The advertising executive behind one of Nike’s most iconic slogans—“Just do it”—revealed the inspiration came from a murderer’s final words. “I was recalling a man in Portland,” Dan Wieden told Dezeen of Gary Gilmore. “He grew up in Portland, and ran around doing criminal acts in the country, and was in Utah where he murdered a man and a woman, and was sent to jail and put before a firing squad. They asked him if he had any final thoughts and he said: ‘Let’s do it.’ I didn’t like ‘Let’s do it’ so I just changed it to ‘Just do it’.”
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