Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. Fascinating story about an incredible entrepreneur.

Shoe Dog might have been my favorite read of the year, its a very inspiring and highly entertaining story. Regardless of what you think of Nike you can learn a lot about determination and grit from this book. I would recommend it to anyone with an entrepreneurial spirit.

Being 25 I am automatically ruled out of giving life advice, but perhaps read something like Shoe Dog and then make a decision. Regardless of what you do, it isn't going to be easy. (team people)

I am reading Shoe Dog, the memoir of Phil Knight

It is a pretty amazing store of how he started Nike

Shoe dog by Phil Knight, Nike Founder.

Best book on entrepreneurship journey, I have ever read.

The book is a heartfelt autobiography.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight.
A memoir of how Nike was build from scratch. Written is a witty funny way that can be totally funny and brutally honest.

in addition to Bad Blood and Shoe Dog that were mentioned numerous times already I would add "Rocket Men" by Robert Kurston. The story of Apollo 8. I'm not a space geek but the story is very interesting and well written. Audible book is very good.

Not done with it yet but listening to a great audiobook from Audible called Shoe Dog about the founding of Nike. Great story of the tough grind of starting a business. Recommended on the Acquired podcast.

1) De Vita Beata ("On the Happy Life") - Seneca

2) Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

3) Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman! - Richard Feynman

No. 1 is a bit of a tricky read but completely worth it in my opinion, never have I read anything that has changed my everyday mindset so much.

Phil Knight's autobiography Shoe Dog was really interesting. This is what he did when he started Nike. He kept his day job as an accountant for a while.

I can confirm Shoe Dog is an incredible book. Bill's summation is right - a how-to on building a company this is not, but it's still very much worth reading.

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
by Phil Knight

Bad Blood-
Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos. - It is not a autobiography but I could not put it down.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (Maybe some more biographies)

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Hard thing about hard things

Thinking Fast and Slow

Origin by Dan Brown

Shoe Dog, the memoir of Phil Knight and how he started Nike. Great read so far.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big by Scott Adams is another one I really enjoyed reading. The systems verse goals approach was something that really appealed to me.

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

I read this book based on the recommendation of Bill Gates. It was one of the best books I have read in a while

Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight (Nike). The best business book I've read in 5 years (maybe more). Really well written, too.

The Undoing Project, Micheal Lewis. The story behind "Thinking Fast and Slow" but much easier to read.

Two worthwhile autobiographies - Phil Knight's "Shoe Dog" (about the growth of Nike) and Kay Graham's "Personal History" (about the Washington Post)

Zen mind, beginner's mind - Shunryu Suzuki. I don't think it's life advice. But, it certainly had a profound impact on my life.

As an entrepreneur, I found the best way to learn about life is to read biographies of successful people, especially the ones that speak of the transformations.

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight
Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein - Walter Isaacson

I have a post at my blog here: http://westby.io/5-books-ive-read-2018-1/

Some other books I read that I'd recommend:
- Anathem
- Deep Work
- A Canticle for Leibowitz
- Into Thin Air
- Shoe Dog
- Happiness Hypothesis

1. 10% Happier

2. Traction

3. Unshakable

4. Shoe Dog (This has been my favorite book thus far of 2017, I did not think it would of left such a lasting impression on me about life and success and business)

5. Start with Why

6. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight (founder of Nike).

Hands down the best autobiography I have read. I personally learned a lot about how a brand is created rather than a business. How businesses were built even before VC capital was a thing. And how life is all about making tradeoffs.

I thought Shoe Dog was a great book, although my favorite book of the year was a Gates Notes recommendation for summer reading-- The Vital Question, by Nick Lane. If you're interested in biology and the origins of life, it makes some provocative claims, and backs them up. If this doesn't change how you think about life on earth (and elsewhere), I don't know what will...

https://www.gatesnotes.com/About-Bill-Gates/Summer-Books-201...

https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Question-Evolution-Origins-Comp...

Shoe dog is a great book - about how you can afford to be a terrible business person if you have rich parents who bail you out and can live out of their garage. I don't see why people are so impressed by it? Nike shoes aren't even that good today.

How to mistreat your allies (Jeff Johnson)

How to mislead your suppliers and almost lose in court.

