#418 Phil Knight: Founder of Nike

If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail that we had to blaze to get here. 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 and the weak died along the way. That leaves us.

Phil Knight is quoting his co founder of Nike Bill Barman. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along the trail, my teacher believed. Some outsize sense of possibility mixed with a diminished capacity for pessimism. And it was our job to keep that strain alive. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I'd recently blazed my own trail. Back home after seven long years away.

It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I lay on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies, and blue ribbons, thinking, This is me? Still? On paper, I thought, I'm an adult. I graduated from a good college, University of Oregon, earned a master's from a top business school, Stanford.

Survived a year long hitch in the army. My resume said that I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty four year old man in full. So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? I have found it quite difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or who I might become. Like all my friends, I wanted to be successful. Unlike my friends, I didn't know what that meant. Money? Maybe. Wife? Kids? House? Sure. If I was lucky.

These were the goals I was taught to aspire to, and part of me did aspire to them instinctively, but 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, short as a morning run, and I wanted mine to be meaningful and purposeful and creative and important. And above all, different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, that's not right. I simply didn't want to lose. And then it happened.

I saw it all before me. Exactly what I wanted my life to be. Play. I thought, that's it. That's the word. The secret of happiness I'd always suspected. The essence of beauty or truth or all we ever need to know of either lay somewhere in that moment when the ball is in mid-air. When both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises as one. There's a kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing are decided.

I wanted that, whatever that was, to be my life, my daily life. Now, as I began to clip off one brisk six minute mile after another, I asked myself What if there was a way without being an athlete to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?

The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery that daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust. Maybe the only answer, I thought, was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete's single-minded dedication and purpose.

Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines. And I didn't want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want. Which led, as always, to my crazy idea. Maybe I thought, just maybe I need to take one more look at my crazy idea. Maybe my crazy idea just might work. Maybe. No.

No, I thought, running faster, faster. Running as if I was chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God, I'll make it work. No maybes about it. I was suddenly smiling, almost laughing. Drenched in sweat, moving as gracefully and as effortlessly as I ever had. I saw my crazy idea shining up ahead, and it didn't look all that crazy. It didn't even look like an idea. It looked like a place.

It looked like a person or some life force that existed long before I did, separate from me, but also part of me, waiting for me. At twenty-four years old, I did have a crazy idea. And somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst and fears about the future and doubts about myself, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long processional of crazy ideas. The things I love most, books, sports, democracy, free enterprise, started as crazy ideas.

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.

That was an excerpt from the book that I'm going to talk to you about today and what I consider a nearly perfect Entrepreneurial autobiography. It is Shoe Dog, written by the founder of Nike, Phil Knight. I've read this book, I don't know, three or four times.

Every time I reread it, I learn something new and it just gives me a ton of energy. And so that's why I wanted to read this book this week. I want to jump right into this idea for Nike. It says it was one of my final classes, a seminar on entrepreneurship. I'd written a research paper about shoes. And the paper had evolved from a run of the mill assignment to an all out obsession.

Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by the Germans. Thus I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, and then captivated me. It seemed so obvious.

So simple and so potentially huge. I had spent weeks and weeks on that paper. I'd moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. Finally, as required, I'd given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates, who reacted with formal boredom. Not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares.

That is the crazy idea that Phil Knight was referencing in the very opening of the book. So I wanna jump into another main theme. of this book that is super important. You and I have seen this over and over again in these hundreds and hundreds of biographies. It's the fact that you can always understand the son by the story of his father, that the story of the father is embedded in the son.

Phil Knight will have two father figures in his life, his actual dad and Bill Bowerman, his coach and then future co-founder of Nike. His two dads could not be any different. And the reason this is so important is because e his dad undoubtedly loved his son.

But one of the most important decisions that Phil Knight ever makes in his entire life is not heeding his advice, is not taking his advice. Many times throughout the early days of what will come Nike, his dad is actively trying to get him to stop quote. Jackassing around with these shoes. He wanted his son to do something more respectable. Phil Knight's father was obsessed with what other people thought. Obviously you and I know this entrepreneurs cannot think that way. So talks about his dad.

My dad also worshipped another secret deity, respectability, and my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was that his friends and neighbors knowing that That he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream. So not only does Phil Knight not come from an entrepreneurial family, but at the time he wants to start his own company selling running shoes. Running was not mainstream. He'll tell a story later in the book.

People would literally drive by runners on the road and throw things at them because they thought it was such a weird habit. And so his father is saying, if you pursue this crazy idea, you become someone that is less respectable.

And so Phil Knight's idea is beautifully simple. He travels to Japan. He's meeting with shoe manufacturers, trying to convince them to let him sell their shoes. In America. And so he's gonna do a deal with this company called Anatsuka, and this is what he tells them. If Anazuka can get its shoes into American stores and price them to undercut Adidas, which most American athletes now wear, it could be a hugely profitable venture.

One of the things I love most about rereading Phil Knight's book is how focused he is on making the best possible product that he can for his customers. You're about to be introduced to his co founder, Bill Bowerman. And what him and Bill Berriman did was they would refuse to rest on their laurels. And so they were constantly inventing new ways to help athletes perform better. And so Phil and Bill were obsessed with their customers.

Obsess over customers is a maxim that is repeated by Jeff Bezos, and you can definitely see that in Phil Knight. It is also the same trait that I see in my friend Kareem, who's the co-founder and CTO of Rant. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Kareem is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance today. And what Kareem is obsessed with is crafting a high quality product and using the latest technology to constantly create better experiences for his customers.

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Travel spending, budget controls, accounting automation, and AI tools that flag waste, fraud, and policy violations. Tomorrow, ramp is full self-driving money for your business. Many of the fastest growing and most innovative companies in the world are running their business on ramp. I run my business on ramp and you should too.

Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com today to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. And so about a year later, they finally send him shoes to America, to Oregon to sell in America.

