In Posthumous Reading of Shoe Dog

For the unaware of the underground-now-mainstream world of shoe culture, the presence of Nike is one of a Titan in the room. Considering the origin story of Phil Knight and his dream of making shoes the next big thing way back in the day is a story filled with some of the most uphill luck anyone can wish to accomplish, but with the tenacity to buckle down and just push through every missed opportunity to make sure he kept surviving for the next battle.

What surprised me the most about Phil was just how much the beginning of his struggle is so relatable. The internal struggle with trying to achieve something respectable, the measure of success by his father, compared to his own dreams of achieving more in a not so respectable field. The bootstrapped beginning of trying to sell by himself from the back of his own car, meeting with those who he knew from his past, barely struggling to meet each milestone needed to get to the next obstacle he would come across.

The thing I most admired about Phil is his almost candid nature about how some things just fell into place for his success. It wasn't that he was surrounded by pure luck, but that he always seemed to be at the right point to take hold of an opportunity when he saw it and drive it forward into his next goal and break his record every time. It isn't an innate skill, nor a skill that requires thousands of hours honing but one that comes with a fundamental trust in your instinct to thrive with whatever comes your way.

With that admiration comes some admonishment. The one point of least admiration is Phil's take on justice, fairness and on the idea of sides and enemies. There are formalities that are respected, like cultural norms of running business that you can get away not following, like keeping major heads o your office all CPA's and still getting design and marketing done. But there is a point where fairness and justice take too much weight on the self, especially when dealing with the antitrust case in the 1980's over the Treasury's retroactive import bill. Constantly rejecting settlement offers when you feel like you are completely in the right is understandable but also unfair to the sides of the negotiation that may have been in the wrong, and no matter how much you think you should pay(in Phil's mind 0 dollars) there is a value in concession that can be more humbling than backbreaking.

Phil consistently came across competition, whether with his own sponsors going back to old shoes, his own team feeling disillusioned at times when the company hit small slumps in otherwise incredible growth, the truly unfair treatment from manufacturers in Japan over sales rights, but through it all Knight rebounded. Taking his shoe and putting it on every top athlete he could sign, ramping up morale in the cheekiest of ways during "Buttface" conferences, and sticking to shady yet timely tactics of keeping tabs on his suppliers to make sure he stayed ahead of being blindsided by early termination.

Phil has an interesting perspective in that he continually thought ahead of what may be needed in the market like trying to push shoes into different sports like switching from track to tennis, sourcing and starting up his own shoe factory in the Northeast just to keep up with production and escalating tensions between competitors by naming shoes as acts of defiance ie the Cortes to the Adidas Aztec. Staying creative and productive is a draining task, but Phil's lightheartedness combined with always searching for inspiration is a lesson anyone can take to heart.

I have thousands of questions that I can ask Phil and his entire team, but I guess I can narrow it down to two for the case of exercising precision:

1. What is the one thing that you do every day that is not related to work or family that you do to give you inspiration or to act as your mental reset button?

2. If you had to keep one lesson from all your years of experience that you feel is the foundation to the rest of your growth, what is that lesson and how succinctly can you distill it?


For Phil, the shoe dog didn't see work as a drag but as an absolute escape from the reality of mundane offices and paperwork. This for him was a space for those who were completely manic to the most coolheaded to come together and know that differences aside there was a commonality and shared experience in the shoe that drove them all to make the best of whatever aspect of that shoe they were working on that day.