Do the marketing methods they used, which is perhaps the impressive part, even work today? Do you show up to track meets with shoes from an unknown brand? I don't think so.
Do things that don't scale, but not the exact same things that worked decades ago.

1) Shoe Dog - Phil Knight

2) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - Mark Manson

3) Start with Why - Simon Sinek

- Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

- Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight

- Rework by Jason Fried

- Rocket Boys by Homer Hickam

- Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand

- The Martian by Andy Weir

- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard Feynman

1. Bad Blood, John Careyou

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

3. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

4. Zero to one Peter Thiel

5. The republic – Plato

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

7. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Kindle Edition

8. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

9. Never split the difference

10. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover

11. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

12. Economy course: https://www.core-econ.org/

Glad to see Shoe Dog on this list, that was one of the most memorable books I listened to this year (the audiobook narration was awesome). It's always interesting hearing the origin story and struggles of a company that was the underdog in the industry for so long, and ended up on top. I thought Phil Knight's account of his journey with Nike was really honest and thoughtful, I had no idea how long it took them to get momentum, or how many times they were on the brink of bankruptcy. Can't recommend this enough, I'm looking forward to reading it a second time next year.

When Breath Becomes Air - Paul Kalanithi (highly recommended, but come prepared)

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - J. K. Rowling, Jack Thorne, John Tiffany (recommended for HP nostalgia)

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance (recommended)

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight (highly recommended)

Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell (meh)

The Gene - Siddhartha Mukherjee (currently reading, recommended so far)

What you get depends a lot on where you're looking - it's true that there's a lot of this clickbaity entrepreneur writing that's light on details on heavy on storytelling, but there's also a lot of great content about entrepreneurs out there.

My advice is to stop reading blog posts and articles, and start getting into content that goes deeper. Listen to the podcast How I Built This - it does a better job of going deep and addressing both failures and successes. Read books - stories of businesses like Shoe Dog by Phil Knight are great, and even if they're autobiographical and thus destined to be slanted to the positive side of things, they still have a lot of real info to dig into.

I'm skeptical of this person's ability to "know" what they don't want to read. E.g., they are recommended Shoe Dog and a King novel, which they claim they don't want to read. However, if other people have read similar books and rated them similarly to this person and have read Shoe Dog and that King novel and rated those well, then this person may like those books. It seems they are assuming they won't like them, but not for particularly strong reasons. One of my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami and I would have rated Colorless Tsukuru a 2 or 3. If that were the only Murakami novel I had read and I made the same assumptions this person made, I would have missed out on some of my favorite books.

I read his book Idea Man, a few years back. I still remember the parts where he travelled the world with his family. Beautiful journey. Most books of people so successful are too inclined towards their work or general advice. It was refreshing to read about somebody you could relate to just like Shoe Dog by Phil Knight. That they had lives outside of their work and went through worse days than most of us will ever face. And yet, he made a difference in the world he lived.

End of the World Running Club - I picked it up for £1 on kindle and its about a group running the length of the UK to make the boat leaving the UK following a asteroid strike

Also liking Shoe Dog by Phil Knight at the moment

Some books I've enjoyed in the past year:

Wish to laugh?

* Born a Crime, by Trevor Noah

* Yes please! by Amy Poehler

Think?

* Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

* Where Good Ideas Come from, by Steven Johnson

* The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene: An Intimate History both by Mukherjee Siddhartha

Learn (more) about great thinkers?

* Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci or Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson

* Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight

Yuval Noah Harari 3 good ones:

* Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

* Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

* 21 lessons for the 21st century

From time to time, I try to put some good ones over here: https://greenido.wordpress.com/?s=book

One thing Phil Knight wrote in Shoe Dog that has stuck with me is something similar:

"If all you see are problems, you're not seeing clearly"

There are often times when I feel like "every way is up" and that there are only bad outcomes; this quote leads me to re-think whether or not I'm seeing the issue clearly or not.

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand.
Story of human grit and survival in the Pacific WWII theater that I hadn't heard of before. I was blown away by the story, and about what I learned about the War that I didn't already know.

Creativity Inc. Re-read it this year, re-inspired.