This is incredible. This is one of my favorite things about reading these biographies. You just realize that Nike's this massive company. It's gonna be the most successful, you know, athletic company in hi and the history of mankind. And yet it starts out with one Japanese company sending A kid in his twenties, still living at home, twelve pairs of running shoes. And this was Phil Knight's reaction. God, they were beautiful.

Then I sent two pairs to my old track coach at Oregon, Bill Bowerman. I did so without a second thought. Since it was Barrowman who first made me think, really think, about what people put on their feet. Barrowman 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. Shoot He was obsessed with the with how human beings are shot.

I'm gonna spend a lot of time on Phil Knight's description of Bowerman, the influence that Bowerman had on Phil Knight. He Phil Knight says over and over again, there would not be a Nike without the experience I had with not only being coached by Bowerman when I was younger, but also choosing him as my co-founder and partner. In the four years I'd run for Bowerman at Oregon, he was constantly sneaking into our lockers and stealing our footwear. He'd spend days tearing them apart.

Stitching them back up, then hand them back with some minor modification, which made us either run like deer or bleed. Bauerman never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the instep, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot. He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes sleeker, softer, and lighter. is specially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes, he said, is equivalent to fifty five pounds over one mile.

He wasn't kidding. His math was solid. You take the average man's stride of six feet, spread it out over a mile, you get 880 steps. Remove one ounce from each step, that's 55 pounds on the butt. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed, and speed equaled winning.

Bowerman didn't like to lose. I got it from him. This ruthless competitive drive that Phil Knight has is another main theme that you and I uh are going to talk a lot about today. Thus lightness was his constant goal. In quest of lightness, he was willing to try anything. Now this next paragraph is so important because we start to see that Phil Knight really looks at Bowerman as the father that he wanted. The father that he chose was

It was possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress and to please Bowerman. Besides my father there was no man whose approval I craved more, and besides my father there was no man who gave it less often.

Frugality carried over to every part of Bowerman's makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise like uncut diamonds. That sentence is really important. He weighed and hoarded words of praise like uncut diamonds. That is exactly the same way that Phil Knight will be with his team and his employees.

I loved Bowerman and feared him, and neither of those initial impulses ever went away. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more. Sometimes it went right down to my shoes, which he probably cobbled with his bare hands. Barrowman and my father were driven by different demons. My father was always chasing respectability, whereas Barrowman didn't give a damn for respectability.

Bowerman possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness, a blend of grit and integrity and calcified stubbornness that is all but extinct today. He was also a war hero too. Of course he was. He was the most famous track coach in America. But Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach.

He called himself a professor of competitive responses. And his job, as he saw it and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead far beyond Oregon.

The facilities at Oregon were sparkled. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn't been painted in decades. It's funny. Reading this over and over again, the early offices of what will come Nike are the exact same way. The lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guys. We hung our clothes on nails, rusty nails.

Sometimes we ran without socks, complaining never crossed our minds. We saw our coach as a general to be obeyed quickly and blindly. In my mind, Barrman was patent with a stop. That is, when he wasn't a god. Like all ancient gods, Bauman lived on a mountaintop. His majestic ranch sat on a peak high above campus. Talks about this later in the book. He actually built of course he did. He built the entire his entire house.

out of stone, by hand, himself. And re and when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the god. There was a truck driver who often dared to disturb the peace on Bowerman Mountain. He took turns too fast and frequently knocked over Bowerman's mailbox. Bowerman scolded the trucker, threatened to punch him in the face, and so forth, but the trucker paid no heed. He drove as he pleased day after day, so Bowerman rigged the mailbox with explosives.

And the next time the trucker ran it over, boom, when the smoke cleared, the trucker found his truck in pieces, its tires reduced to ribbons. He never again touched Bowerman's mailbox. And so Bowerman is not a man of many words. After he gets the Japanese shoes from Phil, he's like, hey, why don't we have lunch? And he says, Those Japanese shoes, they're pretty good. How about letting me in on the deal? Phil responds, What kind of partnership do you have in mind?

fifty fifty. And that is beginning one of the most important partnerships in business history. I mold over Bowerman's eccentric personality, which carried over to everything he did. Again, this is really important. I'm not just trying to describe Bill Bowerman.

Although I do find him a very fascinating figure, I actually read a book. There's a biography of Bowerman I probably read six or seven years ago. I did an episode on a long, long time ago. And there's a lot of f fascinating stories in that book. But there's a sentence in that book that I never forgotten and kind of encapsulates the kind of human being we're dealing with. And it says that Bill Bowerman once killed a seven foot rattlesnake with a clip of the

And so the reason I'm reading this part is because this going against his grain about this insistence on doing things your own way, this is exactly how Phil Knight builds Nike. I mold over Bowerman's essential personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain. Always. For example, he was the first college coach in America to emphasize rest.

To place as much value on recovery as on work. But when he worked you, brother, he worked you. And yet it worked. Barrowman coached more sub-four-minute milers than anybody ever. And so think about the contrast that plays out over the next few pages. You have Bowerman, this this essentially god in Phil Knight's eyes, who is encouraging you so much on your crazy idea. He says, hey, I want to be your partner on this.

And then Phil Knight goes back home and you have his other father figure. This is super important. He hadn't sent me to Oregon and Stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman, he said, jackassing around. That's what he called. He'd ask, how long do you think you're gonna keep jackassing around with these shoes? I would shrug and say, I don't know, Dad.

And so this would play out so much. His mom does something just absolutely beautiful and supportive of her son. My mother's next move, when she heard my father accuse me of jackassing around, she would open up she opened up her purse, took out seven dollars and said, I'd like to purchase one pair, please. She said this loud enough for him to hear. And so there's great stories in the book where she would wear this around the house.

So she'd be in like a dress with these these Japanese running shoes. And she'd be doing you know, she'd be cooking dinner or doing any kind of housework as a demonstration of support for her son.

