Back when I was about 10 years old and was looking for a new pair of football boots, I had my first memorable experience with Nike. I was in a store where they only had adult sized Nike boots, and I had little patience for that. So I begged mom and dad, who somehow weren’t skeptical about the size of the boots, to buy me a pair. The smallest pair they had left my toes swimming around the open sea of the mid-shoe, but I convinced myself and my parents that I was in a hefty growth spurt. “I’m growing fast”. The retail person put his fingers on the mid-shoe and agreed with my verdict. “Yeah, you’re good”. Without further fuss, I was heading home with my size 42 boots, which I could neatly schooch into with my size 37 feet. They were clown shoes, but they were cool shoes. The shoes definitely didn’t fit, but I still wore them, because I loved them. And that seems to be my story with Nike. It’s a story of a problematic, but deeply meaningful relationship. It’s a brand I feel a special connection to. There is something about Nike and what it represents that no other other brand matches for me. And I’ll try to explain why.
During my time in business school, I was quite sure that I wanted to some day apply for a job at Nike. That happened in 2024 when I applied for their marketing graduate programme in the Netherlands. I wrote this quite personal and heartfelt application, progressed through the first round, and was excluded in the second one. I was of course disappointed, but it didn’t hurt me in any greater extent than that. I had now given my honest shot at working for the company that had helped carry me and my dreams through childhood.
At the time, I was on exchange in Brazil and had joined an athletics club at FGV, one of the main universities in Sao Paulo, where I got to join in on a team of Brazilians. Over the duration of my stay, I participated in a few races and had the experience of winning some as well. It wasn’t American college level competition, but it was still fairly exciting among the fastest athletes. The experiences of competing at the top of something, and even winning, in front of a respectably sized crowd of Brazilians, was a surreal experience. I felt like the champ. I had found a little loophole, where I could expend my semi-elite level abilities, and be the best. It gave me serious hunger for pursuing running at a higher level, and so I did.
Back in Denmark, I joined the main running club in Copenhagen and commenced a disciplined training regimen, beyond what I was already doing. I did so while writing my master’s thesis, turning my life into a back-and-forth between the two. I did nothing else than run and write. Consequently, the potential that I believed I had started to show. Within the timespan of a few months, I was competing alongside the elite in Denmark, and managed to run a 5K PR of 15:21, which I to this day still am quite proud of. That wasn’t enough though. I needed to break 15 minutes, and a lot of other barriers, and I wanted to be among the absolute best. As quickly as possible.
After continuing to push myself in that spirit, my body and knees started to show signs of overtraining (surprise) and my mental health started to decline. I was a runner and made running my world, but I didn’t feel like I fully belonged in the world of runners. I had jumped head first into the sport at the age of 25, hoping to pull off a sensational late-bloomer rise to the top, which isn’t conventional conduct. I was ready to leave everything behind to focus on running. Take a job that allowed me to run as much as possible. I had the Olympics in my head, as insane at that might sound. I can’t help but attach my goals to the highest pedestal. Nike’s “Dream Crazy” mantra is always present in my head. Of course, it was wildly unrealistic, probably within any time frame, but had I dedicated the next 5 years, I saw it realistic that I could at least scratch on the surface of something exciting.
After about 6 months of pursuing elite level running, judgement day arrived. Reality caught up with me, and I broke down in tears in my apartment. I was lonely, exhausted, half-injured, anxious, and an unrecognizable version of my usual happy and lighthearted self. My confidence was gone. It was all gone, and it felt as if I had hit rock bottom, at a time when everyone around me, including myself, were wrapping up five years of university, and were looking towards the next chapter of their lives. My next chapter felt like it was nowhere in sight, and what was supposed to be a memory attached to hope, excitement and all the other conquer-the-world feelings that exist, became a struggle to just get by. But, through the wonderful ability we as humans have to process our past and pick out the best parts of it, I have managed to make it not-so-bad. Things are rarely all bad or all good, and in my case, through working with my thesis partner, I had experienced what close teamwork can do to the joy of a process and the quality of a product. We had delivered a thesis product we we’re both proud of. I had also achieved results in my running that I were proud of, and I got to be the elite level athlete that I wanted to be. Regardless of where the actual time benchmark lies, I think I was elite. The day of breaking down in my apartment, was the day I decided start taking care of myself again. I left the club, and I put time aside for all the things I had neglected.
