David Senra

June 4, 2021

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

shoe.jpg

My highlights from the book

1. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind, there are few. 

2. Life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines, and I didn’t want that. 

3. Lightness, Bowerman believed, directly translated into less burden, more energy, and more speed. Lightness was his constant goal. Bowerman didn't like to lose. (I got it from him.) Thus lightness was his constant goal.

4. Carter never did mess around. See an open shot, take it. I told myself there was much to learn from a guy like that. 

5. Why was selling shoes so different? Because I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. Belief is irresistible. 

6. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, "Not one more step!" And when it's not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it. I thought over all the races in which my mind wanted one thing, and my body wanted another, those laps in which I'd had to tell my body, "Yes, you raise some excellent points, but let's keep going anyway.

7. Seek a calling. If you’re following your calling, the fatigue will be easier to bear, the disappointments will be fuel, the highs will be like nothing you’ve ever felt. 

8. 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 my work to be play. I wanted to quit Price Waterhouse. Not that I hated it; it just wasn't me.

9. On paper, I thought, I'm an adult. Graduated from a good college-University of Oregon. Earned a master's from a top business school–Stanford. Survived a yearlong hitch in the U.S. Army-Fort Lewis and Fort Eustis. My résumé 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?

10. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest men I ever knew, spoke of that trail often. It's our birthright, he'd growl. Our character, our fate-our DNA. "The cowards never started," he'd tell me, “and the weak died along the way-that leaves us."

11. I'd have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or might become. Like all 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.

12. 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 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 as 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.

13. 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, and don't give much thought to where "there" is. Whatever comes, just don't stop.

14. That's the precocious, prescient, urgent advice I managed to give myself, out of the blue, and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it's the best advice-maybe the only advice-any of us should ever give.

15. I'd written a research paper about shoes, and the paper had evolved from a run-of-the-mill assignment to an all-out obsession. Being a runner, I knew something about running shoes. Being a business buff, I knew that Japanese cameras 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.

16. They greeted my passion and intensity with labored sighs and vacant stares.

17. 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.

18. But first I'd need 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 keep us unhappy. Reality is nonlinear, Zen says. No future, no past. All is now.

19. If I didn't, if I muffed this, I'd be doomed to spend the rest of my days selling encyclopedias, or mutual funds, or some other junk I didn't really care about.

20. I'm an accountant now and giving some thought to blowing my brains out.

21. Bowerman was a genius coach, a master motivator, a natural leader of young men, and there was one piece of gear he deemed crucial to their development. Shoes. He was obsessed with how human beings are shod.

22. A tiger hunts best when he's hungry.

23. It's possible that everything I did in those days was motivated by some deep yearning to impress, to please, Bowerman. Besides my father there was no man whose approval I craved more, and besides my father there was no man who gave it less often. Frugality carried over to every part of the coach's makeup. He weighed and hoarded words of praise, like uncut diamonds.

24. Bowerman didn’t give a damn about respectability. He possessed a prehistoric strain of maleness. Today it’s all but extinct. He was a war hero, too. Of course he was.

25. I loved Bowerman. And feared him. And neither of these initial impulses ever went away.

26. Sometimes the fear was less, sometimes more, sometimes it went right down to my shoes, which he'd probably cobbled with his bare hands.

27. The most famous track coach in America, Bowerman never considered himself a track coach. He detested being called coach. He called himself a “Professor of Competitive Responses,” and his job, as he saw it, and often described it, was to get you ready for the struggles and competitions that lay ahead.

28. Despite this lofty mission, or perhaps because of it, the facilities at Oregon were Spartan. Dank wooden walls, lockers that hadn't been painted in decades. The lockers had no door, just slats to separate your stuff from the next guy's. We hung our clothes on nails. Rusty nails. We sometimes ran without socks. Complaining never crossed our minds. We saw our coach as a general, to be obeyed quickly and blindly.

29. In my mind he was Patton with a stopwatch. That is, when he wasn't a god.

30. He'd tested me. He'd broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I'd held up.

31. I pulled up to Bowerman’s stone fortress and marveled. Bowerman has built it with his bare hands. I wondered how on earth he’d managed all that backbreaking labor by himself. The man who moves a mountain begins by carrying away small stones.

32. He hadn't sent me to Oregon and Stanford to become a door-to-door shoe salesman, he said. "Jackassing around," that's what he called it. "Buck," he said, "how long do you think you're going to keep jackassing around with these shoes?" I shrugged. "I don't know, Dad."

33. My sales strategy was simple, and I thought rather brilliant. After being rejected by a couple of sporting goods stores (“Kid, what this world does not need is another track shoe!"), I drove all 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.

34. I could not bear the thought of losing.

35. In his heart of hearts Johnson believed that runners are God's chosen, that running, done right, in the correct spirit and with the proper form, is a mystical exercise, no less than meditation or prayer, and thus he felt called to help runners reach their nirvana. I'd been around runners much of my life, but this kind of dewy romanticism was something I'd never encountered. Not even the Yahweh of running, Bowerman, was as pious about the sport as Blue Ribbon's Part-time Employee Number Two.

