Phil Knight didn’t want to be rich. He didn’t want to be famous. He just wanted to make something. To build something. Something that felt… alive.

Shoe Dog, his memoir about the early days of Nike, is not the polished corporate origin story you’d expect from a multibillion-dollar brand. It’s raw. Restless.

Full of bad decisions, existential dread, and occasional brilliance. It reads less like a CEO memoir and more like a confessional travelogue of a man trying to outrun his own uncertainty.

And it’s magnificent.

Knight begins the story in 1962, a 24-year-old with no business plan, just a crazy idea he calls his “Crazy Idea”: to import Japanese running shoes and sell them in the U.S. That first order?

He places it using money borrowed from his dad and lies about having a company.

He calls it “Blue Ribbon.”

Nike doesn’t even exist yet.

What follows is not the story of an empire being built—it’s the story of a man barely hanging on. Knight is broke most of the time. He’s stiffing suppliers, dodging banks, fighting off lawsuits, and running his company out of a trunk and later a shoebox-stacked office.

His co-founder, Bill Bowerman, spends more time blowing up waffle irons trying to invent better soles than actually running the business. And somehow, it works. Sort of.

The magic of Shoe Dog is that Knight never pretends he was in control. In fact, he admits over and over again that he wasn’t.

He had no five-year plan. No grand strategy. Just a manic drive to keep the company alive for one more week. One more shipment. One more line of credit.

And he surrounds himself with a cast of misfits—guys who chain-smoke, crack bad jokes, wear hideous suits, and bleed for the cause. These people, Knight says, were Nike.

This isn’t the sanitized version of entrepreneurship you find on LinkedIn. Knight talks about panic attacks. About being sued by his own suppliers. About losing his son in a tragic accident—and how even the greatest IPO in footwear history couldn’t soothe that grief.

It’s vulnerable and unvarnished, and for that reason, it feels deeply true.

The writing (with the help of a ghostwriter, likely J.R. Moehringer of Open and Spare fame) is poetic at times, but never pretentious. There’s humor, heartache, and a stubborn sense of forward momentum that mirrors the Nike ethos.

You don’t have to be a sneakerhead to love this book. You just have to be someone who’s ever tried to build something, felt imposter syndrome, or doubted everything and pushed forward anyway.

In the end, Shoe Dog isn’t a Nike story.

It’s a human story.

A painfully honest portrait of a man who followed his gut through years of chaos, just hoping it would all mean something.

Spoiler: it did.