The Outsider - Stephen King.
Well written, engrossing but a typical Stephen King novel

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight.
Story of Nike. Phenomenal.

Bad blood - John Carreyrou.
Story of Theranos. Absolutely crazy read.

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer.
Good insights on strategy

And if you want to go beyond computer history, then I'd add

- "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Richard Feynman

- "The hard things about hard things", Ben Horowitz

- "Shoe Dog - A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", Phil Knight

- "Bad Blood", John Carreyrou [about Elizabeth Holmes]

- "Trillion Dollar Coach" [about the life of Bill Campbell]

The share of young high tech companies seems pretty consistent over the decades, with the exception of dot com, which was no doubt an aberration. Not the norm.

Also, it has ALWAYS been a tremendous risk and challenge starting your own venture. Likely always will be, because there is also tremendous rewards for making it happen. If anything, right now seems like one of the easiest / best times to start a high tech venture in history. Plentiful angel and VC capital. Incredible resources and examples teaching you how to do it (YC, incubators, internet). Flexible tools that can scale up and down depending on company size / need (AWS, open source technologies, facebook / google ads).

To put things in context, I just finished Shoe Dog - the story of Phil Knight / Nike - back in the 60's they didn't even have the concept of VC. His biggest challenge was just getting someone to loan him a little cash so he could finance his inventory which was flying off the shelf! The point is that entrepreneurship is destined to be about tackling a very hard problem that nobody else has solved before - in the 60's that was simply getting financing to fund expansion. Today it's something different. In both cases though, it requires being on the edge and pushing the boundary. I would rather be alive today, playing this game. While the gatekeepers are still around, they have much less power than they used to.

Keep your expenses extremely low. That applies to any non-VC context generally.

People borrow money from friends & family, credit cards, or from their assets such as a home.

People lean on savings or take a tax hit and pull capital out of a 401k.

Smaller angel investors are a common avenue (someone that might put in $15k or $50k). They have very little in common with bigger VC investors, they're more like taking an investment from a friend or family member in terms of the actual relationship of dealing with them and their expectations.

Ideally, the absolute best way to non-VC fund, is by securing sales immediately. That is, to not start a business until you have your first customer. Now, that works for some things and not for others obviously, some businesses do not lend themselves easily to that manner of self-funding out of the gate.

If you're talking about a business that's already growing well but needs serious non-VC financing, that's very challenging. If you can demonstrate consistent growth over time and the ability to generate a profit, there are some options for debt financing with specialty financial firms. Traditional bank loans usually won't cut in that situation, that's usually a path if you're operating a franchise chain or convenience store, very traditional predictable businesses (ideally with some assets the bank can take if it all goes south).

The best book I've ever read detailing the struggle of self-financing a very successful company, is Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, in founding & building Nike. They were doubling sales every year for the first dozen years and nobody wanted to fund that growth, they were constantly on the edge of bankruptcy. They had no serious assets, no cash pile, no meaningful profit - all that growth was going right back into larger orders in a repeating cycle; so banks absolutely hated them and were aggressively reluctant to provide sales financing. It's fascinating to read what Knight had to go through to enable Nike to survive, how many times it almost went bankrupt despite meteoric growth.

Here's my whole list for the year in reverse chronological:

- Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance

- Tools of Titan by Tim Ferriss

- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen

- Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction by Chris Sims

- Build Better Products by Laura Klein

- Capital in the Twenty-first Century by Thomas Picketty

- Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

- Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez

- Impossible to Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin

- Grit by Angela Duckworth

- Love Sense by Sue Johnson

- Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

- Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers

- Smarter Faster Better by Charles Duhigg

- Sprint by Jake Knapp

- Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb

- Becoming a Supple Leopard by Kelly Starrett

- Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock

- The Inner Game Of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey

- Design Sprint by Richard Banfield

- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn

- The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

- Advanced Swift by Chris Eidoff

- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Some of these books are older and had been on my list for awhile. Some were released this year. Most of these books are very good. I usually stop reading bad books by the end of the first chapter.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight ( Nike Founder)

The journey of how nike became what it is today. It is a must read because, it gives an in depth knowledge about how Companies used to be built without the VC's.