So Phil Knight starts the company that's going to eventually turn into Nike. For the first seven or eight years, they're just selling other people's brands and other people's shoes, importing them from Japan. He calls the company Blue Ribbon. Before he started this, he had a couple other jobs. He sold encyclopedias door to door. He tried to sell mutual funds.

And he was terrible at it. And yet when he starts selling a product that he's in love with and he's obsessed with, he finds that he's actually a great salesperson. And he's got a lot of good insights in this section. His initial distribution strategy is very simple. He's gonna sell these shoes out of the trunk of his car.

So he says I drove all over the Pacific Northwest to various track meets. Between races I'd chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans, and show them my shoes. The response was always the same. I couldn't write orders fast enough. Driving back to Portland, I'd puzzle over my success at selling. I had been unable to sell encyclopedias and I had despised it. I'd been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I'd often 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 is irresistible.

And so slowly, by word of mouth, more and more people are hearing about Phil Knight's shoes that he's selling, and this isn't gonna be good for his dad. Sometimes people would simply show up at my parents' house. I would invite the kid in, show him over to the sofa, then kneel before him and measure his foot. My father would watch this entire transaction incredulously.

And so keep in mind, the business is underfunded. Phil Knight does not have a lot of money. He's got a full-time job. So he has to work on Blue Ribbon. He is Blue Ribbon's part-time employee number one. It takes like seven years. For blue ribbon.

to be able to afford for Phil Knight to quit his job and start working at his own company full time. And so some of my favorite stories about the book is just this scrappiness that Phil Knight had in the early days of Nike. He says I had a partner, a legitimate bank, and a product of selling itself.

I was on a roll. In fact, the shoes sold so well I decided to hire another salesman. Maybe two, all the way down in California. The problem was how do I get to California? I suddenly couldn't afford airfare. So he is a Army Reserve fan. In addition to building his company, he's got to spend I think like fourteen hours a month serving the Army Reserve.

He winds up taking that and and turning that into an asset. So every other weekend I'd load a duffel bag with tigers, this is the shoe, the brand of shoe that he's selling, put on my army uniform, and head out to the local airbase. Seeing the uniform, the MPs would wave me onto the next military transport to San Francisco or Los Angeles, no questions asked. And so he's gonna hire Blue Ribbon part time employee number two. It's one of the most important hires ever.

I gotta just his name's Jeff Johnson. I gotta describe him because you should find people like this that are as passionate about the mission of your company and hire them when you find him. He's a incredible supporting character in this story. But before I get there, he's talking about even in the early days. He has this burning desire to achieve mission success. He finds losing intolerable. He says, I could not bear the thought of losing. The world is without beauty when you lose.

And so this hatred of losing and this just competitive drive, it's something that Phil's gonna repeat over and over again in the book. But he does it almost in a nice way. I've read a ton of biographies on Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant, and I actually think it's in those books where they talk about Phil Knight. That we actually understand how deep this is. He may be more competitive than Michael Jordan. Here's this.

Quote this paragraph I'm going to read from you, or read to you, I should say, from this biography of Kobe Bryant, this like 600 page biography of Kobe Bryant that I read a few years ago. Jordan and Knight certainly shared in a competitive nature that bordered on insanity. If you think Jordan and Kobe are competitive, go meet Phil Knight. He's a no bullshit competitor. It's you play for me or I can't stand you and I will kill you. That's Phil Knight, full stop. And he's not shy about it.

And so let me tell you about one of the most valuable employees, or the kind of the type of most valuable employee that you could ever find. This is Jeff Johnson. Every time a thought crossed Johnson's mind, he wrote it down and stuck it in an envelope and mailed me a letter.

He wrote me to tell me how many tigers he'd sold that week. He wrote me to tell him how many tigers he'd sold that day. He wrote me to tell me who had worn tigers at which high school meet and in what place they had finished. He wrote me to say that he wanted to expand his sales territory beyond California.

He wrote to suggest that we open a retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads in running magazines and what did I think? He wrote to inform me that he placed those ads in running magazines and the response was good. He wrote to ask why I hadn't answered any of his previous letters. He wrote to plead for encouragement. He wrote to complain that I hadn't responded to his previous plea for encouragement.

In his heart of hearts, Johnson believed that runners are God's chosen people, that running done right in the correct spirit and with the proper form is a mystical exercise. No less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. I had been around runners much of my life.

But this kind of dewy romanticism was something I had never encountered before. Not even the god of running, Bill Bowerman, was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon's part-time employee number two. In fact, in nineteen sixty five, which is the year we're in, I guess I should back up in in case you haven't read this book, and I highly, highly, highly encourage you to read it. One of the things I love most about it is every single chapter

The name of the chapter is just the year. And so he the it starts with his the founding of Nike, and then it brings it all the way up to the IPO, and then it ends. The format and the writing is perfect. In fact, in 1965, running wasn't even a sport.

To go out for a three mile run was something weirdos did, presumably to burn off manic energy. Running for pleasure, running for exercise, running for endorphins, running to live better and longer, these things were unheard of. People oh my god. People often went out of their way to mock runners. Drivers would slow down and honk their horns. Get a horse, they yell, throwing a beer or soda at the runner's head. Johnson had been drenched by many a pepper.

He wanted to change all this. He wanted to help all the oppressed runners of the world to bring them into the light and fold them into a community. Above all, Johnson wanted to make a living doing it, which was next to impossible in 1965. In me, in Blue Ribbon, he thought he saw a way. I did everything I could to discourage Johnson from thinking like

At every turn, I try to dampen his enthusiasm for me and for my company. Besides not writing back, I never phoned, never visited, never invited him to Oregon. I also never miss an opportunity to tell him the unvarnished truth. In one of my rare replies to his letters, I put it flat. Though our growth has been good, I owe our bank eleven thousand dollars and cash flow is negative.

