Key Lessons Learnt from Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Phil Knight is the founder of Nike and wrote his memoir “Shoe Dog”. It is an amazing story of Grit, Faith, and Hard Work. He started his company at a very young age and took his chances in life. He hustled, run, and again hustled. I don’t want to share his full journey but want to capture some important lessons learned from his book.

Key Lessons:

• In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s mind
• 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. An important and above all.. different
• 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.
• When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none can fully justify the effort. the act itself becomes the destination.
• 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
• Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.
• The concept of Kensho vs Satori — enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. Sort of like the bulb on my Minolta. Kensho is growth by pain. Satori comes from moments of sudden awakening.
• According to Zen, Linear Thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says, No Future, no past. All is now.
• In every religion, it seemed, the Self is the obstacle, the enemy, and yet Zen declares plainly that the self does not exist. Self is a mirage, a fever dream, and our stubborn belief in its reality not only wastes life but shortens it. Self is the bald-faced lie, debunking it. To study the self, said the thirteenth-century Zen Master Dogen, is to forget the self. The inner voice, and outer voice, it is all the same. No Dividing lines.
• Victory, Zen says, comes when we forget the self and the opponent, who are but two halves of one whole. In Zen and the art of Archery, it is all laid out with crystal clarity. Perfection in the art of swordsmanship is reached. When the heart is troubled by no more thought of I and you, of the opponent and his sword, of one’s own sword and how to wield it. All is emptiness: your own self, the flashing sword, and the arms that wield it. Even the thought of emptiness is no longer there.
• You can not travel the path until you have become the path yourself ~the Buddha
• Minimalist. Expect nothing, seek nothing, grasp nothing — the immortal Japanese poets wrote lines that seemed polished and polished until they gleamed like the blade of a samurai’s sword, or the stones of a mountain brook. Spotless.
• Tycoon came from Taikun, Japanese for Warlord.
• You are remembered for the rules you break — MacArthur
• Don’t go to sleep one night, What you most want will come to you then. — Rumi
• Life is dangerous. And this: We must always be prepared.
• Belief. I decided. Belief is irresistible.
• People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing and that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!”. And when it is not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it.
• I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I would have to tell my body, “You, you raise some excellent points, but let’s keep going anyway.”
• The world is without beauty when you lose, and I was about to lose, big time.
• Boredom scares you if you are a rebel.
• The accountant in me saw the risk, the entrepreneur saw the possibility. So I split the difference and kept moving forward.
• Business is war without bullets
• Heroes are the ones who did not say much. None was a blabbermouth. None micromanaged. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.
• In Japan, you could not predict what either your competition or your partner might do. I had given up trying.
• Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.
• The cowards never started and the weak died along the way -that leaves us.
• No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room, he assured the Dane. But a lot of silly ideas have died there, said Stahr — F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon
• Somebody may beat me — but they are going to have to bleed to do it.
• I would search my mind and heart and the only thing I could come up with was this word — “winning”. It was not much, but it was far, far better than the alternative. Whatever happened, I just did not want to lose. Losing was death.
• Hire accountants and lawyers — at least they proved that they could master a difficult subject. Most had also demonstrated basic competence. When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert or product developer, what did you know?
• You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you — The Bucket List
• To study the self is to forget the self (Mi casa. Su casa)
• Oneness — in some way, shape, or form. It is what every person I have ever met has been seeking.
• When goods do not pass international borders, soldiers will.
• Trade is the path of coexistence, cooperation. Peace feeds on prosperity.
• Luck plays a big role. Yes, I would like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, and businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, and 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 Jnana, or Dharma. Or spirit or God.
• Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao. And since no one has ever adequately defined Tao, I now try to go regularly to mass. I would tell them. Have faith in yourself, but also have faith in faith.

Hi, I am Jaspal Singh, Founder of Mobility Innovation Lab (MIL) and Host of the Mobility Innovators Podcast. I am also Included VC 23 Fellow. I love to talk about startups, mobility, and technology.