‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight
Book review & thoughts.
My favorite book of the year so far. In ‘Shoe Dog’ by Phil Knight, the founder of Nike shares the personal, honest, vulnerable side of building an empire. The prose is beautiful, the lessons are great. Unpretentious, funny and surprisingly heartbreaking at some points, you get a glimpse of his relationship with his family (his dad, his kids, his wife), his co-founders and team, his partners across the world, and his love for running. All of this while trying to build a company, being buried in debt and working full time.
My favorite thing of this book is that it portrays perfectly how building a business isn’t about being a smart ‘businessman’, but about the people that surround you, hard work and good luck.
Published in April 20167, Knight tells the story of how he began the ‘Blue Ribbon’ company in 1964 after having a ‘crazy idea’ in Stanford. He takes us on a trip with him and a team of people that you would have never thought had an athletics apparel company; starting in Oregon, going through Japan, California, Taiwan, Wellesley, Guadalajara, China and a lot more places, until we arrive to Wall Street and see them IPO successfully.
I had never been a sports fan until very recently. In the last 3 years I found a new interest in tennis and football. I didn’t understand what being a sports fan meant. Why would grown ups scream at their TVs? Why would they cry if their team lost? This quote explains why:
“When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.”
I think something similar happens in entrepreneurship. Those of us that work helping entrepreneurs experience the same thing. The entrepreneurs are the athletes giving their all to do something great. To achieve something that few people do. We are the athlete’s fans. Our spirit merges with the entrepreneurs’. We feel the rush and excitement of seeing someone else succeed and break their own records.
Every founder should read this book.
By the way, Knight thanks J.R. Moehringer in the end of his book. I think I can see Moehringer’s style in the book. I’m sure he helped Knight create that amazing prose, like he did with Andre Agassi in his book Open (my favorite memoir so far). If you haven’t read Agassi’s Open, go read it.
These are some of my favorite quotes of the book:
“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, call me a businessman. Maybe it will grow on me.”
“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. Luck plays a big role. Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put”
“It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.”
“Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith. Not faith as others define it. Faith as you define it. Faith as faith defines itself in your heart.”
“Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.”
“There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.”
“You are remembered, he said, prophetically, for the rules you break.”
“He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to — equally important qualities in a friend.”
“No idea was too sacred to be mocked, and no person was too important to be ridiculed, it also summed up the company spirit, mission and ethos.”
“I do not like stupidity,” he said. “People pay too much attention to numbers.”
This review was originally posted in Goodreads.
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