He wrote back immediately asking if he could work for me full time. I shook my head. I tell the man blue ribbon is sinking like the Titanic, and he responds by begging for a birth in first class. So in the summer of nineteen sixty five I wrote and accepted Johnson's offer to become the first to Full time employee of Blue Ribbon.

As you're probably picking up from this story, Phil Knight is one of the most focused and intense founders that you will ever come across. I actually met another founder, my friend Adam, who's the founder of App Love, and he's one of the most focused and intense founders. founders I've ever met too. And Adam, just like Phil Knight, is driven to build a great product that serves his customers.

He's driven to relentlessly improve that product over time, and he is driven to win just like Phil Knight. And that is exactly what Adam and his team has done with their advertising platform Axon. Axon connects you with over a billion potential new customers. In mobile games. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full screen videos that are watched for an average of 35 seconds.

Retention that blows other platforms out of the water. You can launch on Axon in minutes. You set the goal and Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed, and Axon scales. Quickly, they can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses.

scale to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So you want to get started quickly before all your competitors are on axon. And you can do that by going to axon.ai forward slash founder. That is axon.ai forward slash founder. And then I want to tell you about Vanta and how Vanta is related to something that Elon repeats over and over again. I think you've been noticing that I've making a lot of episodes on Elon and SpaceX.

And something that comes up in all these different sources that I'm reading is Elon's obsession with saving time. Elon says, this direct quote, the only true currency is time. The one thing you cannot replace is time. I often tell the team, it's okay to scrap equipment or money. It is not okay to scrap time. Vanta helps you save time. Vanta helps your company prove your secure so more customers will use your product or service.

Vanta is an AI-powered security expert who scales with you. The more your business grows, the more complex your security needs will get. And that complexity will turn into chaos. Vanta tames that chaos. Vanta automates compliance, continuo monitors your controls, and gives you a single source of truth for compliance and writ.

So whether you're a fast growing startup or an enterprise company, Vanta fits easily into your existing workflows. In fact, Ramp uses Vanta, which is a huge positive indicator since Ramp is so stringent on buying software instead of building it themselves. That is a huge positive sign. Vanta helps you build a company that your customers can trust because many companies will not sign contracts.

unless you're certified and that is causing you to lose out on sales, which is why the average Vanta customer reports a 526% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer. Go to vanta.com forward slash founders and you can get$1,000 off. That is vanta.com forward slash founders.

Okay, so that leads us to another main theme of the book, and something that causes Nike to not only grow unbelievably fast, but also gives him a lot of pain and suffering and trouble. And it's the fact that Phil Knight did not believe in leaving any money. in the company bank account. And it says any dollar that wasn't nailed down, I was plowing directly back into the business. To have cash balances sitting around doing nothing made no sense to me.

Sure, it would have been the cautious, conservative, prudent thing, but the roadside was littered with cautious, conservative, prudent entrepreneurs. I wanted to keep my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal. After I sold out the shoes and repaid the bank in full, I would do it all over again.

But this time I double the size of my previous order. This is one of the most important parts to understand about the story. The early days of Nike. He's gonna get kicked out of bank after bank after bank and almost die. And even when that happens, he refuses to order less inventory. And so at this point in the story, he is an accountant. He's got a day job. And so he's working on blue ribbon at night.

And he's investing his paycheck into the company bank account. And so another one of my favorite ideas that reappears over and over again in the book is the fact that I don't even know if they did this intentionally, but Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman drastically expanded the market for their product.

And they did that by celebrating the activity that their products were used for, not by saying, hey, buy more shoes. They would celebrate running. They would celebrate great athletics. They would celebrate great athletes. And so in this case, Bill Bowerman's gonna write what he writes this book called Jogging. Which again at this time this seems crazy to United today. But at this time, people just did not go out for runs. So this book called Jogging winds up selling millions of copies of the

And as a result, which again I don't think was intentional, drastically expands the market for their products, and Bowerman's just explaining his thinking here to Phil Knight. Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone's an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you're an athlete.

Now he was determined to get that point across to a larger audience. And the funny thing is that Phil Knight, this is Phil Knight's response to Bowerman telling him, hey, I'm going to write this book about jogging, one that again is going to go on and sell millions of copies. Phil Knight says I thought my old coach had popped a screw. Who in the heck would want to read a book about jogging?

And then Phil Knight repeats two things. One, he did not believe in s in offering words of encouragement to his team. He was very quiet, very reserved, the opposite of a micromanager. He says, I got another letter from Jeff Johnson with one last plea for encouraging words, which I never sent. I didn't have time for encouraging words. Besides, it wasn't my style. And then the second thing he brings up is the fact that both Jeff Johnson and him, they're just voracious readers.

Phil Knight loved reading history, loved reading military history, loved reading biographies. He talks to us right now about what he was getting out of doing this. I was reading everything I could get my hands on about generals, samurai, shoguns, along with biographies of my three main heroes, Churchill, Kennedy, Tolstoy. I had no love of violence, but I was fascinated by leadership under extreme conditions. Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tend to agree.

And then he talks about his management style. Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and let them surprise you with the results. And so his message to Jeff Johnson was clear. We just want to sell more shoes. Goes back into how just it's a phenomenal employee if you can find somebody.

Johnson works seven days a week selling and promoting Blue Ribbon, and when he wasn't selling, he was building up his customer data file. So this data file system, remember in the nineteen sixties, mid nineteen sixties, winds up becoming so valuable as they expand Nike maybe half a decade from now.