36. I thought I loved to read; Johnson was next level.

37. He riffled through his card catalog and found the address of a local customer, another high school track star. He drove to the kid's house, knocked at the door, unannounced. The kid wasn't there, but parents said Johnson was more than welcome to come in and wait. When the kid got home he found his shoe salesman sitting at the dining room table eating dinner with the whole family. The next day, after they went for a run, Johnson got from the kid a list of names-local coaches, potential customers, likely contacts-and a list of what neighborhoods he might like.

38. I was putting in six days a week at Price Waterhouse, spending I early mornings and late nights and all weekends and vacations at Blue Ribbon. No friends, no exercise, no social life-and wholly I 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

39. I wanted what everyone wants. To be me, full-time.

40. Though the company was on track to double sales for a fifth straight year it still couldn't justify a salary for its cofounder.

41. She was learning that I spent a fair portion of each day lost in my own thoughts, tumbling down mental wormholes, to solve some problem or construct some plan.

42. I struggle to remember. I close my eyes and think back, but so many precious moments from those nights are gone forever. Numberless conversations, breathless laughing fits. Declarations, revelations, confidences. They've all fallen into the sofa cushions of time. I remember only that we always sat up half the night, cataloging the past, mapping out the future. I remember we took turns describing what our little company was, and what it might be, and what it must never be. How I wish, on just one of those nights, I’d had a tape recorder. Or kept a journal, as I did on my trip around the world.

43. Here l'd built this dynamic company, from nothing, and by all measures it was a beast-sales doubling every year, líke clockwork-and this was the thanks I got? Two bankers treating me like a deadbeat?

44. More than once, over my first cup of coffee in the morning, or while trying to fall asleep at night, I'd tell myself: Maybe I'm a fool? Maybe this whole damn shoe thing is a fool's errand? Maybe, I thought. Maybe.

45. I felt drained, but exhilarated. I felt everything I ever hoped to feel after a day's work. I felt like an artist, a creator.

46. I look back over the decades and see him toiling in his workshop, Mrs. Bowerman carefully helping, and I get goosebumps. He was Edison in Menlo Park, Da Vinci in Florence, Tesla in Wardenclyffe. Divinely inspired. I wonder if he knew, if he had any clue, that he was the Daedalus of sneakers, that he was making history, remaking an industry, transforming the way athletes would run and stop and jump for generations. I wonder if he could conceive in that moment all that he'd done. All that would follow. I know I couldn't.

47. I looked down the table. Everyone was sinking, slumping forward. I looked at Johnson. He was staring at the papers before him, and there was something in his handsome face, some quality I'd never seen there before. Surrender. Like everyone else in the room, he was giving up. The nation's economy was in the tank, a recession was under way. Gas lines, political gridlock, rising unemployment, Nixon being Nixon-Vietnam. It seemed like the end times. Everyone in the room had already been worrying about how they were going to make the rent, pay the light bill. Now this. I cleared my throat. "So...in other words," I said. I cleared my throat again, pushed aside my yellow legal pad. "What I'm trying to say is, we’ve got them right where we want them."

48. “This is-the moment," I said. "This is the moment we've been waiting for. Our moment. No more selling someone else's brand.

49. I told myself, Don’t forget this. Do not forget. I told myself there was much to be learned from such a display of passion, whether you were running a mile or a company.

50. Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories. And defeats.

51. The first time, the clerk at the rental car company declined my credit card. Then confiscated it. When Cale tried to smooth it over, offering up his credit card, the clerk said he wouldn't accept Cale's card, either, because Cale was with me. Guilt by association. Talk about your deadbeats. I couldn't bring myself to look Cale in the eye. Here we were, a dozen years out of Stanford, and while he was an eminently successful businessman, I was still struggling to keep my head above water. He'd known I was struggling, but now he knew exactly how much. I was mortified. He was always there at the big moments, the triumphant moments, but this humiliating little moment, I feared, would define me in his eyes.

52. I would search my mind and heart and the only thing I could come up with was this word-“winning." It wasn't much, but it was far, far better than the alternative. Whatever happened, I just didn't want to lose. Losing was death. Blue Ribbon was my third child, 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.

53. I remembered that the best way to reinforce your knowledge of a subject is to share it.

54. My management style wouldn't have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that's how I'd always liked people to treat me.

55. He didn't compete against the opponent so much as against the rules-the structure.

56. I said maybe I didn't want to go public-ever. I don’t want to lose control. That’s my greatest fear.

57. Above all, I regret not spending more time with my sons. And yet I know that this regret clashes with my secret regret—that I can’t do it all over again. God, how I wish I could relive the whole thing.

58. Whatever comes, don’t stop. That is the advice I managed to give myself and somehow managed to take. Half a century later, I believe it’s the best advice—may be the only advice—any of us should ever give.

If you like reading stuff like this, you will like listening to my podcast Founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and find ideas you can use in your work. 

About David Senra

Learn from history's greatest founders. Every week I read a biography of an entrepreneur and tell you what I learned on Founders podcast