William J. O'Rourke

In 1971, Phil Knight was teaching accounting at Portland State University. One day, he overheard a graphic design student say that she couldn’t afford to take a painting class. Knight paid her $35 to design a logo for his start-up shoe company. When he saw the design, he said, “I don't know if I like it, but maybe it will grow on me.” Knight didn’t have time to fuss over the logo. "We had a deadline," he explains. He had signed a contract with a factory to produce 3,000 pairs of Nike's first shoe. "Production was starting on the shoe that Friday." Before then, they needed a logo. “You don’t like it?” Knight’s chief operating officer asked of the student’s design. “I don’t love it,” Knight said, “but we’re out of time. It’ll have to do.” Takeaway 1: It's said that if not for constraints and deadlines, nothing would get made. George Lucas, for instance, worked on drafts of the first Star Wars for years. "I never arrived at a degree of satisfaction where I thought the screenplay was perfect," he said. But then he struck a deal with a movie executive from United Artists—"At that point, it became an obligation," Lucas said. "If I hadn't been forced to shoot the film, I would doubtless still be rewriting it now." Takeaway 2: At Nike's IPO in 1980, Phil Knight gave the student who designed the Swoosh 500 shares. She never sold. Since the IPO, there have been 7 stock splits. So those 500 shares have become 64,000 shares. At the time of this writing, Nike is at $110/share. $110/share x 64,000 shares = $7,040,000. It makes me think of something Robert Greene once told me: “Above all else, focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills are like gold—a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine." Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!