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.”
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Want the full text of all articles in RSS? Become a subscriber, or learn more. ### Summary - Face your fears head on, or risk having them hold you back from realizing your dreams. - Courage is a key component in overcoming your fears, and there are strategies to help you build this courage. - One such method that's been used for centuries is exposure – putting yourself in fearful situations, or bringing them to mind through your imagination, to train your brain that it's safe. - There's a right and wrong way to do exposure therapy, and in this piece we dive into the most effective ways to do it. - Who should be doing exposure, and on what – as well as the benefits of facing one's fears head on, and the lasting impact it can have. - "Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: 'Is this the condition that I feared?' It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. #### By Dan Shipper / Superorganizers