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. Continue reading “Shoe Dog” by Phil Knight: The Reluctant Tycoon Who Just Did It →