#418 Phil Knight: Founder of Nike

**David Senra** (0:00)
I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun. I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my clothes, and laced up my shoes. Then I slept quietly out the back door.
There were no cars, no people, no signs of life. I was all alone, the world to myself. What a beautiful place to be from, I thought. I was proud to call Oregon my home, but I felt a stab of regret too. Oregon struck some people as the kind of place where nothing big had ever happened. If we Oregonians were famous for anything, it was an old, old trail that we had to blaze to get here. The best teacher I ever had, one of the finest man 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 and the weak died along the way. That leaves us. Phil Knight is quoting his co-founder of Nike, Bill Bowerman. Some rare strain of pioneer spirit was discovered along the trail, my teacher believed. Some outsized sense of possibility mixed with diminished capacity for pessimism and it was our job to keep that strain alive. That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962, I'd recently blazed my own trail back home after seven long years away.
It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains. Stranger still was living again with my parents sleeping in my childhood bed. Late at night, I'd lay on my back staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons thinking, this is me?
Still?
On paper, I thought I'm an adult. I graduated from a good college, University of Oregon, earned a master's from a top business school, Stanford, survived a year-long hitch in the army. My resume said that I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a 24-year-old man in full. So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid? I have found it quite difficult to say what or who exactly I was, or who I 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, and above all, different. I wanted to leave a mark on the world. I wanted to win.
No, that's not right. I simply didn't want to lose. And then it happened. 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 lays somewhere in that moment when the ball is in midair, when both boxers sense the approach of the bell, when the runner's 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.
Now, as I begin to clip off one brisk six-minute mile after another, I asked myself, what if there was a way without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel, to play all the time instead of working, or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing.
The world was so overrun with war and pain and misery, that daily grind was so exhausting and often unjust, maybe the only answer I thought was to find some prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy, that seemed fun, that seemed a good fit, and chase it with an athlete's single-minded dedication and purpose. Like it or not, life is a game. Whoever denies that truth, whoever simply refuses to play, gets left on the sidelines. And I didn't want that. More than anything, that was the thing I did not want.
Which led, as always, to my crazy idea.
Maybe, I thought, just maybe, I need to take one more look at my crazy idea. Maybe my crazy idea just might work?
Maybe.
No.
No, I thought, running faster, faster, running as if I was chasing someone and being chased all at the same time. It will work. By God, I'll make it work. No, maybe is about it. I was suddenly smiling, almost laughing, drenched in sweat, moving as gracefully and as effortlessly as I ever had. I saw my crazy idea shining up ahead, and it didn't look all that crazy. It didn't even look like an idea. It looked like a place. It looked like a person or some life force that existed long before I did. Separate from me, but also part of me, waiting for me.