I don't know if this comment is serious, but I'd suggest you explore the idea that you don't know, what you don't know. With a few years of experience, you can feel comfortable in a technology stack and seen and learnt from a few mistakes. You may know the names of other areas, and played around with them a bit, but you won't understand their pitfalls. This is not enough to make decisions. Software is not easy, it's far too easy to make reasonable design choices, that turn out in the long term to be poor. These can cripple large scale systems.

There is so much that you can't learn from books. Reading Mythical Man Month does not make you Fred Brooks, reading Shoe Dog does not make you Phil Knight, nor does reading a medium article on event driven systems make you ready to implement one.

Imagine that the college of surgery acted in the same way, a surgical trainee who has worked for a few years and reads a lot may feel comfortable taking the lead in a surgery, but will be out of their depth the moment things deviate from normal. I spoke to a surgeon about this once, and he described how he taught a particular procedure. At one point he has his student reach in to the body, with the explaination that 'it should feel like this'. No book can substitute that experience.

In no particular order.

Empires of Light, by Jonnes. Titan, by Chernow. The Wright Brothers, by McCullough. His Excellency, by Ellis. The Wizard of Menlo Park, by Stross. I Invented the Modern Age, by Snow. Dealers of Lightning, by Hiltzik. Margin of Safety, by Klarman. Masters of Doom, by Kushner. Andrew Carnegie, by Nasaw. Infidel, by Hirsi Ali. Buffett, by Lowenstein. Where Wizards Stay Up Late, by Hafner. Shoe Dog, by Knight. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, by Rhodes.

Shoe Dog by Phil Knight https://www.amazon.com/Shoe-Dog-Memoir-Creator-Nike/dp/15011....

I'm a historical fiction nut & as it just so happened the Sharpe series from Bernard Cornwell (21 books) had been too long on my wish list, waiting to be read. Finally, got around to finishing it this year.

Usually, I'm real bad at reading & finishing non-software non-fiction; but managed ~10 of those this year.

Enjoyed reading Shoe Dog by Phil Knight & I contain multitudes by Ed Yong. I keep going back to Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman quite a bit. Need to read more in 2017.

I read 47 books so far:

* Oxygen (Lane)

* The Vital Question (Lane)

* Mitochondria and the meaning of life (Lane)

* Life Ascending (Lane)

* Shoe Dog (Knight)

* Heat (Buford)

* Thinking Fast And Slow (Daniel K, 3rd time reading it)

* Fluent Forever (Wyner)

* Dark Money (Mayer)

* Elon Musk (Vance)

* The Black Swan (Taleb, 5th time reading it)

Shoe Dog: about Nike

* In Defense of Liberal Edication By Farred Zakaria

* Confidence Men By Ros Suskind

* Dark Money by Jane Meyer

* Better by Atul Gawande

* The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

* Essentialism by Greg Mckeown

* Contagious by Jonah Berger

* Sapiens by Yuval Harari

* The Pentagons Brain by Annie Jacobson

* Shoe Dog by Phil Knight

* The Only Game in town by Mohamed El-Erian

* The Industries of Future By Alec Ross

Books I read that I would recommend:

Deep Work - Cal Newport

The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business - Charles Duhigg

Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance - Angela Duckworth

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise - Anders Ericsson, Robert Pool

The War of Art - Steven Pressfield

Do the Work - Steven Pressfield

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future - Ashlee Vance

Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike - Phil Knight

The one that surprised me the most was the last one on that list. I don't usually read memoirs but this one was recommended by a few people so I picked it up and found the honesty with which he describes his mistakes refreshing and useful.

> Unfortunately these days banks don't extend large enough lines of credit for most growth businesses.

That has been a universal problem for growth businesses in the US going back to the WW2 era (particularly cash thin product companies that have to plow their sales right back into growth).

Phil Knight's Shoe Dog book has an almost unbelievable account of lines-of-credit hell (despite Nike's perpetual, extreme growth - basically doubling sales every year for the first ~15 years - they couldn't find any US banks willing to fund the growth; a Japanese import/export bank ended up saving them numerous times as several large US banks dumped their business).

I feel you and others in this thread.

