Shane Parrish

He focused on the most important ones and ignored everything else.

And there's one other detail that stood out about his focus.

When things were toughest, he deliberately directed his attention to what was working and not what was broken.

He forced himself to focus on the good.

Okay, that's the setup.

A misfit with a crazy idea, a thousand borrowed dollars, and the kind of obsession that makes balance irrelevant.

Now let's get into what he built.

So it's 1962.

Phil is 24 years old, sitting in his father's TV room in Portland, waiting for a commercial break during wagon train.

He's rehearsed what he wants to say for weeks, but he's nervous because what he's about to propose sounds insane.

So, Dad, you remember that crazy idea I had at Stanford?

The crazy idea came from a research paper.

Phil was a runner, good enough to compete at the University of Oregon under a legendary coach named Bill Bowerman.

So he knew running shoes, but he was also a business student, and he'd noticed something.

Japanese cameras had recently blown apart the German-dominated camera market.

They were much cheaper and just as good, if not better.

So his paper asked a simple question.

Could Japanese running shoes do the same thing to German running shoes?

At the time, Adidas and Puma owned that world completely.

At the 1960 Rome Olympics, 75% of track and field athletes wore Adidas.