YouSaid · the spoken record

Phil Knight

lines on the record: 67
first: 2021-06-16
most recent: 2021-06-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Selling encyclopedias or mutual funds or some other junk I didn't really care about. I'd be a disappointment to my parents, my school, my hometown, myself. I want to pull out something from the meeting. They wind up agreeing to supply him and take some like a year before he gets the shoes. But I thought it was really fascinating because they asked him, they're like, yeah, we want to sell to the United States. Remember, this is shortly after World War II. Japan's in shambles. The book goes into more detail about that. But they asked him, you know, how big do you think this market is? And this is just a reminder that markets are almost always bigger than you think they are. They asked me how big I thought they American shoe market was. How big it could be. And I told them ultimately it could be as big as $1 billion. I think Nike sold 24 billion, so that's just one company in one year in 2019 sold $24 billion worth of just shoes. Not all the other stuff they sell too. So it's just really interesting to me.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just like that idea all is now. Can't change the past, it's gone. The future's not here yet. All we have is now. It's one way to tame your mind, I think. So now we see the inner monologue as he goes to what he considers like the biggest meeting of his life. Remember he's only 24 years old at the time. So he's got to convince the shoe factory in Japan to supply him shoes. And let me read my note to you before I read this section because it was really interesting what he even at the very beginning. He always was focused on his goal. And if it meant some levels of discomfort, he didn't really care about that. So it says the satisfaction of achievement is worth the pain endured to get there. Stand for seven hours in a crowded train. Question mark. Sleep on a mat in a dingy motel? Question mark? Whatever. I'm unbothered. These are things that he had to do before he gets to this meeting. And he says everything depended on my rising to this occasion. Everything. If I didn't, if I muff this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my day.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So he continues on the trip alone. He goes to Japan, starts meeting with shoe manufacturers. And one of the great things about reading the book is that Phil's very well read, and he's constantly learning from every experience, even if it's an abstraction and then applying it to his own life's journey. And so he's sitting there, he's studying the environment in Japan, he winds up reading some of the philosophy, learning from Buddhism and Shinto and all this other stuff. So I'm just going to read a couple sentences to you. I marveled at the concept of Kensho. which was enlightenment that comes in a flash, a blinding pop. I like that. I wanted that. But first I needed to change my whole approach. I was a linear thinker, and according to Zen, linear thinking is nothing but a delusion, one of the many that is keeping us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says, no future, no past, all is now.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Billions of dollars, and yet this book tells us the struggles that Phil had to endure to build a company and that advice that he set at the very beginning, keep going, don't stop. It might be the only advice looking back 50 years later that we should ever give. And we see that you have to have control of your mind, though. It's going to play mind games with you, right? So he's saying, the last thing I wanted to do was pack up and return to Oregon. But I couldn't see traveling around the world alone. Go home. a faint inner voice told me. Get a normal job. Be a normal person. Then I heard another faint voice, equally emphatic. No, don't go home, keep going, don't stop.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the first stop on their trip is why they like it so much they decide to stay, which is really surprising. Like it's like, okay, we're going to go see these places. First place we get, oh my God, this is amazing. They rent like a little apartment by the beach. They wind up getting jobs. They'd sell encyclopedias door to door. They wind up selling investments over the phone, doing all this other stuff. But eventually feels like, all right, I need to go on with this trip. We can't just stay here. And Carter decides not to continue the trip because he met a girl. And so now we see Phil sitting on the beach. He's depressed. And this is the North Life myself is keep going. Don't stop. That's the main theme of the book. And that's where I think is one of probably the main benefit of reading this book is because we see Nike now wiley successful, great products, great marketing, multiple, I don't even know what their market cap is, hundreds of billions.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later, he got the okay from his parents, and this is one of my favorite sentences in the book Carter never did mess around. See an open shot take it. That was Carter. I told myself there was much I could learn from a guy like that as we circled to Earth.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Carter wasn't your typical jock. He read books, good books, and he was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to, equally important qualities in a friend and essential in a travel companion. So he goes to pitch Carter on his ideas. He's laying out. He's like, you know, we're going to go to Tokyo, Cairo, Istanbul, Athens, Jordan. I'm not going to list. There's like 50 countries for God's sake. But Carter had a really interesting reaction. He laughed in my face when I laid out all the list of places I wanted to see mortified. I looked down and began to make apologies. Then Carter, still laughing, said, What a swell idea, Buck. I should tell you, everybody calls Phil Buck. His dad calls him. That's his nickname, so everybody calls him Buck. I looked up. He wasn't laughing at me. He was laughing with joy, with glee. He was impressed. It took balls to put together an itinerary like that, he said. Balls, he wanted in.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way to reduce the thought, the main point behind Edwin Land's quote is that indifference is your enemy. And we saw the same thing in the presentation that Phil's giving. They didn't hate the idea. They just didn't care about it at all. So he goes for that run that changes his life in 1962. He's like, okay, I'm going to pursue the crazy idea. He doesn't have a lot of money, so he's got to get some money. He has this idea. He's like, I'm going to go around the world. I'm going to do a trip around the world while I'm on this trip around the world. I want to stop in Japan, try to convince some Japanese shoe manufacturers to let me resell their product. So that is Nike, he doesn't start out with the idea of Nike. His company's called Blue Ribbon. And for the first, I don't know, 10 years we'll get to it today of the company's life. He was reselling, no, it was less than 10 years, maybe seven or eight, but he's reselling other people's shoes. And there's a lot of lessons on the dangers of building a business that you don't control.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had made deep cuts into the camera market, which had once been dominated by Germans. Thus I argued in my paper that Japanese running shoes might do the same thing. The idea interested me, then inspired me, then captivated me. It seemed so obvious, so simple, so potentially huge. I spent weeks and weeks on this paper, I'd moved into the library, devoured everything I could find about importing and exporting, about starting a company. I'd given a formal presentation of the paper to my classmates who rejected with reacted with boredom. No not one asked a single question. They greeted my passion and intensity with sighs and vacant stares. The professor thought my crazy idea had merit. He gave me an A, but that was that. At least that was supposed to be that. I had never really Stop thinking about that paper.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 twenties are, I did decide that the world is made up of crazy ideas. History is one long procession 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 manage to give myself out of the blue, and somehow manage to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice, maybe the only advice any of us should ever give.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe No, no, I thought, running faster, faster, running as if I were chasing someone and being chased all the same time. It will work. By God, I'll make it work. No maybe's 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.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Maybe my crazy idea just might work.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At different times had fantasized about becoming a great novelist, a great journalist, a great statesman, but the ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. Sadly, fate made me good, not great. I'd run a track at Oregon and I'd distinguish 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 with athletes feel to play all the time instead of working or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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'd 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 midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runners near the finish line and the crowd rises 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.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 US Army. My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a twenty four year old man in full. So why, I wondered why do I still feel like a kid?”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 nineteen sixty two, 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.”
2021-06-16 · Founders · #186 Phil Knight (Nike) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source