#418 Phil Knight: Founder of Nike

I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my clothes and laced up my shoes. Then I subquitly out the back door.

“There were no cars, no people, no signs of life.”

I was all alone, the world, to myself. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought. I was proud to call Oregon my home, but I felt a stab of regret, too. Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened. 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 grow, 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 outside 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 blaze 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 gonna dope. 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 24-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, thought 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. Yes, 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 midair. When both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line, and the crowd rises as one. They say kind of exuberant clarity in that pulsing half second before winning and losing

or 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. Then 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, maybe it's 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 person or some life force that existed long before I did, separate from

me. Part of me, waiting for me.

“At 24 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 I'm going to talk about today and what I consider a nearly perfect entrepreneurial autobiography. It is shoe dog written by the founder of Nike Phil Knight. I read this book. I don't know three or four times.

Every time I reread it, I learned something new and it just gives me a ton of energy.

“So that's why I wanted to read this book this week.”

I want to jump right into this idea for Nike. It says there's 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 size and vacant stairs. That is the crazy idea that Phil Knight was referencing in the very opening of the book. I want to 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 Bauerman, his coach and the future co-founder of Nike. His two dads could not be any different. The reason this is so important is because his dad undoubtedly loved his son, but one of

“the most important decisions that Phil Knight's ever makes in his entire life is not”

heating 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, "jack-assing 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 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 entrepreneur 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 going to do a deal with this company called "Onitsuka," and this is what

he tells them. Onitsuka can get its shoes into American stores and price them to undercut a detis, 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 Barman, and what him and Bill Barman 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, obsessed over customers as they maximum that is repeated by Jeff Bezos.

It is also the same trait that I see in my friend, Karim, who's the co-founder and CTO of Ramp. Ramp is the presenting sponsor of this podcast, and Karim is one of the greatest technical minds working in finance today. And what Karim is obsessed with is crafting a high quality product and using the latest

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business on Ramp.

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Make history's greatest entrepreneurs proud by going to ramp.com today to learn how to help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue that is Ramp.com. And so about a year later, they finally sent him shoes to America to Oregon to sell in America. This is incredible. This is one of my favorite things about reading these biographies. It just realized that Nike's this massive company is going to be the most successful athletic

company in hit and the history of mankind, and yet it starts out with one Japanese company sending a kid in his 20s still living at home 12 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.

Shoes, he was obsessed with how human beings are shot.

“I'm going to spend a lot of time on Phil Knight's description of Barrowman.”

The influence of Barrowman had in 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 Barrowman or a younger but also choosing him as my co-founder and partner. In the four years I'd run for Barrowman 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. Barrowman never stopped. He was determined to find new ways of bolstering the in-step, cushioning the midsole, building out more room for the forefoot.

He always had some new design, some new scheme to make our shoes slicker, softer and lighter.

Especially lighter. One ounce sliced off a pair of shoes he said is equivalent to 55 pounds over one mile. He wasn't kidding, his math was solid. You take the average man's stride of 6 feet, spread it out over a mile, you get 880 steps. You remove one ounce from each step that's 55 pounds on the button.

Lightness. Barrowman believed directly translated to less burden, which meant more energy, which meant more speed, and speed, equaled winning. Barrowman didn't like to lose. I got it from him.

This ruthless competitive drive that Phil Knight has is another main thing that you and I 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 the Phil Knight really”

looks at Barrowman as the father that he wanted, the father that he chose. It was possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress and to please Barrowman. Besides my father, there was no man who's approval I craved more, and besides my father, there was no man who gave it less often.

Fugality carried over to every part of Barrowman'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 Barrowman 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.

Barrowman possessed a prehistoric strain of malnice, 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 Barrowman 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

far beyond Oregon.

“The facilities at Oregon were Spartan, dank wooden walls, lockers that had 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. Lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guys. We hung our clothes on rails, 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, Barrowman was patented with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn't a god, like all ancient gods, Barrowman lived on a mountaintop, his majestic ranch sat on a peak high above campus talking about this later in the book. He actually built, of course, he did.

He built the entire entire house, out of stone, by hand, himself. And when reposing on his private Olympus, he could be vengeful as the gods. There was a truck driver who often dared to disturb the peace on Barrowman Mountain. He took turns too fast and frequently knocked over Barrowman's mailbox. Barrowman 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 Barrowman 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 Barrowman's mailbox.

And so Barrowman is not a man of many words.

“After he gets the Japanese shoes from fill, 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, fill response? What kind of partnership do you have in mind? 50, 50. And that is the beginning of one of the most important partnerships in business history.

