You tell yourself that you’re running toward some goal, chasing some rush, but really you run because the alternative, stopping, scares you to death.

Before I died, became too old or consumed with everyday minutiae, I wanted to visit the planet’s most beautiful and wondrous places.

Before setting out on my own personal life voyage, I thought, let me first understand the greater voyage of humankind.

It was my first real awareness that not everyone in this world will like us, or accept us, that we’re often cast aside at the very moment we most need to be included.

Victory, Zen says, comes when we forget the self and the opponent, who are but two halves of one whole.

Love and fear—the same binary emotions governed the dynamic between me and my father.

Bowerman’s strategy for running the mile was simple. Set a fast pace for the first two laps, run the third as hard as you can, then triple your speed on the fourth.

Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves.

The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past. You must forget that internal voice screaming, begging, “Not one more step!” And when it’s not possible to forget it, you must negotiate with it.

To have cash balances sitting around doing nothing made no sense to me. Sure, it would have been the cautious, conservative, prudent thing. But the roadside was littered with cautious, conservative, prudent entrepreneurs. I wanted to keep my foot pressed hard on the gas pedal.

There was no such thing as venture capital. An aspiring young entrepreneur had very few places to turn, and those places were all guarded by risk-averse gatekeepers with zero imagination. In other words, bankers.

Running track gives you a fierce respect for numbers, because you are what your numbers say you are, nothing more, nothing less.

Fight not to win, but to avoid losing. A surefire losing strategy.

I look back now and wonder if I was truly being myself, or if I was emulating Bowerman, or my father, or both. Was I adopting their man-of-few-words demeanor? Was I maybe modeling all the men I admired?

Throughout history men have looked to the warrior for a model of Hemingway’s cardinal virtue, pressurized grace.

But my hope was that when I failed, if I failed, I’d fail quickly, so I’d have enough time, enough years, to implement all the hard-won lessons.

I’d never been a multitasker, and I didn’t see any reason to start now. I wanted to be present, always. I wanted to focus constantly on the one task that really mattered. If my life was to be all work and no play, I wanted my work to be play.

He hadn’t found herself involved in many negotiations, and she didn’t know that the basic rule of negotiation is to know what you want, what you need to walk away with in order to be whole.

The single easiest way to find out how you feel about someone. Say goodbye.

By nature I was a loner, but since childhood I’d thrived in team sports. My psyche was in true harmony when I had a mix of alone time and team time.

I told myself: Life is growth. You grow or you die.

Each of us found pleasure, whenever possible, in focusing on one small task. One task, we often said, clears the mind.

I wished I had more. I wished I could borrow some. But confidence was cash. You had to have some to get some. And people were loath to give it to you.

What better way of connecting, shoe dogs thought, than by refining the hinge that joins each person to the world’s surface?

No matter the sport—no matter the human endeavor, really—total effort will win people’s hearts.

When sports are at their best, the spirit of the fan merges with the spirit of the athlete, and in that convergence, in that transference, is the oneness that the mystics talk about.

He had a superb talent for underplaying the bad, and underplaying the good, for simply being in the moment.

It’s hard enough to invent and manufacture and market a product, but then the logistics, the mechanics, the hydraulics of getting it to the people who want it, when they want it—this is how companies die, how ulcers are born.

Fear of failure, I thought, will never be our downfall as a company. Not that any of us thought we wouldn’t fail; in fact we had every expectation that we would. But when we did fail, we had faith that we’d do it fast, learn from it, and be better for it.

Now that we’d gotten past our bank crisis, now that I was reasonably sure of not going to jail, I could go back to asking the deep questions. What are we trying to build here? What kind of company do we want to be?

And yet, during my nightly run, I’d sometimes ask myself, Hasn’t your life been a kind of search for connection? Running for Bowerman, backpacking around the world, starting a company, marrying Penny, assembling this band of brothers at Blue Ribbon’s core—hasn’t it all been about, one way or another, going public?

Time and again I’d vow to change. Time and again I’d tell myself: I will spend more time with the boys. Time and again I’d keep that promise—for a while. Then I’d fall back to my former routine, the only way I knew. Not hands-off. But not hands-on.

When you see only problems, you’re not seeing clearly. At just the moment I needed to be my sharpest, I was approaching burnout.

We reminded each other that there was honor in saying, “Back to the drawing board."

I also thought of all the games I’d seen through the years—football, basketball, baseball—when one team had a big lead in the final seconds, or innings, and relaxed. Or tightened. And therefore lost. I told myself to stop looking back, keep my gaze forward.

For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits, period, full stop, but for us business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.

The cowards never started and the weak died along the way. That leaves us, ladies and gentlemen. Us.

The world was the same as it had been the day before, as it had always been. Nothing had changed, least of all me. And yet I was worth $178 million. I showered, ate breakfast, drove to work. I was at my desk before anyone else.

The pain of his impatience, his hostility to my Crazy Idea—it had faded. It was long gone. But not the memory. Fathers and sons, it’s always been the same, since the dawn of time.

Love wasn’t spoken, or shown, but it was there, always. My sisters and I grew up knowing that both parents, different as they were from each other, and from us, cared.

I keep thinking of one line in The Bucket List. “You measure yourself by the people who measure themselves by you.”

But that’s the nature of money. Whether you have it or not, whether you want it or not, whether you like it or not, it will try to define your days. Our task as human beings is not to let it.

Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping. Don’t ever stop.

Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao.