What I learned from rereading Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike by Phil Knight.
I was up before the others, before the birds, before the sun.
I drank a cup of coffee, wolfed down a piece of toast, put on my shorts and sweatshirt, and laced up my running shoes.
Then I slipped quietly out the back door.
I stretched my legs, my hamstrings, my lower back, and groaned as I took the first few steps down the cool road into the fog.
Why is it always so hard to get started?
There were no cars, no people, no signs of life.
I was all alone, the world to myself.
That foggy morning, that momentous morning in 1962.
I had recently blazed my own trail back home after seven long years away.
It was strange being home again, strange being lashed again by the daily rains.
Stranger still was living again with my parents and twin sisters, sleeping in my childhood bed.
Late at night, I'd lie on my back, staring at my college textbooks, my high school trophies and blue ribbons, thinking, this is me.
Still on paper.
I thought, I'm an adult.
I graduated from a good college, University of Oregon, earned a master's from a top business school, Stanford.
Survived a year long hitch in the US army.
My resume said I was a learned, accomplished soldier, a 24 year old man in full.
So why, I wondered, why do I still feel like a kid?
I would have found it difficult to say what or who exactly I was.
Or I might become.