I mold over Barrowman's essential personality, which carried over to everything he did. Again, this is really important. I'm not just trying to describe Bill Barrowman. Although I do find him a very fascinating figure, I actually read a book who's a biography of Barrowman.

I probably read six or seven years ago, I did an episode on a long long time ago. And there's a lot of fascinating stories in that book.

So there's a sentence in that book that I never forgot and kind of encapsulates the kind of

human being we're dealing with here. And it says that Bill Barrowman once killed a seven-foot rattlesnake with a clipboard. 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 Barrowman's such a personality, which carried over to everything he did. He always went against the grain, always. For example, who's 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 coach more sub four minute mylers than anybody ever. And so think about the contrast that plays out over the next few pages. You have Barrowman, such a god in Phil Knight's eyes, who is encouraging you so much on your crazy A.J. 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, "Jack-assing around." That's what he called it. He'd ask, "How long do you think you're going to keep Jack-assing 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. The mother's next move when she heard my father accuse me of jack-assing around. She opened up her purse, took out $7 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. She'd be like a dress with 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 his Nike. The first seven or eight years are 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. In psychopedias, Dordador, 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 going to sell his shoes out of the trunk of his car. So he says, I drove all over the Pacific Northwest to various track meats. Between races, I chatted the coaches, the runners, the fans, and showed 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 as selling. I had been unable to sell in psychopedias 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 believe 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 going to be good for his dad.

Sometimes people would simply show up on my parents' house. I would invite the kid in, show him over to 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 doesn't have a lot of money. He's got a full-time job. So he has to work on blue ribbon. He is blue ribbons. 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 a 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 certainly couldn't afford airfare.

So he is a Army Reservist. In addition to building his company, he's got to spend, I think, like 14 hours a month serving the Army Reserves. He wants to be taking that 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 air base. 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 going to hire blue ribbon, part-time employee number two.

It's one of the most important hires ever.

I got to say his name is Jeff Johnson.

“I got to 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. And he's 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 feels going to repeat over in a ring of book.

But he doesn't 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 might be more competitive than Michael Jordan.

Here's this quote, this paragraph I'm going to read from you. A read too, I should say, from this biography of Kobe Bryant. It's like 600 page biography of Kobe Bryant that I read a few years ago. Jordan and Knight certainly shared in a competitive nature that boarded 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 full night, 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 I thought Cross 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 meat and what the place they had finished, he wrote me to say that he wanted to expand his sales territory beyond California. He wrote suggest that we open a retail store in Los Angeles. He wrote to tell me that he was considering placing ads and running magazines and what

did I think. He wrote to inform me that he placed those ads and running magazines and 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 are 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 do we romanticism was something

I had never encountered before, not even the God of running Bill Barman was as pious about

the sport as blue ribbons part time employee number two. In fact, in 1965, which is the year we're in, I guess I should back up 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 is every single chapter. The name of the chapter is just a year and so he starts with his 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 off 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 hunk their horns. Get a horse they yell, throwing a beer or soda at the runner's head.

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 him possible 1965.”

In me, in Blue Ribbon, he thought he saw a way. I did everything I could to discourage Johnson from thinking like this. At every turn, I tried to dampen his enthusiasm for me and for my company.

Besides not riding back, I never phoned, never visited, never invited him to Oregon.

I also never missed an opportunity to tell him the unvarnished truth. In one of my rare replies to his letters, I put it flatly. Though our growth has been good, I owe our bank $11,000 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 1965, I wrote an accepted Johnson's offer to become the first full-time employee of Blue Ribbon. As you're probably picking up from the 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 Apple oven, and he's one of the most focused and intense 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's driven to win just like Phil Knight, and that is exactly what Adam and his team has done with their advertising

platform, 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 a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased 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/founders that is axon.ai/founders. 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 it's making a lot of episodes on Elon and SpaceX,”

and something that comes up in all these different sources that are 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 you're 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 claims that chaos. Vanta automates compliance continuously monitors your controls and gives you a single source

of truth for compliance and risk. So whether you're 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 500 and 26% return on investment after becoming a Vanta customer.

Go to Vanta.com/founders and you can get $1,000 off that is Vanta.com/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. He dollar that wasn't nailed down, I was plowing, directly back into the business. To have cash balance is 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 one I'm most important to understand about the story.”

The early days of Nike, he's going to 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 account. 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 every person when we're going to book is the fact that I don't even know if they did this intentionally. But Phil Knight and Bill Barman drastically expanded the market for their products.

And 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 Barman's going to write, he races book called jogging, which again at this time, this seems crazy to you and I today.