Each new customer got his or her own index card, and each index card contained that customer's personal information, shoe size, and shoe preferences. This database, which is again just a bunch of cards. With written physically, this database enabled Johnson to keep in touch with all of his customers.

at all times, and to keep them all feeling special. He sent them Christmas cards. He sent them birthday cards. He sent them notes of congratulations after they completed a big race or marathon. And then when he would like drop into a new city, Jeff Johnson would look up into like this Rolodex that he has.

find which one of existing customers live in that city and then just go knock on their door. In many cases, these are like college kids or even younger. And the kid wouldn't be home, but the parents would invite them to dinner. So when the kid that bought shoes from Johnson in the past would come home and they'd see his shoe salesman having dinner with his parents.

And so Johnson keeps hounding Phil Knight, We need a store, we need a store, we need a store. Phil sets these like crazy ambitious sales targets that he doesn't think he's like, Okay, if you can hit this target. Then you can open the store, Johnson. Didn't think Johnson would hit it. Johnson hits it. And so this is a description of the first ever, you know, what could be thought of the first ever Nike store. He then set about turning the store into a mecca, a holy of holies for runners.

He bought the most comfortable chairs that he could find and afford. They bought him at yard sale. And he created a beautiful space for runners to hang out and talk. He built shelves and filled them with books. that every runner should read, many of them first editions from his own library.

In all of the world, there had never been such a sanctuary for runners, a place that didn't just sell them shoes, but celebrated them. That is such a key to understanding the marketing of Nike, but celebrated them and their shoes. Johnson, the aspiring cult leader of runners, Finally had his church. Services were Monday through Saturday, nine to six.

Let's go back to the ruthless competitive drive of Phil Knight that I mentioned a few times. This time it's directed at a competitor. He talks about Adidas over and over again, which at the time is by far the number one company in his space.

And I think this paragraph gives us some insight into the way that Phil Knight's mind works. I was developing an unhealthy contempt for Adidas, or maybe it was healthy. That one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades, and they possessed all the arrogance of unchallenged dominance.

Of course it's possible that they weren't arrogant at all. That to motivate myself, I needed to see them as a monster. In any event, I despised them. I was tired of looking up every day and seeing them far, far ahead. I couldn't bear the thought that it was my fate to do so forever. Adidas irritated me to no end. It also drove me hard. And this hard driving, super competitive life is exactly what Phil Knight wanted.

This part reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. It's from Herb Keller, who is the founder of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines is one of the most successful, probably the most successful airline in history. Under Herb's leadership, it was profitable for forty straight years. And he was asked one time, you undergo a lot of stress, how do you handle it? And he says, I don't handle it, I like it.

Phil Knight says something very similar here. The year is nineteen sixty eight. I was putting in six days a week as a accountant. I was spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life, and holy content. My life was out of balance, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance or a different kind of imbalance.

I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been a multitasker and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present always. I wanted to focus constantly on one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play. I wanted what everyone wants to be me full time.

But it wasn't possible. Blue Ribbon simply couldn't afford me. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year, think about that. He's five years into starting his company and he still can't work for it full time. It still couldn't justify his salary for its co-founder. So I decided to compromise. To find a different day job, one that would pay my bills but require fewer hours, leaving me more time for my passion.

The only job I could think of that fit this criteria was teaching. I applied to Portland State University and got a job as an assistant professor. His dad hates this idea too. Another recurring theme. He says I didn't send you to Stanford to be a teacher, and certainly not a teacher at Portland State University.

And the way Phil talks about his business, especially in the early days, it's it's very reminiscent. I think he considers it his his third child, of just bringing this thing into the world and no matter what, it has to survive. It has to survive. Flue ribbon was tenuous. The whole thing might go bust any day, but I still couldn't see myself doing anything else.

My little shoe company was a living, breathing thing, which I had created from nothing. I breathed it into life, nurtured it through illness, brought it back several times from the dead, and now I wanted, needed to see it stand on its own feet and go into the world. I flat out didn't want to work for someone else. I wanted to build something that was my own. Something I could point to and say, I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.

And so finally in 1969, he gets the business to the point where he can work on it full time. I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder. Right before my 31st birthday, I made the bold move. I quit Portland State and went full time at my company, paying myself a salary of eighteen thousand dollars a year. And so he's married and starting to have kids at this point, and he describes what

And what Phil Knight looked at looked like through the eyes of his wife at the at this time in the history of Nike. She was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts. Tumbling down some mental warmhole. Trying to solve some problem or construct some pan. I often didn't hear what she said, and if I did hear it, I didn't remember it minutes later. She was learning that I was absent minded.

That it would drive to the grocery store and come home empty handed, because all the way there and all the way back I'd been puzzling over the latest bank crisis. Or the most recent shipping delay. She was learning that I didn't like to lose at anything, that losing for me was a special form of agony. She would see me leaning back in my recliner each night, staring at the ceiling. I would try to settle myself. I would tell myself, life is growth. You either grow or you die.

That night I told her that if Blue Ribbon failed, we'd lose the house. And so what he's talking about there is again, they're underfunded. No one will loan them any money. The only money that they get they can get lent is to buy more inventory, which he then As soon as the sales come in, drains the account again. And so to survive, he literally signed over his house. If he failed to pay the loans to keep his company alive, his family wouldn't have anywhere to live.

And so even though we're almost a decade in, he's still facing the same exact problem. He's gonna get kicked out of another bank again. There's so many times when this happens when he almost loses the entire company. He says that still face problems with Wallace. This is his banker. Bigger orders would require bigger loans, and bigger loans would be harder to pay off. And in nineteen seventy, Wallace was telling me that he wasn't interested in playing these games with me anymore.

Here I'd built this dynamic company from nothing, and by all measures it was a beast, sales doubling every year like clockwork, and this was the thanks I got, two bankers treating me like a dead beast. For the umpteenth time he explained that he lived on cash balances, and for the upteenth time I suggested ever so politely that if my sales and earnings were going up, up, up, up, Wallace should be happy to have my business.

