The cowards never started and the weak died along the way...

...that leaves us!

That's how Phil Knight's memoir, Shoe Dog, begins and it just gets better and better. For those of you who do not know, this is Nike's founder story written by himself. It's really a surprisingly great read. By that I mean, not that for a memoir is pretty good but that it's maybe the best book I read this year! It's gripping, interesting, nostalgic and REAL.

It begins with Phil at 24 and his CRAZY IDEA and follows his steps and missteps until he officially launches NIKE. Spoiler alert: Nike becomes one of the most successful brand in history. Yeah...

But what is amazing is how well written it is and how it surprised something that I never got from Nike's ads, a sense of belonging and also a search. He constantly wonders what is this thing I'm building here? Am I a shoe seller?
Pushed by these questions and enriched by the answer, he adds layers and layers to Nike. |For sure, a lesser company - if any - it would be without Phil. I ended the book transformed: from a Nike fan to a Nike fanatic. I dare you to read it and resist the urge to NOT buy a pair of something NIKE.

My favorite part and to some extent the most important part, what started it all, was his trip around the world at 24. His retelling is beautiful and meaningul. Take this for example:

The Upanishads say, Lead me from the unreal to the real. So I fled the unreal. I flew to Kathmandu and hiked straight up the clean white wall of the Himalayas. On the descent I stopped at a crowded chowk and devoured a bowl of buffalo meat, blood rare. The Tibetans in the chowk, I noted, wore boots of red wool and green flannel, with upturned wooden toes, not unlike the runners on sleds. Suddenly I was noticing everyone’s shoes.

I went back to India, spent New Year’s Eve wandering the streets of Bombay, weaving in and out among oxen and long-horned cows, feeling the start of an epic migraine—the noise and the smells, the colors and the glare. I went on to Kenya, and took a long bus ride deep into the bush. Giant ostriches tried to outrun the bus, and storks the size of pit bulls floated just outside the windows. Every time the driver stopped, in the middle of nowhere, to pick up a few Masai warriors, a baboon or two would try to board.

I went to Cairo, to the Giza plateau, and stood beside desert nomads and their silk-draped camels at the foot of the Great Sphinx, all of us squinting up into its eternally open eyes. The sun hammered down on my head, the same sun that hammered down on the thousands of men who built these pyramids, and the millions of visitors who came after. Not one of them was remembered, I thought. All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says Zen. All is dust, says the desert."

Just re-reading this I get goose-bumbs. This man writes too good - he took some classes in preparation for this - and it's just so authentic. It's how he was constructed and he made Nike in his image.

For the business point of view, there are a ton of lessons but what I came out of it is to surround yourself with the best people possible ..as long as you like them. The camaraderie at the start is something unique and he always looked for this:

You’re one of us,” I said. One of us. He knew what those words meant. We were the kind of people who simply couldn’t put up with corporate nonsense. We were the kind of people who wanted our work to be play. But meaningful play.

In the end, he was not a shoe seller, but a SHOE DOG. And that's all the difference in the word....