PNTV: Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (#333)

Foreign. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today we've got another great book, Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Shoe Dog Subtitle A memoir by the creator of Nike, Phil Knight created Nike. And in this great book he tells the story of how he and a group of misfit geniuses created one of the most iconic brands and businesses in the world. It's a really well written, charming, funny, tear jerking, inspiring look at his hero's journey and I highly recommend it. If you're into sports and business and Hero's Journey and just creating cool stuff, this is a great book. I think you'll absolutely love it. Philosopher's Note, bunch of big ideas. I'm excited to look at five of my favorites now and help us apply some of that wisdom to our lives today. Starting with the first big idea. Crazy idea. So the story starts and the real thread and kind of through line throughout the book is Phil's crazy idea. At 24 years old, he got his crazy idea. And the quick backstory on it is that Phil was a runner at the University of Oregon. He ran under one of the most legendary coaches, Bill Bowerman, who coached more four minute milers in the US than anyone ever, won all kinds of championships. Extraordinary coach. And Phil was a very good runner. Good enough to run for him, but not quite great. He couldn't quite make it to that next level, but he loved running, right? So that's kind of part one of the story. And then he went from University of Oregon to Stanford where he got his mba. And while he was getting his mba, he wrote a business plan for an entrepreneur class, class on entrepreneurship and gave his presentation. Right. Super nervous, done all this research, super passionate about it. The idea was to take Japanese, import Japanese shoes for the American market and compete with the then dominant German Adidas, right? He's unbelievably excited about it, gives a presentation. His class is like completely bored by it. His professor gives him an A and he's obsessed. He's obsessed with his crazy idea and he tells the story in such a cool way. Now his father, he would share the story with his dad, you know, needed some support from his dad alone to kind of take a trip around the world and to Japan to kind of start, see if he can create a partnership or whatever. And his dad, who was incredibly supportive of him throughout his life, at that stage when he was just getting going, his dad was a respectable publisher of a newspaper. Very important to him that his son had a respectable career. And here he was selling Shoes. And he said something along the lines of, Phil, how long are you going to keep on jackassing around selling shoes? Phil had this crazy idea and he said to himself, be willing to let people see you as crazy. Just don't stop. Be willing to go all in. He said. He gave himself this advice, this precocious, prescient advice to himself at 24 years old. And for some reason he was able to give himself the advice and more importantly, take the advice. Stuck with it. And again, this book is about his 40 year journey of bringing this crazy idea to life. Which brings us to the second big idea when we think of Nike. I just opened up the newspaper the other day. No digital news for me these days, but I did subscribe to the local LA Times paper. So that's how I'm getting my news these days. Kind of fun, whole nother conversation. Anyway, I'm opening up, looking at the Rio Games and you know, all the athletes crossing the finish line, what are they wearing? Almost all of them are wearing Nikes. And it's awesome to read this book because you can take something like that for granted. You can think, yeah, yeah, it's Nike. Of course, Nike's just, it's Nike, right? They're ubiquitous, but they weren't at one point. Nike was a crazy idea, super crazy idea, right? People didn't even run. Crazy people jogged, but that wasn't a Ram. But that wasn't a thing that people did. And they weren't looking for athletic shoes. Nike didn't exist. We need to keep that in mind when we see people who have achieved extraordinary success. And reading a book like this, you're reminded of just how humbling the process was. One example among many that Phil shares in the book is he's 12 years out of Stanford, right? And he's flying back east to see if he can create a relationship with a guy who owns a manufacturing plant or something like that. And he's flying with a good friend of his who went to Stanford with him. They graduated a dozen years ago and his friend is crushing it. He's an eminently successful business guy and Phil is trying to rent a car and his credit card gets declined. That's how in debt he is. His credit card limits max or whatever. And the guy who's at the rental car agency takes his card from him, confiscates it, thinking that this guy Phil's trying to rip him off. And then his friend's card, he tries to help him out and give him his card. The guy won't Even take that card. And Phil's just sitting there feeling humiliated. 