Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, smart guy. Phil, though, goes on to Japan. He's still thinking about this idea. When he's in Japan, he starts going to tracks in Tokyo and watching what people are wearing running around the tracks. He observes and decides that the Tiger brand shoes that he's seeing are the best. He looks up the company that makes Tigers. It turns out they're made by a company called Onitsuka, which is based in Kobe in the south of Japan near Osaka. Phil, for a desperate introvert, crazily—this is how passionate he is about this idea—he gets it in his head that he's going to hop on a train from Tokyo, just go knock on their door, and say hi to the Onitsuka Corporation, and maybe ask them if he could import some of their shoes. The story goes that he shows up on the door. I can only imagine what 23-year-old Phil Knight is feeling as he's going through this. This is the other side of Phil's personality, where he's a tortured soul. He's introverted, but he's unbelievably driven. He has a splinter in his mind, where when his buddy is like, actually this is pretty good, I'm going to stay in Hawaii. Phil's like, but I'm longing for something. There's something wrong with my existence in the world that needs to be fixed, and I need to go and find out where I belong, what to do, how to change the world, and how to build something. I think he's got a motor that's just different than the way that other humans operate. I think this is a David Senra saying that the CEOs and the founders of these companies that we cover, that he covers, they are the Genghis Khans of our time. Phil doesn't present as a Genghis Khan, but he still is. Deep down underneath all that introvert, he has that same drive that John Rockefeller had, that an Elon Musk has, that a Mark Zuckerberg has.…

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