That could have been the end of the story of the little Nike dreamer who got his heart broken, but it’s not. Some months before my graduation, I had figured out what I wanted to do after business school. I had no idea what kind of job I wanted, except for the one I had already imprinted in my mind. The marketing job at Nike. Somehow, someway, I wouldn’t accept anything less than that. I needed to get to that exact thing, and so I decided to enrol into a 9-month sports marketing programme in Madrid. It seemed like the ticket to my dream job. A job which I, in reality, had no idea what looked like. I only knew that it had some role to play in the making of all the inspiring marketing campaigns that I was obsessed with. But since I didn’t know myself very well, nor what the programme really entailed apart from a bit of surface level curriculum, I was about to do something very desperate.
I packed my bags, erased my danish address, and jumped on the plane, ready to roam with tragic rootlessness in the world. From here, there isn’t much more lead up to my second big reality check, since it took me three days of the programme before I decided to withdraw. It hit me at the immediate entrance into the classroom, that I had made a mistake. I had five years of higher education in Denmark behind me, and I was about to do one which made me feel like I was starting over from the very beginning. Not only that, but what I learned about the business side of the sports industry, had my little heart sinking. It seemed like hard business, and I could envision the future scenarios of me being handed over in powerless fashion to the industry machine and getting fully crushed by it. It wasn’t for me, and despite being a drastically swift decision to pull out, it was one I had never been more sure about. That also tells me that I wasn’t fully clueless about myself. When I could suddenly see and feel the real consequences of my actions, my intuition struck open like a life vest. It was there for me, screaming inside my gut, so brutally loud, that there was no way I would have continued down that path.
I spent about a week in bed in a hotel in the outskirts of Madrid crying and trying to make sense of things. Feeling shameful about my calamitous failure and naive in thinking this was the way to go about life. How could I hit yet another wall like this? How could I be this detached from myself to repeatedly push myself over the edge? After having absorbed the shock, I made a decision to stay in Madrid to learn a bit of the language and engage with the culture of the city. It was a weird, feverish time of my life, with some days giving me a feeling of relief and freedom, and others giving me a feeling of anxiety and hopelessness. The fact of the matter is, I was walking on shaky legs, and while those reps definitely have made me stronger, and taught me a bit of Spanish smooth-talking (very grateful for that), it was all just a delay of the true recovery I had to go through. I came back to Denmark two months after leaving for my ultimate adventure to Spain, feeling like I would never regain the courage to pursue my dreams or move back out into the world. My world was as small as it had ever been. It was no bigger than the four walls of my parents house. So that’s where I had to start.
The reconciliatory work now begun. The kind of work that changes one’s perspective on life, completely. Without getting into the whole diary of my transformation, I spent 6 months, mostly unemployed, working through all my personal demons. I talked to a therapist and learned to sit with and share my feelings, I learned to accept my faults and limitations, which is hard when you perceive yourself as an ambitious, well-adapted individual who can do anything, I learned to face my fears, to embrace my shadow (which we all have by the way, we’re all reasonably fucked up, we just hide it away), and more than anything, to just be myself. It was a full surrender to myself, and a complete acceptance of my past. That’s why I now have no problem talking about it. I’m fully comfortable with it, and it feels right for me to share. That’s apparently just how I am wired, and I guess it stems from my belief, that opening up to each other and showing vulnerability is not so dangerous afterall.
