Phil Knight Quotes

It’s never just business. It never will be. If it ever does become just business, that will mean that business is very bad.

But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.

Starting my own business was the only thing that made life’s other risks — marriage, Vegas, alligator wrestling — seem like sure things. But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons. I wasn’t much for setting goals, but this goal kept flashing through my mind every day, until it became my internal chant: Fail fast.

The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.

Driving back to Portland I’d puzzle over my sudden success at selling. I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.

I wanted to build something that was my own, something I could point to and say: I made that. It was the only way I saw to make life meaningful.

Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome.

He was easy to talk to, and easy not to talk to-equally important qualities in a friend. Essential in a travel companion.

History is one long processional of crazy ideas.

There were many ways down Mount Fuji, according to my guidebook, but only one way up. Life lesson in that, I thought.

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.

Don’t go to sleep one night, wrote Rūmī, the thirteenth-century Persian poet. What you most want will come to you then.

I refused to even consider ordering less inventory. Grow or die, that’s what I believed, no matter the situation.

You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.” I

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