12 years out of Stanford Business School, his friends crushed it, and he's still nursing a crazy idea. And the number of times that he teetered on bankruptcy is unbelievably simultaneously humbling and inspiring to read. And this is a guy who today, if you think of Phil Knight, you think of Nike, right? He's worth something like $25 billion, Forbes tells us. And they also tell us he's something like the 15th wealthiest person in the world. But at one stage of his life, reasonably far into the creation of Nike, he's a failure. He's a deadbeat is what he feels like. So this willingness to embrace failure, and he talks about the importance of it and how Nike as a culture, they were never afraid of failing. They wanted to fail fast and learn as fast as they could and get better. They weren't afraid of failing. They needed to fail fast. And. And in the note, I talk about Michael Jordan, the quintessential Nike athlete, right, who had that amazing Nike ad where he says, look, I failed over and over and over again. I've missed so many shots, I've lost so many games and missed so many game winning shots. And it's because I failed that I've succeeded. Not in spite, but because in the note I talk about the fact that the hall of Fame exists on the other side of the hall of Shame. Really? Or the Failure hall of Fame. You can't go around failure to get to the hall of Fame. You got to be willing to go through that if you want to reach the ultimate pinnacle of success. We need to reorient our relationship to failure. Obviously we want to succeed, but we've got to be willing to bump our heads, miss those shots, make mistakes, etc. And Phil's just candid, humble, vulnerable. Sharing of all these challenges he had is incredibly inspiring. Third big idea is money and blood cells and living for something bigger than that. He has a passage in there where he talks about his orientation to business and the fact that none of these guys that he started this business with, who were an amazingly eclectic band of misfit geniuses, was in it for the money. They weren't sitting there. The ultimate end game wasn't money. And he says, look, I know some people approach business where money is just it, full stop, period. Done. This is just why we were in business. He said, that was never it for us, right? We wanted to do something bigger. And he says, uses a metaphor which I talked about in our class on optimal business 101, that's a big metaphor in conscious capitalism, the movement where I first heard about it. And he says the idea is, look, it's kind of like a human body, right? The human body needs red blood cells to live, but we don't live for the red blood cells, right? He says doing that, it's similar to a business, right? A business needs profit in order to live. A business's red blood cells, you could say is it's profit, right? It needs profit in order to live. But a wise business doesn't live for the profits. They're simply fuel for a bigger purpose. He said that's what business was for him was an opportunity to make someone's life a little bit better. That's what fired them up, was to make a global impact and to do something meaningful. And with that in mind, that's what business inspires me so much. To combine my passion for teaching with my passion for creating cool stuff and using business in an optimal fashion as an incredible force for good. It's really, really inspiring. He also talks about the sweatshop in quotes, challenges that he faced whenever that was in the 90s, and how challenging it was for him to see an effigy of himself burning in front of his office in his hometown in response to what was going on in some of his factories. And he talks about how it was a lot more nuanced than what the activists had portrayed, yet there was a lot of room for them to improve. And as a result of that antifragile style, they're now among the leaders in creating the most optimal space. So again, beautiful look at using failure as fuel as we look to business as something bigger than just making money. The fourth big idea was super inspiring gratitude if you go to the Nike campus and not been in the Nike campus yet. Although part of why reading this book was fun for me too is as a 25 year old entrepreneur I've mentioned before, I hired the CEO of Adidas to replace me as the 25 year old entrepreneur of the business I had created at that time focused on sports and online stuff. So it's particularly fun to read the story of Nike and what Phil did anyway on the Nike campus, all the different, it's huge, right? So there's different streets you got to take. And he says the security guard will tell someone on any given day, hey, okay, go ahead and take Bowerman Drive until you get to Delhayes Way, then make a right and all the streets are named after the founding fathers of Nike. He says it's basically an ode to the people for whom I have gratitude and who built Nike, right? And we can go through these little streets and go to the oasis in the middle that's named after an amazing Japanese businessman and firm that helped them in the most extraordinary ways when they most needed it. And he just makes the point that behind love, gratitude is the strongest human emotion. And he shares a number of stories in the book where his company was on the brink of bankruptcy and he got support. One of them was incredibly profound. One of where his right hand guy, I think his name was Waddell, Bill Waddell was his right hand guy. Phil needed money, right? And he needed to ask anybody who could for money. His right hand guy's parents wound up giving him all their life savings. It was $8,000, right? $8,000. And he didn't want to take the money, but he had to to keep the business, the lights on, right? So he takes the money and he asked him on the way out, why are you doing this? And the parents of his right hand guy said, if we can't trust and believe in our son's company, what can we trust in, right? Then he fast forwards 200 pages later in the book, we learned that that $8,000 investment, his right hand guy, when they went public, years later, way later, goes back to his parents and says, Nike went public. And they said, okay, well, what does that mean? And he says, well, it means that your $8,000 check is now worth $1.6 million. Gives me tears in my eyes right now. And I literally was basically weeping when I read this story, thinking about the people who have bet on me in my past businesses and who have bet on me in this venture that I'm in now, a 200 times return is just astonishing, absurdly awesome for a family that just bet on him and believed in him and supported him and loved him and, and that level of gratitude permeates the book and it's just unbelievably inspiring. So in the note I say, okay, for whom are you grateful? And who are you going to name your streets after in the metaphorical or perhaps future real campus of your life? Who dug your wells that you now get to drink water out of? Thank them, dedicate your life to giving them an incredible return, 200 times return, not necessarily monetarily, but what can you do to energetically return all of that which has been given to you? Gratitude. Incredibly powerful. It's frankly, my biggest motivation might be some other things tied for it, but giving back to the people who have supported me when I needed it most is one of my deepest inspirations. The fifth big idea is your calling. So he winds up the book. This again is a memoir, not a self help book. So he doesn't bang you over the head with hey, do this, do that. But at the end he has some think about this. And actually it was more the intention of what he wanted to achieve in writing the book. And one of the most salient things is look, if you're just getting started at any point, but particularly Those in their 20s, he says, pause and think about it. Think about what your calling might be. He's like, you might not even know what that means, calling. But just step back and think about how you want to spend the next 40 years of your life. With whom do you want to spend that time? It matters. Don't just go get swept up in whatever job comes at you. Think about what you want in your life. What's your crazy idea that you're willing to go all in on? Let people call you crazy, but you're not going to stop in pursuit of it. In pursuit of what? In pursuit of Nike. Do you know what Nike means? I didn't know what Nike meant in Greek before I read this book. Victory goddess Athena, one of her gifts is the gift of Nike, a victory. And he shares some awesome stories about his visit to the Parthenon, into Greece and all the little synchronistic things that came together in the creation of his company, Nike, which when it was founded, by the way, did not have a sexy name. It wasn't Nike, it was Blue Ribbon Sports, which he randomly came up with spontaneously in a meeting. And it iteratively got optimized over years and decades. But Nike means victory. The ultimate victory, he says, is the same for all of us. It's actualizing our potential. Doesn't matter whether you're an athlete or an entrepreneur or an artist or a writer, or I would offer a mother or a father, whatever you're choosing to do with your life. We want to become all that we're destined to be. As Maslow says, what one can be, one must be. There's a calling. There's some phone ringing, as Joseph Campbell says, begging you to answer it and respond to it and to ultimately be victorious in bringing your crazy idea to fruition. Being willing to endure failure in the process of it, remembering the business and life is certainly about more than just money. We're about more than just our red blood cells. We need healthy red blood cells, but that's a means to an end. It's a vehicle, not the destination. We want to use that healthy body, right, and that healthy profit in a business to do something bigger than ourselves and to serve as profoundly as we can. And we do so with gratitude for those who have made it possible. Awesome book. Can't recommend it enough. It was particularly enjoyable as I had gone all in on nutrition for a while to step back and to kind of read this biography. Really appreciate it. Hope you enjoyed this and go get the book if you're feeling it. And for now, think about what idea landed the most, what reminded you of something you already know to be true, and how you're going to make it a bigger part of your life starting today. Get on that. Make today another awesome day. See you. Isn't it a bit odd we went from math to science to history but somehow missed the class on how to live? For some wacky reason, optimal living 101 never made the schedule. Of course, it's too late to go back and change that and you're too busy to read full time to catch up yet. If you're like us, you're all about optimizing your life and actualizing your potential. So imagine this. Imagine having someone read the best books on optimal living and pulling out the big ideas that can truly change your life. You know those sections you asterisk and underline and mark all up? Then imagine that guy me connecting those ideas to other great books in helping you apply them to your life today. Well, that's what I do with something we call Philosopher's Notes where I break down each great book into a simple 6 page PDF, 20 minute MP3 and 10 minute Philosopher's Notes TV episode. Then imagine me taking the absolute best big ideas from those great books and sharing them with you in fun, inspiring, super practical optimal living 101 classes on stuff like purpose 101, confidence 101, business 101, meditation 101, that sort of thing. You've got a personal trainer? I'm kind of like your personal philosopher. Ancient Wisdom plus Modern Science plus Common Sense plus Virtue plus Mastery plus Fun. That's what our optimized membership program is all about. We'd love to have you join us. Check us out at BrianJohnson. Me join.