My credit was maxed out, he said, officially, irrevocably, immediately. He wasn't authorizing one more cent until I put some cash in my account and left it. And so there's many times in the book that he's so hard up for cash that he does things that he just can't believe he he does.

that he's greatly embarrassed by. Some of these turn out okay in the end, but here's one example. So one of his early employees, this guy named Woodle, comes into his office and he says, He and his parents wanted to loan me five thousand dollars. Now think about that.

You're 10 years into running your company. This company's gonna be one of the most successful companies, uh especially in in the industry it's in, ever created. But that is very far into the future. And things are so precarious and so bad, and your employees know it. That they and their families and their parents who don't have a lot of money are willing to give you their life savings of a couple thousand dollars.

He said he and his parents wanted to loan me five thousand dollars, and they wouldn't take no for an answer. They also wouldn't tolerate any mention of interest. In fact, they wouldn't even formalize the loan with any sort of paper. I knew they weren't well off. I knew that with their son's medical bills. So their son had been a former runner. Woodow, the guy working for Phil Knight, was paralyzed in a freak accident. He's in a wheelchair.

So it says I knew that with their son's medical bills, they were scuffling more than I. This five thousand dollars was their life savings. I knew that, but I was wrong. His parents had a little bit more and they asked if I needed that too, and I said yes. And they gave me their last three thousand dollars, draining their life savings down to zero. How I wish I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash.

But I couldn't. I wouldn't. On the way out the door I stop and I ask them, why are you doing this? Because his mother said, If you can't trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust? Now what is remarkable about that is I think six years later, when Nike IPO Phil Knight converted that loan to stock, and that eight thousand dollars was worth one point six million.

And so so far we've been talking about Blue Ribbon, the fact that he's just importing shoes. He's selling on Atsuka's brand. Well, how the hell did Nike come about? And what happened is he gets double crossed by his supplier.

They want to break the contract with Blue Ribbon and they want to sign with other distributors because American market, which Phil Knight is the first to sell their running shoes in, is way more valuable than they understood. And Phil had proven that by doubling sales year after year after year. And so behind his back, his supplier was in contact with all these other distributors in the United States.

And so Phil has this tightrope act where he says, I can't let them know that I know and I have to develop my own brand as soon as possible before they cut me off. And he talks about just th the sense of betrayal and this pain that he's in. but mostly hurt. For seven years, we devoted ourselves to tiger shoes. We introduced them to America. We reinvented the line. Bowerman and Johnson had shown them how to make a better shoe. And their designs were now foundational. I forgot to tell about that.

Where Bowerman, of course, knows more about running and the importance of shoes to running than anybody else. So he was essentially taking their product. experimenting his garage and then it keeping those designs gave it back to the company. So that's what he's talking about there. And their designs were now foundational, setting sales records. Changing the face of the industry. And this is how we were repaid. And so Phil Knight is back sitting at his recliner at night.

working through what he has to do. And so he would just ask himself a series of questions. What do you know? I know that Anatsuka cannot be trusted. What else do you know? I know my relationship with my contact at Anatsuka cannot be solved.

What does the future hold? One way or another, Blue Ribbon and Anazuka are going to break up. I just need to stay together as long as possible while I develop other supply sources so I can manage the breakup. What's the next step I have to take? I need to scare off all the other distributors.

That Anazuka has lined up to replace me. What's the next step after that? Find my own replacement for Anazuka. And so he finds out where Adidas is manufacturing some of their other shoes that are outside of Japan and decides to visit those factories, many of which are in Central America.

And so at the same time, he's trying to essentially run two businesses in one. He's trying to develop this line. They're trying to figure out there's all these these these names of their own brand that they're going back and forth. And of course, the name for Nike comes from Jeff Johnson. Says Johnson phone first thing this morning. Apparently a new name came to him in a dream last night. What is the name? I asked. Nike, the Greek goddess of victory.

And even though he's under an immense amount of stress at this time, listen to this description that he has. After working through this intense period where they're designing and naming the first Nike model. He knows this is his path. He knows what this is what he should have been doing the entire time. A feeling came over me, unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I felt spent but proud. I felt drained but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after days work.

I felt like an artist. I felt like a creator. And then he gives us this excellent description. Again, this is why I've spent so much time talking about Bill Bowerman and the role that he played in Phil Knight's life and career. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardencliffe, divinely inspired.

I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he had done, all that would follow. I know I couldn't.

And so Phil Knight was managing this tightrope as long as he could, but he winds up, Anazuka, winds up finding out about Nike and cutting him off. Cutting him off earlier than he was ready. And so this is one of the most important turning points in Phil Knight's career.

He gathers all of his employees and he's trying to tell them what's going on. I laid out the situation we faced. We've come to a crossroads. Yesterday our main supplier cut us off. I let that sink in. I watched everyone's jaw drop. We're completely on our own. We're set adrift. We have this new line, Nike. That's all we've got. And as we know, there are big problems with the quality. It's not what we'd hoped so far. We have no time and suddenly no margin for error.

I looked down the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping forward. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him, and there was something in his face, some quality I'd never seen before. Surrender. Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up.

The nation's economy was in a tank, a recession was underway, gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make their rent, pay the light bill. Now this I cleared my throat. So in other words, I said, what I'm trying to say is we've got them right where we want. Johnson lifted his eyes. Everyone around the table lifted their eyes. They sat up straighter.

This is the moment we've been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else's brand. No one working for someone else. Anitsuka had 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 face the 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 dollars in sales last year, none of which had anything to do with Anatsuka. 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.

It's going to be rough. I won't lie to you. We're definitely going to war. But I feel in my heart this is a war that 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're still alive, people. We are still alive. In our coming battles with Anatsuka, with whoever, we would compete as if our lives depended on it, because they did.

And competing as if his life depended on it, this is not like a I don't think this is a figure speech with Phil Knight. He tells a story in the book when he was younger that he would play his cousin at Batmint, and he said that one summer we played exactly a hundred and sixteen games. Why 116? Because my cousin beat me 115 straight times. I refused to quit until I'd won.

