to numbers." (9:37)
"With Hayward vibrating and swaying from the roars and cheers, he pulled away and won in 13:23.8, which was 1.6 seconds off his best time. Pre was most famous for saying, "Somebody may beat me but they're going to have to bleed to do it." Watching him run that final weekend of May 1975, I'd never felt more admiration for him or identified with him more closely." (9:40)
“The difference from one shoe to another, he said, nine times out of ten, is the factory. Forget design, forget color, forget all the other things that go into a shoe. It's all about factories, factories, factories.” (10:03)
"I smiled, but I had no sense of victory. It can all disappear tomorrow, I whispered." (11:48)
"A guiding demon has been nudging me, whispering to me, or else just playing with me. Can it really be nothing but a fluke of geography that the oldest shoes ever discovered are a pair of 9,000-year-old sandals salvaged from a cave in Oregon? Is there nothing to the fact that the sandals were discovered in 1938, the year I was born?" (12:38)
"You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you." (12:50)
"I'd like to remind them that America isn't the entrepreneurial Shangri-La people think. Free enterprise always irritates the kinds of trolls who live to block, to thwart, to say, "No, sorry, no," and it's always been this way. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They've always fought uphill and the hill has never been steeper. America is becoming less entrepreneurial not more." (13:17)
Since no one has ever adequately defined tau, I now try to go regularly to Mass. I would tell them, "Have faith in yourself but also have faith in faith." (13:18)

Topic: Nike

Source

Dad: "For anybody who might want to run a business I recommend shoe dog by Phil Knight. The story of all the trials and tribulations in the first 20 years of Nike."
Padj: from a friend of his

Created: 2023-06-21-Wed
Updated: 2026-10-05-Mon