Shoe Dog. A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE

When you hired an accountant, you knew he or she could count. When you hired a lawyer, you knew he or she could talk. When you hired a marketing expert, or product developer, what did you know? Nothing. You couldn’t predict what he or she could do, or if he or she could do anything.

If you showed any weakness, any sentimentality, you were dead.

The average person takes seventy-five hundred steps a day, 274 million steps over the course of a long life, the equivalent of six times around the globe —shoe dogs, it seemed to me, simply wanted to be part of that journey.

Shoe dogs were people who devoted themselves wholly to the making, selling, buying, or designing of shoes.

No news was bad news, no news was good news —but news was always some sort of news.

We’re fighting over slices of a pie that doesn’t exist.

He looked at numbers the way the poet looks at clouds, the way the geologist looks at rocks. He could draw from them rhapsodic song, demotic truths.

When you run around an oval track, or down an empty road, you have no real destination. At least, none that can fully justify the effort. The act itself becomes the destination.