Fear, Courage, and Willingness

Nerves almost killed Nike before it got off the ground.

At 26 Phil Knight was running a growing sneaker business importing Japanese-made running shoes to America. He’d found a sneaker in Japan called Tigers that were lighter and faster than anything on the U.S. market. He was partnered with Olympic coach Bill Bowerman, and he’d figured out a sales strategy that meant he was taking orders faster than he could fill them. “I was on a roll,” he said. 

Until the letter arrived, and his business imploded. 

The letter was from a man, just back from meetings in Japan, who claimed that he was now the exclusive distributor of Tiger sneakers in America. “Since he’d heard that I was selling Tigers, I was therefore poaching, and he ordered me—ordered me!—to stop.”

Phil didn’t take the news well. He was a self-described shy, pale, rail-thin kid who couldn’t handle rejection. “I went into a deep funk. Each night I’d sit with my family at dinner, moving my mother’s pot roast and vegetables around my plate. Then I’d sit with my father in the nook, staring glumly at the TV.” He considered going back to selling encyclopedias door to door. 

He wrote letters to Onitsuka, the Japanese company who manufactured Tigers asking them to change their mind, but got no response. After a few months of waiting, he’d basically given up on the idea of selling shoes at all. 

But then at the end of summer of that year, he had a change of heart: 

“[I had a] Crazy Idea, and somehow, despite being dizzy with existential angst, and fears about the future…I [decided] that the world is made up with crazy ideas.”