At times, during my healing process, it seemed like a process I would never get out of, like the spiral of ruminating thoughts in my head would continue indefinitely. But then I found out how to break it. All I had to do, was pour all of it into my work. Write about it and film it. Express it in any way possible. It was my creative awakening, and now I know, that it was the hard work I had to go through to be able to do what I’m meant to do. Which is to make people feel, and to use my capacity for storytelling to captivate, inspire and make us feel more connected. That’s what I feel like my mission is, truly. And the style I have to do it in, is cool style. It’s not business style, journalist style, or politician style, it’s cool style. It’s Nike style, Obama style, Brazil style, Flacko style, Nolan crossed over with Hans Zimmer style. It’s cool style, SAASTA style. Not to take anything away from those professions and their own storytelling swagger. They can all be cool in their own right, but they sure as hell can be uncool as well. Anyone can be cool. It’s just a matter of carrying ourselves authentically and empowering people around us. Pretentiousness kills cool. Being yourself creates it. I want to build a platform that captivates through cool, and makes people listen. And so, that means I have to be my whole self and share who I am.
The communicational style that I want to embody in my work is one I feel will resonate with audiences that may not find their own voice reflected in general media and politics. These people would rather listen to the voice of Kendrick, than to that of the local state politician. I love when politicians have a cool, charismatic sway, like Obama does, because his words have the power to bridge gaps. He’s a channel, and so is Kendrick. You can’t be cool like that if you don’t understand the stories of ordinary people and can’t channel their voices. Policy action, and action in general, is always the basis for tangible improvement, but the word has a magic that can make us take all of that action together. And it makes the process much more meaningful. The outcome is important, but there is more to it. There is the process. I think one of Obama’s greatest feats as president was the individual stories he unified. You can’t put that into numbers on his performance evaluation. You just can’t. And some of the most inflamed human conflicts out there persist simply because we are unable to reconcile our differing stories. Obama made me feel American. He spoke to the human race. I shy away from political discussion, because I’m scared of its divisive nature and that I’ll fall into it’s grip. It doesn’t mean I don’t have a stand on things, but I’d rather have the discussion grounded in stories and feelings. That makes me wildly impractical in some sense. But it makes me damn suitable to be a storyteller. And I’m assertive about my stories. That’s my source of strength and power.
Returning to Nike and my dreams, it can be a dangerous play with fire to be as obsessed with the pursuit of dreams as I am, especially when there are few constraints holding one back from pursuing them. I’m unbelievably privileged, and there is really no adventure I don’t have access to. And the same goes for the majority of people in Denmark. We’re damn privileged. And with that privilege comes the opportunity to take chances in favour of the things we believe. We can hurt ourselves, but we will never end up on the street. And then we afford the chance to learn from our mistakes. I hurt myself twice, based on the same fixated ideal. So I had to look at myself and figure out what in my temperamental pursuit was pushing me over the edge. It wasn’t the intensity of the pursuit itself, per se. I need that intensity and the feeling that my whole being is being thrown into something. But I took that energy into the wrong pursuits, and sure, with a bit too much intensity, and that’s when things start to break apart. I loved running, and I still do, but as a pursuit at an elite level, it would never have worked as anything more than a shortlived dream. It’s was too restrictive and required the wrong sacrifices. But despite running head first into a brick wall, I will never regret the pursuit. I had to explore my potential. It was as if I had no choice, and in that sense, it was self-sacrifice. I let myself hurt in the pursuit of some greater goal. But we don’t want to live a self-sacrificial life, as that would just lead us to become miserable. So when I broke down in my apartment, I had to pull the plug. I left the higher goal behind, one that wasn’t mine to pursue, and chose myself. And I quickly found both physical and mental recovery. Same thing with Madrid. Am I going to stop pursuing my dreams in this way moving forward? Absolutely not. All I have to do, is know myself. And then pursue.
