The overarching theme running throughout Shoe Dog is the concept of having a career that you love. Knight first mentions this concept in the book’s Prologue, as he describes what is going through his mind while he is out for a morning run. He had just returned home, to his parents’ house, after years of being away at college, graduate school, the army and is wondering what he should do with his life. He writes that suddenly he saw it all before him, “exactly what [he] wanted [his] life to be. Play” (4). Knight admits that at times he had fantasized about a career as a novelist or a journalist, but his ultimate dream was always to be a great athlete. He had been a three-year letterman as a member of the University of Oregon track team, but his athletic career was now over. While continuing his run, he wonders “if there [is] a way, without being an athlete, to feel what athletes feel? To play all the time, instead of working? Or else to enjoy work so much that it becomes essentially the same thing?” (4).

For Knight, the work as play concept is not only about being able to avoid the “so exhausting and often unjust” daily grind that others are forced to endure but also about following some “prodigious, improbable dream that seemed worthy” (5).