Phil Knight Quotes

In many ways my father was a conventional Episcopalian, a believer in Jesus Christ. But he also worshipped another secret deity — respectability. Colonial house, beautiful wife, obedient kids, my father enjoyed having these things, but what he really cherished was his friends and neighbors knowing he had them. He liked being admired. He liked doing a vigorous backstroke each day in the mainstream.

It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.

One day, fearing that I was coming down with the flu, I stopped by Bowerman’s office to say that I wouldn’t be able to practice that afternoon. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Who’s the coach of this team?” “You are.” “Well, as coach of this team I’m telling you to get your ass out there. And by the way . . . we’re going to have a time trial today.” I was close to tears. But I held it together, channeled all my emotion into my run, and posted one of my best times of the year. As I walked off the track I glowered at Bowerman. Happy now, you son of a — ? He looked at me, checked his stopwatch, looked at me again, nodded. He’d tested me. He’d broken me down and remade me, just like a pair of shoes. And I’d held up. Thereafter, I was truly one of his Men of Oregon. From that day on, I was a tiger.

Bowerman was forever griping that people make the mistake of thinking only elite Olympians are athletes. But everyone’s an athlete, he said. If you have a body, you’re an athlete.

I trusted them, wholly, and didn’t look over their shoulders, and that bred a powerful two-way loyalty. My management style wouldn’t have worked for people who wanted to be guided, every step, but this group found it liberating, empowering. I let them be, let them do, let them make their own mistakes, because that’s how I’d always liked people to treat me.

Why is it always so hard to get started?

It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it — this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.

Oneness — in some way, shape, or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.

But I was wrong. His parents had a little bit more, and they asked if I needed that, too. And I said yes. And they gave me their last three thousand dollars, draining their savings down to zero. How I wished I could put that check in my desk drawer and not cash it. But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. On my way out the door I stopped. I asked them: “Why are you doing this?” “Because,” Woodell’s mother said, “if you can’t trust the company your son is working for, then who can you trust?

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

Like books, sports give people a sense of having lived other lives, of taking part in other people's victories. And defeats. When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

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

For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.

Someone somewhere once said that business is war without bullets, and I tended to agree.

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some service or product to the lives of strangers and make them happier or healthier or safer or better and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly - the way everything should be done but seldom is, you are participating more fully in the whole vast human drama. More than simply alive, you are helping others to live more fully and if that’s business then alright - call me a businessman.