Now, let’s talk a bit more about Nike as a brand. Ever since I started taking interest in branding, I’ve been trying to understand what separates Nike from other brands. It’s one of the most iconic brands in the world. You ain’t beating the swoosh. Stock market performance and all other things considered, you ain’t beating the swoosh. Ain’t happening. Why do I feel this way? Because Nike touches a nerve in our hearts that very few brand manage to do. Nike touches the nerve of belief. And it expresses it through sport. Nike is telling you and me that the only true obstacles to reaching our potential as individuals resides within ourselves. From today, you can start identifying yourself as an athlete, and as you go by holding on to that belief and manifesting it through your actions, you will become one. Performance truly doesn’t matter. It’s not up for other’s to decide if your’e an athlete. That’s all on you. If you carry yourself like an athlete, and have the mindset embedded into your actions, you are an athlete. You can take that mentality anywhere, and it will bring you far in life. I carry myself as an athlete in my creative work, and I sincerely hope that you can feel that. I think our general culture is a suppressant of belief. It seems like we are afraid of looking stupid, or to reveal parts of ourselves in the act of expressing what we really care about. In Denmark, we downplay our beliefs through humour. Humour is a great way to deal with our messy reality, but if overused, it robs us off opportunities to really be ourselves. We should be dead serious about who we are and what we believe in. Stating our beliefs is a scary thing to do, because we’re sealing a contract with ourselves that we now have to honour. It exposes our integrity. If we fail to do so, we fear that we might be subjected to public shaming, and much worse, that we will have let ourselves down. But that’s a chance we gotta take.
To draw a specific example from Nike’s belief ethos, the “Dream Crazy” campaign with Colin Kaepernick was a stance against social injustice and for individual greatness, and at the time, a radical thing for a corporation to do. It broke the rules of business and the idea that a company should keep their mouths shut on social issues, never risking any friction with its customer base. Nike is loud about what it stands for, and there are probably many companies that stand for things more quietly. But why not be loud about it? Why not make it known to the world what you stand for? It’s not about bragging or appropriating societal causes for goodwill and marketing purposes. I think that’s the belief of cynics, and one that’s frankly too common in the business world. Many companies talk about authenticity, diversity, community and purpose, and too much of it seems to be strategy. Do we enact a true belief in these things? Maybe not enough?
Making a belief known to the world is about giving all of us in the audience a chance to get inspired, and to enter into an inalienable agreement about what that brand will always be fighting for. Nike is one of the global brands that have managed to gain true acceptance from underserved communities. And believe me, corporate buy-in is not an easy respect to gain among people that have felt their opportunities squashed and robbed by the very presence of these entities. You have to seriously put in some honest work to earn that sort of respect. The strongest proof that a company is acting accordingly to their promises to society, is to look at whether the affected people respect them and wear the badge voluntarily. That’s my belief. We need many more companies that are born out of such communities, and the only way we can do so, is for resourceful people to start engaging with them. We need to move out of our social spheres, and see and feel what’s on the other side of the fence. I mean, really feel. Breed up a stronger sense of responsibility for what’s beyond our immediate environment, and an awe at what these people are capable of. They go through so much more shit every day than we do, so they are the ones that inspire us. We don’t inspire them as much as they inspire us. And there is no difference between them and us, except for our privileges. Trash the privilege, and we are all one.
We get to travel and see the world, and it is then upon us to absorb the realities we are faced with, to understand the common condition, and to continuously push our own understanding of how interconnected, and by implication, responsible we are for each other’s suffering. There is no problem in going out on self-actualizing journey’s to exotic lands, getting shitfaced drunk and learning about the spiritual awakening of the Kama Sutra. I condone and have partaken, but there needs to be more to it. When all the dopamine has settled, we gotta let our hearts bleed for the things we finally have the chance to see with our own eyes. It has to weigh us down for a little bit. Make us sad, angry and resentful. It shouldn’t manifest itself as a heavy weight around our ankles, forever holding us back, but it should rip our hearts open momentarily. We have to let our guards down and partake in the collective suffering. It sounds fucked up, but it’s true. We then translate what we’ve seen into empathy, which we bring with us back to where we came from, and let it drive our actions moving forward. I’m going to use the words of the responsible teacher here: think globally, act locally. That’s the essence. We need to teach our kids this. That with the opportunity to travel for years on end out into the world, through gap years and exchange, comes a responsibility to absorb it and carry it with them into their future work endeavours. It’s not a free lunch, and we are the ones eating it, because many others aren’t. So we have a responsibility to equalize, and in the global world of today, such efforts should be much more pronounced than what seems to be the case. It’s puzzling to me why we aren’t more globally minded in our actions towards underserved communities, given today’s access to the world.
