Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

Inspiration, he learned, can come from quotidian things.

I’d rehearsed this scene in my head so many times, as I’d rehearsed every race I’d ever run, long before the starting pistol. But now I realized this was no race. There is a primal urge to compare everything—life, business, adventures of all sorts—to a race. But the metaphor is often inadequate. It can take you only so far.

told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company.

Like me, he read compulsively about war.

Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

Blue Ribbon was my third child, my business child, as Sumeragi said, and I simply couldn’t bear the idea of it dying. It has to live, I told myself. It just has to. That’s all I know.

So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.

Denny Strickland, creative director at our advertising agency, had designed a block-lettered NIKE, all caps, and nested it inside a swoosh. We spent days considering it, debating it.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.