He quickly earns enough to cover rent and plenty of surfing time.Įventually, though, his journey calls to him again. He isn’t a smooth talker, but he knows his product, and he speaks the truth, and his customers like that. He switches jobs to sell securities, which essentially means cold-calling customers to sell funds. Phil is a terrible encyclopedia salesman. So they get jobs as encyclopedia salesmen. Frolicking in the waves and surrounded by beautiful women, young Phil Knight decides his plan can wait. With his Stanford friend Carter, they fly directly to Hawaii as their first stop. Phil later realizes a major motivation for his global journey might be to define himself in opposition to his father – to be one who’s not obsessed with respectability. But to his surprise, the elder Knight approves, bemoaning his own lack of travel experience in younger days. Phil’s quite sure his father will demur from funding his wanderlust. Phil Knight describes his father as obsessed with respectability and grounding in traditional values, and wandering the earth seemed the antithesis of this. Along the way, he wants to see and feel the world, for how can you change the world without seeing it? His traveling ambitions have a spiritual air, longing to understand how the Chinese and Buddhists and Greeks and Christians have thought about life for millennia. He now has to travel to Japan, find a shoe company, and pitch them his Crazy Idea. His paper’s thesis: Japanese companies are poised to burst into the shoe market, just as they had for cameras and displacing the German incumbents. Having been a decent runner on the U of Oregon track team, he’s obsessed with shoes.
His best lead is a final paper he wrote on shoes. Young Phil Knight has graduated from University of Oregon and earned an MBA from Stanford, and he doesn’t know what to do. Let’s start at the beginning of Phil Knight’s young life. What was young Phil Knight like? How did he come upon the idea of Nike, and how did he build it into the world’s most recognizable athletic brand? Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, started what would later become Nike in the 1960s when he was in his mid-20s. Like this article? Sign up for a free trial here. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading. This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "Shoe Dog" by Phil Knight.
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