![[Outliers] The Obsession That Built Nike | Phil Knight - The Knowledge Project cover](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmegaphone.imgix.net%2Fpodcasts%2Fd6ff8140-0cd1-11f1-86d4-7b36ea448488%2Fimage%2Fa169f7e6c9d8bba97f4d3de6c48056f4.png%3Fixlib%3Drails-4.3.1%26max-w%3D3000%26max-h%3D3000%26fit%3Dcrop%26auto%3Dformat%2Ccompress&w=1920&q=75)
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Every runner knows this. You run and run, mile after mile, and you never quite know why. You tell yourself that you're running towards some goal, chasing some rush, but really, you run because the alternative, stopping scares you to death. So that morning in 1962, I told myself, let everyone else call your idea crazy. Just keep going. Don't stop. 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. That's the precious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself out of the blue and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believed it's the best advice and maybe the only advice any of us should ever give. That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Today, Nike looks inevitable. But for nearly two decades, this company almost died daily. It was that close. Two banks dumped him. His only supplier tried to replace him. The FBI opened an investigation. The government hit him with a customs bill larger than their revenue. And that's not all. Phil's inner monologue during these years is extraordinary. He swings between extremes, beating himself up in one moment and then positive affirmations of things he doesn't quite believe to keep him going. He was also a misfit, and I mean that in the best way possible. He's an introvert who bombed at selling encyclopedias. He surrounded himself with oddballs, a guy in a wheelchair, an obsessive letter writer, people nobody else would have bet on. He never praised them and often ignored them. But he trusted them completely, and they rewarded that trust by giving everything they had. Shoe Dog is one of the best business books ever written because it tells the truth about what building something actually feels like. Let's start with some of the lessons. Lesson 1 Belief is irresistible. Phil Knight was a terrible salesman. He tried encyclopedias door to door and hated every moment. He was an introvert. He tried mutual funds next. And while he was slightly better, it was a job. And then he started selling Japanese running shoes out of the trunk of his car. And something strange happened. He couldn't stop selling them. Here's how he explained it. 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 believe these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. And then he writes a line. I keep Turning over for the rest of the book. Belief. I decided belief is irresistible. You can learn all the sales techniques in the world. You can study persuasion. You can read every negotiation book, listen to every podcast. But if you don't genuinely believe in what you're building, people will sense it instantly. The reverse is also true. Genuine conviction is contagious. You stop persuading and start attracting. In my conversation with James Clear, he put it this way. If you're having fun, then you're dangerous. You're hard to compete with. And Phil Knight was having fun. He didn't pay himself for years. He wasn't in it for the money. Nike wasn't a job. It was him. I mean, just listen to how he closed his memoir. It's never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad. Lesson 2 Fail fast, but fight like hell not to. Two words become Knight's internal mantra. Fail fast. This is strange advice from someone who never actually fails. He comes close, though. In fact, you could say he lived on the edge for over a decade. So what does fail fast really mean? Not what you think. Nike isn't celebrating failure. He desperately does not want to fail. You feel it on every page of his memoir. Throughout a lot of the book, he's holding himself together with positive affirmations he doesn't fully believe, coaching himself through one crisis to the next. But he does something the Stoics would recognize. He thinks about the worst case. The reason you do this isn't about pessimism. It's about changing your relationship with fear. Listen to how he does this. If Blue Ribbon, which is the precursor to Nike, went bust, I'd have no money and I'd be crushed. But I'd also have some valuable wisdom, which I could apply to the next business. Wisdom seemed an intangible asset, but an asset all the same, one that justified the risk. He imagines the worst outcome, thinks about it, and says he'd be okay. In fact, if it happened, it would just be tuition. Fear is the real enemy. Fear is the thing that stops you from getting where you want to go. It clouds your judgment at the exact moment you need clarity most Knight nails this later in the book when he says, when you see only problems, you're not seeing clearly. By accepting the worst case scenario up front, he took away its power. Fear stopped blinding him, letting him see what was in front of him instead of what his anxiety invented. And this gave him the power to take big swings and go for it. Lesson three. Let people surprise you. Phil's approach to people was unorthodox. In fact, some would have called it outright neglect. He hired all oddballs. Consider Jeff Johnson, his first real salesman. He wrote Knight passionate letters from the road. His letters were long, they came daily, and they were filled with random missives. And Knight barely acknowledged or even responded to these. Sometimes he'd sit down to reply, stare at the page, realize he didn't even know where to start because he was so behind, and get up. And by the next day there would be a new letter. Anyway, Knight was following a principle he'd absorbed from studying military leaders, especially General Patton. Don't tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and let them surprise you with the results. Here's Knight in his own words. One lesson I took from all my homeschooling about the heroes was that they didn't say much. None was a blabbermouth, none micromanaged. So I didn't answer Johnson, and I didn't pester him. Having told them what to do, I hope that he would surprise me. Sit with that last line for a second. Having told him what to do, I hope that he would surprise me. This is the difference between managing and leading. If you tell someone how to do something, you cap the upside at your own imagination. But if you tell them what to do and you leave them alone, there's room for their imagination. They could surprise you. His people rewarded that trust with devotion. They called themselves Butt Faces, a name from their brutally honest retreats where no idea was sacred and everyone was fair game. They were a band of misfits who had walked through the fire for the company. Not because Nike paid them well. He didn't for years. Not because he praised them constantly. He wasn't the type. They did it because he saw something in each of them that the world had missed. He bet on them when nobody else would. There seems to be two competing worldviews around trust. Some people think that you earn it, and some people think that you give it. And in this case, Phil gave it generously, with real responsibility and real autonomy. And people moved mountains to prove him right. Knight's team didn't just work for Nike, they were Nike. Lesson four. Make work, play. Everyone talks about work, life, balance. But Knight wanted the opposite. Listen to what he writes here. I was putting in six days a week at Pricewaterhouse, spending early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life, and wholly content. My life was out of balance. Sure, but I didn't care. In fact, I wanted even more imbalance. Or a different kind of imbalance. I wanted to dedicate every minute of every day to Blue Ribbon. I'd never been a multitasker, and I didn't see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted work to be play. Two lines in there deserve a second listen. First, I wanted even more imbalance. He's obsessed. This isn't hustle culture porn. This is someone who found their life's work. Work is life and life is work. And second, if my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted work to be play. This connects directly back to belief. When you believe deeply in what you're building, the boundary between work and play dissolves. You're not forcing discipline. The work is pulling you forward. Lesson 5 the Goodbye Test Phil writes one of the most quietly powerful lines in the book about the woman he's dating, his future wife, Penny. And he says the single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone is to say goodbye. He meant it about love, but the principle applies everywhere. Brad Jacobs has a framework for evaluating your team. He calls it abc. When a C player tells you they're leaving, you feel relief. When a B player says the same thing, you think we'll miss them, but we'll manage. But when an A player walks into your office and says they're done, you feel a pit in your stomach. You do almost anything to keep them. That gut response tells you the truth about how you feel. You don't always know what someone means to you while they're there. You find out when they're gone or when you imagine them gone. And and this applies to everyone, from co founders to employees and friends. If you want to know who really matters to you, run them through the goodbye test. Lesson 6 One thing Phil was always overwhelmed. There were too many crises, too little cash, and not enough hours in the day. But he had a discipline that carried him through all of it. And he writes, I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. His team adopted the same principle. Each of us found pleasure whenever possible in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind. Knight didn't want to just tackle every problem. At the same time, he focused on the most important ones and ignored everything else.