Genre: Nonfiction/Memoir
Pages: 382
Looking at the real heroes, mentors, achievers, and big names in our lives, whether domestically or in the now global village that is our world, it is easy to fall prey to overwhelmingly awe and marvel at their present-day success. Blame it on lack of perspective or impatience, we’re becoming more and more eager to become one of those next big names without really understanding them. Especially when our world measures our worth on such materialistic success, on outward fame, and on meaningless fan-following. But losing our patience and lacking the perspective of how things come to be so successful, is a counterproductive mindset.
In words of the brilliant Henry David Thoreau, “Success only comes to those who are too busy looking for it”. Maybe we’ve lost the philosophy, the meaning, and the ways to a successful life. We are not, as Thoreau says in his revelationary line, busy working, lost in passion, in tireless effort of becoming something, of realizing our dreams, of inventing something, of making the world a better place. But rather we are busy in idolizing those who have achieved these things, which isn’t a totally bad thing unless it fails to inspire us. We either live our lives as we find it, or are too frustrated at why our day-dreams and superficial efforts are not doing the job.
That’s where memoirs come in. They show the all-making, all-important, and all-lost beginnings of the now seemingly flashy, effortless, and illusional endings. Beginnings indeed tend to lose themselves in the endings, because the overwhelming success is all we want to see. Definitely not the difficult, real, and honest stories of how these successes actually came to be.
Living in Pakistan, I’ve only visited the Nike stores a couple of times in the big malls, let alone trying their shoes, or thinking about purchasing them. When the price-tag of a pair of Nike shoes equals a one-month salary of a working young man, definitely no one would buy Nikes and starve while wearing them. However, next time I cross a Nike store here, I’d know how it came to be the Nike it is today – I’d know its never-told, buried beginning – and I’d feel, maybe, better, I guess.
Reading this honest, inspiring, telling, and intimate story of one of the big names of the shoe industry, Nike, by Phil Knight was a really informative and exhilarating experience for me. As a student of bachelors in Business Administration, not only did I find this honest book more relatable, but also eye-opening.
The story starts when our young Phil, from the ordinary town of runners, Oregon, goes on his crazy idea of world tour. After Hawaii, his next stop is Japan, where he meets the Onitsukas, a shoe making company, and in a slightly dishonest but eagerly smart meeting steals his first deal of 50 pair of Tiger shoes which he’ll sell back in America. And the first thing he asks his father after coming home from his explorative world tour is whether the shoes have arrived. Oregon, we then come to know, has a lot of shoe dogs, people crazy about running and shoes. With relentless effort, right people, and some luck, Phil’s made up company Blue Ribbons shoots in America as a trading shoe company of Japan’s Tiger shoes. But the marathon has only began. Big and gut-wrenching challenges, never ending efforts, anxious possibilities of losing it all in a moment, and the ever-facing need to expand – Phil and his team’s long journey only starts.
And all of it prepares them for their soon-to-be-born company Nike, whose birth was both well availed opportunity and a fight back from the disastrous break-up with the Onitsukas. But as toddlers with a new start-up, their rough journey continues. Phil’s honest storytelling lets the readers into the brutal lives of him, his team, and Nikes throughout all those years as they fought one challenge after another, while never giving up, and despite it all, growing.
Passion, risks, winging it, teamwork, growth, doubts, failures, victories, family and family-issues, friendship, cut-throat competition, life-long partnerships, witty business and a beginning’s story – Phil’s memoir ‘Shoe Dog’ has them all with an intimate honesty which is just beautiful to read.
“Cowards and heroes feel the same the things, it is how they respond to them that distinguishes one from the other”.
(Ratings
4/5 **** Sep 21, 2020)