By the creator of NIKE

"Shoe dog" was first published in 2016. Still, most of the learning made by Phil Knight the creator of NIKE is accurate today. Hereafter are my preferred quotes from Phil and from other authors. I would be delighted to read yours!

"I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running.”

" Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying or designing of shoes.”

 "In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few." Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

•  "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that." Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass 
• "All is vanity, says the Bible. All is now, says the Zen. All is dust, says the desert."
•  "I went by train to Milan, communed with Da Vinci, considered his beautiful notebooks, and wondered at his peculiar obsessions. Chief among them, the human foot. Masterpiece of engineering, he called it. A work of art."

 " On my last day I sauntered up the Champs-Elysées, tracing the liberator’s path, thinking all the while of Patton. Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

•  "My SALES STRATEGY was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting good stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!”), I drove over the Pacific Northwest, to various track meets. Between races I’d chat up the coaches, the runners, the fans and show them my wares. The response was always the same. I couldn’t write orders fast enough."
•  "Belief I decided. Belief is irresistible."
•  "Life was good. Life was grand… happiness can be dangerous. It dulls the senses."
•  "Also, there was no such thing as venture capital. An aspiring young entrepreneur had very few places to turn, and those places were all guarded by risk-averse gatekeepers with zero imagination."
•  "I learned that lack of equity was a leading cause of failure."
•  "Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy."
•  "Though the company was on track to double sales for a 5th straight year, I still couldn’t justify a salary for its co-founder."
•  Life is growth. You grow or you die."
•  "1970... I spent most of every day thinking about liquidity, talking about liquidity, looking to the heavens and pleading for liquidity. My kingdom for liquidity. An even more loathsome word than equity."
•  "Yes, I thought. CONFIDENCE. More than equity, than liquidity, that’s what a man needs."
•  "When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about."
•  "Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we would do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it."

 "No brilliant idea was ever born in a conference room”, he assured the Dane. “But a lot of silly ideas have died there", said Stahr. – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Last Tycoon.

The very first shoes were sold by Knight $6,5 in the sixties. In 2017 NIKE, Inc. revenues rose to $34,4 billion, what an impressive "shoe dog" story!