But at this time, people just did not go off for runs. So this book called jogging winds up selling millions of copies. And as a result, which again, I don't think was intentional drastically expands the market for their products. And Barman's just explaining his thinking here to Phil Knight.

Barman was forever gripping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians or 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 Barman telling

him, I'm going to write this book about jogging. One that again is going to go on to sell millions of copies. Phil Knight says, I thought my old coach had popped a screw, who in the heck would run a read a book about jogging. And then Phil Knight repeats two things.

One, he did not believe in an offering words of encouragement to his team. He was very quiet, very reserved, the opposite of a micro manager. 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 to fact that both Jeff Johnson and him.

They're just foracious 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 get my hands on about generals, samurai, show guns, 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. I 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 a phenomenal employee if you can find something like this. Johnson works seven days a week selling and promoting Blue Ribbon. And when he wasn't selling, he was building up his customer data files.

“So this data files system, remember in the 1960s, mid 1960s, 1960s, winds are 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 Rolex that he has find which one of his existing customers living 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 would be home, but the parents would invite them to dinner. So when the kid that put 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 pounding, fill night. We need a store, we need a store, we need a store, fill sets these like crazy ambitious sales targets. They just 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 said about turning the store into a mecca, a holy of holys for runners. He bought the most comfortable chairs he could find and afford.

They bought them at yard sales. 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 additions 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”

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 a de-discipline 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 content for a de-discipline, or maybe it was healthy. That one German company had dominated the shoe market for a couple of decades, and

they possess 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 despise 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. A de-dis 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's the founder of Southwest Airlines, Southwest Airlines. It's one of the most successful, probably the most successful airline in history. Under Herb's leadership, it was profitable for 40 straight years.

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 1968.”

I was putting in six days a week as a accountant. I was spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations I blew 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 blew Ribbon.

I'd never been a multi-tasker 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 salary for it's 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 fifth 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 reoccurring thing. 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 earlyies, it's very reminiscent.

I think he considers it his third child of just bringing the thing into the world and

no matter what it has to survive. It has to survive. Blue 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 in 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 it to make life meaningful.”

And so finally in 1969 he gets to the business of the point where he can work on a full time.

I decided that Blue Ribbon was doing well enough to justify a salary for its founder.

And 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 $18,000 a year. And so he's married and starting to have kids at this point and he describes what Phil Knight looked at, looked like through the eyes of his wife 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, humbling down some mental wormhole, trying to solve some problem or construct some plan. 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 I 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 are 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 going to kick out of another bank again.

There's so many times when this happens when he almost loses the entire company, he says that still faced problems with Wallace, this is his banker. Bigger orders would require bigger loans, and bigger loans would be harder to pay off. In 1970, Wallace was telling me that he wasn't interested in playing these games with me anymore. Here I built this dynamic company from nothing, and by all measures it was a beast, sales

doubling every year like clockwork. And this was the things I got, two bankers treating me like a deadbeat. For the umpteenth time he explained that he lived on cash balances, and for the upteam time I suggested ever so plately that if my sales and earnings were going up, 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 sense until I put some cash in my account and left it there. And so there's many times in the book that he's so hard of for cash that he does things that he just can't believe 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,

Now think about this, your 10 years into running your company.

This company's going to be one of the most successful companies, especially in the industry drain, 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 $5,000, 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 papers. I knew they weren't well off. I knew that with their sons medical bills, so their son had been a former runner.

Woodle, the guy working for Phil Knight, was paralyzed in a freak accident. He's in a wheelchair. So says I knew that with their sons medical bills, they were scuffling more than I. This $5,000 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 $3,000, draining their life savings. Down to zero. How I wish I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it, but I couldn't. I wouldn't.

On the way out the door, I stopped and I asked 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 IPOs, Phil Knight”

converted that loan to stock and that $8,000 was worth $1.6 million.

And so so far we've been talking about Blue Ribbon, the fact that he's just importing shoes. He's selling on its Suka'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 a 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 tight rope 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 the sense of betrayal on this pain that he's in. I was outraged, 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 foundation off earth, tell it about that, where Bowerman of course knows more about running and the importance of shoes to running the NBA.

So he was essentially taking their product, experimenting his garage and sending 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 on at Suka cannot be trusted. What else do you know? I know my relationship with my contact at on at Suka cannot be salvaged.

What does the future hold? One way or another blue ribbon and on at Suka 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 to break up. What's the next step I have to take?

I need to scare off all the other distributors that on Suka has lined up to replace me. What's the next step after that? Find my own replacement for on Suka. And so he finds out where a deed is 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 names of their own brand that they're going back and forth.