And so one of the most interesting things about this early history of Nike is their financial problems never go away until they IPO and Phil Knight would say no to going public over and over and over again. Even in a situation like this, this is This is the financial again, we're a decade over a decade into the company.

Our problems could tip us into bankruptcy. We were leveraged to the hilt. And like most people who live from paycheck to paycheck, we were walking in the edge of a precipice. When a shipment of shoes was late, our pair count plummeted, meaning how many they sold that day.

When our paracount plummeted, we weren't able to generate enough revenue to pay niche, so nicho is they get financing from banks as much as they can, even though the banks hate them. And at this point in history, there's these Japanese trading companies.

And these Japanese trading companies, one thing they had a bunch of different business lines, but one thing they would do is they would finance trade. Without the financing from the Japanese trading companies, Nike would never have survived. So that's what he's talking about.

So say we weren't able enough to generate enough revenue to p to repay NISHO and the Bank of California in time. When we we couldn't repay NISHO and the Bank of California in time, we couldn't borrow any more. When we couldn't borrow anymore, we were late placing our next order. Round and round and round it went.

And so it is out of desperation that Phil Knight comes up with one of his best ideas. I have an idea. Why not go out to all of our biggest retailers and tell them that if they would sign ironclad commitments If they'd give us large and non refundable orders six months in advance, we'd give them hefty discounts up to seven percent. This way, we'd have longer lead times and fewer shipments and more certainty, and therefore a better chance of keeping cash balances in the bank.

Also, we could use these long-term commitments from heavyweights like Nordstrom's, Kinney's, Athletes Foot, etc., and others to squeeze more credit out of Nisho and the Bank of California. And he makes this point over and over again in the book. It's like we didn't know what we were doing.

We didn't know anything about manufacturing, we didn't know anything about building a brand. We had to learn these things along the way. And so eventually he wants to continue to have more and more control over his supply chain, over his the product quality. And so they decide to buy these bankrupt factories.

This factory happens to be in the northeast of America. And then he sends a trusted employee over there. And they're having this conversation. And the employee says, What do I know about running a factory? I'd be in completely over my head. And Phil's response was, I laughed and laughed and laughed. Over your head, over your head, we're all in over our heads, way over.

And it is something that he repeats it's probably the thing that he repeats the most in the book. It wasn't easy paying anyone. We were undergoing an explosion in assets and inventory, which put enormous strains on our cash reserves. With any growth company, this is a typical problem. But we were growing faster than the typical growth company. I refuse.

To even consider ordering less inventory, grow or die. That's what I believed, no matter the situation. Why cut your order from three million down to two million if you believed in your bones that the demand out there was f actually five million? So I was forever pushing my conservative bankers to the brink. Forcing them into a game of chicken.

I'd order a number of shoes that seemed to them absurd, a number we'd need to stretch to pay for, and I'd always just barely pay for them in the nick of time and then just barely. Pay our other monthly bills at the last minute, always doing just enough and no more to prevent the bankers from booting us. And then at the end of the month, I'd empty our accounts again to pay nicho and start from zero again. This would have seemed a brazen, reckless, dangerous way of doing business.

But I believed the demand for our shoes was always greater than our annual sales, full speed ahead. And I want to be very clear. It's it's Phil Knight is not bragging about being aggressive.

He's saying I was taking it to the absolute limit and many times he went over the limit. So when they they actually uh wind up having to bounce a bunch of paychecks. And what they do is they go to their supplier where they're buying all the boxes. So the sh the boxes of the shoes come in. I think they're like something like eighty percent of this guy's business and say, Hey, will you will you front us some money?

And Phil Knight said it was an outrageous request, but the man's box company depended on us for its survival. If we went out of business, the box company would too. So the box man became our bag man. And this goes on and on and on until again, Phil Knight almost goes out of business again because his bank cuts him off. Gentlemen, we've decided we no longer want your businesses that's bank. Does that mean you're throwing us out? I asked. It does indeed.

I don't remember the end of that meeting. I don't remember leaving the bank or walking out or going across the street or getting on an elevator or riding it to the top floor. I only recall shaking, violently shaking. And the only thing that they saves them is he goes to the Japanese trading company.

And he asks for more credit. They're not willing to do that without going over his entire books. They spent a few days in the Nike office going over every single thing. And these are more entrepreneurs and less bankers. And so they agree. And this is very fascinating, is the way that the guy from the trading company said there are worse things than ambition. He saw that Phil Knight just wanted to grow his company. He wanted to make a great company.

And so one of the early athletes they tried to help out was this runner named s named Stephen Prefontaine. who dies tragically in it uh early at an early age in his twenties. And he was one of the first Nike ambassadors. Phil is talking about the way that Pre ran his races is the way that Phil is running his company. says Pre was most famous for saying, Somebody may beat me, but they're gonna have to bleed to do it.

I'd never felt more admiration for him or identified with him more closely. Somebody may beat me, I told myself. Some banker or creditor or competitor may stop me, but by God, they're going to have to bleed to do it.

And he goes back to what do I want this company to be? That you see this like inner monologue that he's having with him about this time. I would search my mind and heart, and the only thing I could come up with was this word, winning. It wasn't much, but it was far, far better than the alternative.

Whatever happened, I just didn't want to lose. Losing was death. Blue ribbon was my third child, my business child, and I simply couldn't bear the idea of it dying. It has to live, I told myself. It just has to live.

That was all I knew. At some point in that year, it appeared that there was only one solution going public. On one level, of course, the idea made perfect sense. Going public would generate a ton of money in a flash, but also be highly perilous because going public often meant losing control. It could mean working for someone else.

Suddenly being answerable to stockholders. For me, there was an added consideration, a semantic one. Defined by shyness, intensely private, I found that phrase itself off putting. Going public. No, thank you. And yet during my nightly run, I'd sometimes ask myself, hasn't your life been a kind of search for connection?