I think we’re expending too much of our talent, resources and energy on making incremental improvements to our already quite comfortable lives, and too little on making radical improvement at the margins. I’ve observed that there is a much greater connect between science and business, than there is between the humanities and business. Put an engineer and a business graduate together, and we are on course to building the next unicorn. It may become a life science company whose technology aims to fight cancer, which is amazing in its own right, but it still leaves people in marginalized communities out of the equation. These communities are not dealing with cancer, as much as they are dealing with life in general. We need solutions for these people, much more urgently than for most of those we pass by in our metropolitan streets. I fully respect the freedom to pursue whatever moves us, trust me, I used to be a libertarian, and value freedom beyond most other things, but I must admit that I dream of a stronger shared concioussness around the human challenges that persist beyond our borders. And the best way to sway people to use the power of their free will in this direction is to foster as much empathy as possible. I will always respect initiative and entrepreneurial spirit of any sort, but I would also like to push our understanding of how that could be materialized.
We don’t like to operate in the space of the marginalized communities because it lacks commercial incentive, but we sure can find a way to make a thriving business out of it, if we really wanted to. It requires a lot of creativity, and that’s an exciting challenge. That’s why we need more inflection between the humanities and business. To abandon the obsession we have with breeding the next rainbow animal, and start handing out some rock-solid bricks to the base of the pyramid. If more people and organizations did, collectively agreeing to channel their resources and inventive capability towards the margins, it wouldn’t be such a self-sacrificial thing to pursue, as most NGO’s would attest to. Why don’t more organizations want to be a killer hybrid, with the elite performance of a cutting-edge business and the soft heart of an NGO? And establish The Believing Enterprise? Seems like a company such as Patagonia offers a similar blueprint, but we need a lot more of that, at much greater speed. Those hybrids need to be the coolest shit to come out of business school. And the humanities school. Put a status mark on it, and let that be the ultimate pursuit of prestige. The ridiculous cliff between the humanities and business is one of the reasons why this is not the case. The humanities people think the business people are are soulless, and the business people think the humanities people are wimps. Excuse my language, but my point had to get across. We’re all our own bunch. Sort it out, man. Leave the infantility and prejudice behind, and start having some god damn belief in each other. We need the genius of both, and the pride of none. Get in the game, and start writing the next great business story.
Nike has its fair share of missteps, but it still has the gist of the believing enterprise. Nike started simply as a shoe business, and along the way, some smart and sincere marketing people decided to make it about much more, not through reaching into empty clouds, but by digging deep within the human spirit (much credit to Wieden+Kennedy here). And the rest is history. So, these are some of the reasons why I connect so deeply with the brand. It is there for all of us who find belonging in such spirit of progress, mobilizing people to take on a positive mission on behalf of themselves and others. It’s a way of living and overcoming life’s obstacles confidently and leaving nobody behind who wants to be a part of it. It’s about giving it it all while our minds and bodies have the power to move. It matters that there are messengers out there. It really matters. What doesn’t matter is whether it happens to be a relative, a friend, Ghandi, or a big brand like Nike. In my case, Nike happened to deliver the message to me in a way that resonated. To me, Nike is one of the greatest guarantees that all of us across this big, blue, beautiful planet have the chance to receive the message that we are allowed to dream and seek out our own greatness. But this is really not about Nike. It's just about belief.
I tried a lot of different Nike shoes that didn’t fit. So I put it all on my sleeve instead. I wear Nike on my sleeve, because that’s where it needs to be. It’s my battle scar and belief system. I raise that arm to the sky to show you what I truly believe in. Nike, and all that it encompasses as a brand encouraging little kids to pursue lofty dreams, regardless of their circumstances, is my stance. And so is getting back up after failing a hundred times, and taking yet another chance. I’ll believe in that shit till the day I die, and you don’t get to come here and tell me that I need to put my feet to the ground. I need to fly, and so do you. Put that arm to the sky, and show me what you believe in.
#NikeOnMySleeve.