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 his time, listen to this description that he has after working through this intense period where they're designing and naming the first Nike models. He knows this is his path. He knows what he should have been doing the entire time.

A feeling came over me on like 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 spent so much time talking about Bill Bauerman in the role that he played in Phil Knight's life in 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,

I wonder if he could see in that moment all that he'd done, all that would follow. I know I couldn't. And so Phil Knight was managing this Tyrop as long as he could but he winds up on a Suka 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 a drift. 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 where 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 them.

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. On its suitcase been holding us down for years. They're late deliveries. They're mixed up orders.

They're 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 $2 million in sales last year, none of which had anything to do with on its

suitcase.

“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 or in the penance 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 Onitsuka, with whoever, we would compete as if our lives depend on it because they did. In competing as if his life depend on it, this is not like a, I don't think this a figure speech with Phil Knight. He tells a story in the book when he was younger that he would play his cousin at Batman

and he said that one summer we played exactly 116 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. And in this 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 help.

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 a day. When our pair count plummeted, we weren't able to generate enough revenue to pay Nisho.

So Nisho is, they get financing from banks as much they can, even though the banks hate them. And at this point in history, there's these Japanese trading companies. When 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 as we were enabled enough generate enough revenue to repay Nisho in the Bank of California time. When we couldn't repay Nisho in the Bank of California time, we couldn't borrow anymore.

When we couldn't borrow anymore, we were late placing our next order round and round and round it went. And so as 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 iron

cloud commitments, if they'd give us large and non-refundable orders six months in advance, we'd give them hefty discounts up to 7%. This way, we'd have longer lead times and fewer shipments and more certainly, and therefore a better chance of keeping cash balances in the bank. Also, we could use these long-term commitments from heavyweights, like Nordstroms, Canis,

athletes' foot, et cetera, and others, to squeeze more credit out of Nisho and the Bank of California. And he makes this point over and over in the books. 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 product quality, and so they decide to buy these bank rubbed factories. This factory happens to be in the northeast of America, and then he sends a trusted

do I know about running a factory? I'd be incompletely 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 in 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 refused to even consider ordering

less inventory. Grow or die.

“That's what I believe, no matter the situation.”

Why cut your order from 3 million down to 2 million if you believed in your bones that demand out there was actually 5 million. So as 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 knee show 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 9 is not bragging about being aggressive. He's saying I was taking it to the absolute limit, and many times he went over the limits. And when they, they actually wind up having a bounce a bunch of paychecks.

And what they do is they go to their supplier where they're buying all the boxes. So the boxes of the shoes come in, I think they're like something like 80% of this guy's business and say, hey, we, we, we front us some money and Phil Knight said it was an outrageous request, but the man's box company dependent on us for 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 business as its 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 writing us his hot floor.

“I only recall shaking violently shaking and the only thing that it 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 spend 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 try to help out was this runner named Steven Prefontaine who dies tragically and is early at an early age in his 20s 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. It says pre was most famous for saying somebody may beat me but they're going to 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 in 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. Never 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, 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 with generated ton of money and a flash would also be highly perilous because going public, often meant losing control.

It would 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 what he's been talking about over and over again.

I just can't see this Nike can't die, Nike cannot die, I cannot lose it has to exist. Nike was more than just a shoe, I was no longer making Nike's, Nike's were making me. If I saw an athlete's shoes and others' shoe, if I saw anyone's shoes and others' shoe, it wasn't just a rejection of the brand, but of me. I told myself to be reasonable.

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 he is struggling with, we'll talk about this later on the book. At this point, he was still in the 70s, his kids are small, and so he says like every minute I spend working on my company was at the cost of my family, and he says the guilt was palpable. 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 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 Nike's 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 vow to 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, than 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 owner, kind of mentor for a person. He says this guy named Chuck says Chuck knew business is cold, better than anyone I'd ever met, and I'd 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 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."

Wrestled 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 doesn't think he's being a good father.

I'd always promise myself that I'd be a better father to my sons than my father had been

to me. 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 marks. And then he's really formulating 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 his 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 50 new problems, 50 tough decisions that needed to be made right now.

And we were always aculierware 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 realized 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 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 allowed. 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, our right then, call me a businessman, maybe it will grow on me. And so towards the very end of the book, Nike Goes Public, and I want to read the response that Phil Knight experienced, the Knight 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.

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 missed and fog.

The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been.

Nothing had changed, at least of all me, and yet I was worth $178 million dollars. I shoured, 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 70s and 80s 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 sons. 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 or deals might be inspired or comforted, or warned. 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 40 years.

I'd tell men and women in their mid 20s 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 iconoclasts, 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, 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.