Running for Bowerman, backpacking around the world, starting a company, marrying Penny, assembling this band of brothers at Blue Ribbon, hasn't it all been about, one way or another, going public? And what finally gets him over this hump is this what he's been talking about over and over again. I just can't see this Nike can't die. Nike Canada I cannot lose it has to exist. Nike was more than just a shoe. I was no longer making Nikes. Nikes were making me.

If I saw an athlete choose another shoe, if I saw anyone choose another shoe, it wasn't just a rejection of the brand, but of me. I told myself to be reasonable. Not everyone in the world was going to wear Nike. And I won't say that I became upset every time I saw someone walking down the street and running shoes that wasn't mine, but it definitely registered.

And I didn't care for it. Despite the risks and the downsides, going public was the best way to sustain growth. It was us against the world, and we felt damn sorry for the world. Now there's a huge internal conflict that Phil Knight experiences as he builds Nike. He has a series of regrets that conflict with one another. The fact that he wishes he could build the company all over again when he's an older man, and the fact that he missed out on much of his kids his two sons' childhood.

One of his sons is going to die tragically when he's in his twenties in a drowning accident. And this is something that that he is struggling with. That we'll talk about this later on the book. At this point, we're still in the seventies. His kids are small. And so he says, like every minute I spend working on my company was the at the cost of my family.

And he says the guilt was palatable. Often I'd walk into my house and Matthew and Travis would meet me at the door. Where have you been they'd ask? Daddy was with his friends, I'd say, picking them up because he he considered the people he's working with brothers and friends. They'd stare confused, but mommy told us you were working. Matthew announced that he would never wear Nikes so long as he lived. This is the one that tragically passes away a few decades in the future.

His way of expressing anger about my absences as well as other frustrations. Penny tried to make him understand that Daddy wasn't absent by choice. Daddy was trying to build something. Daddy was trying to ensure that he and Travis would one day be able to attend college.

Time and time again I'd vowed a change, and time and time again I'd tell myself I will spend more time with the boys. Time and again I'd keep that promise for a while, then I'd fall back to my former routine. Remember this for later at the very end. And so right before this, he goes to a friend, an an older kind of mentor or person, he says, this guy named Chuck. He says, Chuck, new business is cold.

Better than anyone I'd ever met, and had been wanting his advice for quite some time. And so he goes through the books of Nike with Chuck and Chuck's like you have no other choice. All you have is debt. You have no cash. And he says he said going public wasn't an option. It was mandatory. I needed to solve this cash flow problem, he said. Attack it, wrestle it to the ground, or else I could lose the company. Hearing his assessment was frightening but necessary.

And then at the same time he's trying to go public, he goes back to the fact that he sh doesn't think he's being a good father. I'd always promised myself that I'd be a better father to my sons than my father had been to me, meaning I'd give them more explicit approval, more attention. But when I evaluated myself honestly, when I looked at how much time I was spending away from the boys and how distant I was when I was home, I gave myself low mark.

And then he's really formulating like his philosophy of how he thinks about building his company. And one thing he did not want to be called was a businessman. He didn't think of himself in those terms. And there's just this great part in the book where he's just like, what does business actually mean to me? And he says, it seems wrong to call it business.

It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles under that bland generic banner, business. What we were doing felt like so much more. Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made right now. And we were always acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision could be the end.

The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher, and none of us wavered in the belief that stakes didn't mean money. For some, I realize business is the all-out pursuit of profits. Period. Full stop. But for us, business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood. Yes, the human body needs blood.

But that day-to-day business of the human body isn't our mission as human beings. It's a basic process that enables our higher aims, and life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living. And at some point in the late 1970s, I did too. I redefined winning, expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive.

That was no longer enough to sustain me or my company. We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud.

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier or healthier or safer or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, Smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is, you're participating more fully in the whole grand human drama.

More than simply alive, you're helping others to live more fully. And if that's business, all right then, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on.

And so towards the very end of the book, Nike goes public. And I want to read the response that Phil Knight experienced the night that Nike goes public. He says I went around the house, turning off the lights, checking the doors. Then I joined my wife. For a long time we lay in the dark. It wasn't over, far from it. The first part, I told myself, is behind us. But that's only the first part. I asked myself, what are you feeling? It wasn't joy, it wasn't relief. If I felt anything, it was regret.

Good God, I thought. Regret. Because I honestly wished I could do it all over again. I fell asleep for a few hours. When I woke, it was cold and rainy. I went to the window. The trees were dripping water. Everything was mist and fog. The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me, and yet I was worth$178 million. I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.

And then the very last chapter of the book is no longer the story of Nike, it is now Phil Knight in his seventies and eighties looking back on his life and career. He's got excellent advice and perspective for both of us. Above all, I regret not spending more time with my son. Maybe if I had, I could have solved the encrypted code of Matthew Knight. And yet I know this regret clashes with my secret regret that I can't do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.

Short of that, I'd like to share the experience, the ups and downs, so that some young man or woman somewhere, going through the same trials and ordeals might be inspired or comforted. Or warrant. Some young entrepreneur maybe, some athlete, or painter, or novelist might press on. It is all the same drive, it is all the same dream. It would be nice to help them avoid the typical discouragement.

I'd tell them to hit pause, think long and hard about how they want to spend their time and with whom they want to spend it for the next forty years. I'd tell men and women in their mid twenties not to settle for a job or a profession or even a career. Seek a calling. Even if you don't know what that means, seek it. If you're following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear. The disappointments will be fuel. The highs will be like nothing you've ever felt.

I'd like to warn the best of them, the iconoclass, the innovators, the rebels, that they will always have a bullseye on their backs. The better they get, the bigger the bullseye. It's not one man's opinion. It's a law of nature. Entrepreneurs have always been outgunned, outnumbered. They've always fought uphill, and the hill has never been steeper. And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlotte.

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.