Transcript
Introduction
"I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my running shoes. Then I slipped quietly out the back door. I'd stretch my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back and groaned as I took the first few steps down the cool road into the fog.
Why is it always so hard to get started? There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself, that foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962. I had 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 and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I'd lie 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 U.S. Army. My resume said 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 would have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or I might become. Like all of 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, above all, different.
I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win. No, no, that's not right. I simply didn't want to lose and then it happened. As my heart began to thump, as my lungs expanded like the wings of a bird, as the trees turned to greenish blurs, 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 had always suspected the essence of beauty or truth or all that 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. At different times, I'd fantasize about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman, but the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate had made me good, not great. I'd run track at Oregon and I'd distinguished myself, but that was that, the end.
Now as I began to clip off one brisk six-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. The 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 were 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 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 a part of me, waiting for me but also hiding from me. That might sound a little high-flown, a little crazy, but that's how I felt back then.
At 24, I did have a crazy idea and somehow despite being dizzy with existential angst and fears about the future and doubts about myself, as all young men and women in their mid-20s are, 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. 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, which is Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, and it was written by Phil Knight. So I originally read this book about four years ago. It was Founders #10, one of the first books I've ever read for this project. And it's one of my favorite books. It's an absolutely fantastic book, and I believe that great books should be reread. They stay the same, but you change. And so now I thought approaching almost 200 biographies read for this podcast, I should go back and see how the insights in this book have changed given how much I've read since then. And I want to place it into -- I want to -- I would make the argument that it's the perfect biography. So there's a lot of ways you can think about different books that we've talked about.