I don't know if I really know how to deal with failure but I am slowly learning to prioritize other thing like my kids above business success. It is very conflicting process, I mean if I am giving up on my dreams, then how can I tell them to chase their dreams. What is more important, to spend time with them or to be role model?

One book that really helped me is "Shoe Dog." It is story Phil Knight and how he created Nike. Unlike some other biographies, Phil Knight described really how stressful it is to run a business. But related to parenting, it seems like he was not very close to his kids. And then unfortunate death of his elder son. Those things make me want to spend more time with my kids.

However, I still have this feeling that I am a failure, haven't really done anything worthwhile with my life.

At one point, I decided to get professional help but the cost was too much. Then I have tried using CBT to help myself establish realistic business and career goals but it doesn't work that well. It has helped me realize that I do have conflicting narcissistic grand goals. My financial goals had been:

1. Be the richest person on the earth ever\
2. Okay maybe just make one billion dollars\
3. Fine let's do just $10,000,000 - My current goal\

But then I have conflicting but a bit more realistic goals like:

1. Build passive-income business\
2. Build socially good startup\
3. Be a writer that brings social change\
4. Build a mental health non-profit\
5. Build outdoors and fitness business but I spend time outside not like CrossFit or 5k races founders who sit inside the offices\
6. Don't want to deal with office politics, so no chance I will make C-level salary\
7. Never work for more than 40 hours for someone else's business\

--

I have started journaling, doesn't help when typing but I find it very useful when using pen and paper or iPad and Apple Pencil.

I think I really want to be a good father, but I don't know how to be one. Someone once posted here that the best way to show kids that it is okay to pursue their dreams is by pursuing our dreams.

That's a fair point, but I chose those specific examples because there was a power imbalance. Brin was a co-founder of Google, where Amanda Rosenberg worked (dated for at least a bit). Bill Gates met his wife Melinda when she was a Microsoft employee (still married, 23 years).

And Phil Knight (founder of Nike) actually met his wife when she was a student in his accounting class (power imbalance #1). He then hired her at Nike (power imbalance #2) and eventually initiated a romantic relationship with her[1]. They're still married today, ~50 years later.

[1]This courtship, and the entire Phil Knight/ Nike story is told in his memoir, "Shoe Dog", which has 4.8 stars on Amazon, is highly recommended by Bill Gates, and is the best business book I've ever read.

  - Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon by Valley John Carreyrou
  - Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep by Matthew Walker
  - The Magicians by Lev Grossman
  - Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of NIKE by Phil Knight
  - How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
  - Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World by Hans Rosling
  - Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E. Frankl
  - Deep Work by Cal Newport
  - Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
  - The Phoenix Project by D.M. Cain
  - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
  - Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Tia T. Farmer
  - Leonardo da Vinci by Walter Isaacson
  - Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss
  - Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink
  - Linear Algebra by Jim Hefferon
  - 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson
  - Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall
  - Skin in the Game by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  - Atomic Habits by James Clear

Most are about self improvement...i wonder if this bias says something about those who recommended the books. Was hoping for some new fiction books to put on my audiobook list.

Sapiens/Homo Deus - History of Humankind. Also goes into topics of how money came to be and evolved over time. Homo Deus is the follow up book by the same author which focuses on humanity’s future.

Shoe Dog - Nike founder Phil Knight shares the story of the company’s early days.

Chasing the Scream - History and impact of drug criminalisation (War on Drugs). The author describes the War on Drugs (mostly in US but also describes other countries like Portugal where the policies on drugs are different)

I can say I've got through something similar.

A book that made me very introspective was David Brook's The Road To Character . It made me ask my self a lot of questions which I have documented here https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/packages/55/david-brooks-humi...

Another book was Paul Kalanathi's When Breath Becomes Air I also copied some quotes, questions, and answers here https://www.deepthoughtapp.com/packages/135/paul-kalanithis-...

I'd recommend reading biographies because they can help you give perspective about how a person leads their life. The ones I found thoroughly fun was Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, Phil Knight's Shoe Dog.

These books were my favorites this year:

- Alibaba - The house that Jack Ma built by Duncan Clark https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25817524-alibaba

- Shoe Dog - A memoir by the creator of NIKE by Phil Knight https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27220736-shoe-dog

- Originals - How non-conformists move the world by Adam Grant https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25614523-originals