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This advertising line did a few things, it told the public that the Nike corporation was interested in its customers being more driven, more ambitious to achieve not only their sporting goals but their life goals by doing more.

They became the cheerleader of doing more, the cheerleader, it must be said of the western world’s capitalist mantra of having more.

They also, incidentally, not too cynically understood, the more of the public they could get associating Nike with doing and having more, the more sporting goods they would sell.

For a long time, in particular, our western society has valued what we ‘do’ as the measure of our worth and contribution to the world. Our income, for many is seen as a gauge to our potential to do and our fame, an indicator of our reach. We meet someone, and not too long into the conversation will arrive the inevitable, “What do you do?”

It turns out from a spiritual perspective, just ‘doing’ is not enough, in fact, it can be actually detrimental to the spiritual, mental and emotional health of the seeker.

Doing is not a spiritual goal at all, it is actually in almost every situation an action of the human ego and has very little relationship at all to our happiness or satisfaction or state of being.

Spiritual authenticity comes from love. Doing an action with love becomes not so much doing as ‘being’, the more love, the less important what we do is, and the more ‘being’ it becomes.

‘Being’ the action or being the inaction is the true goal of the spiritual seeker, to be in love and what we do is just the syllabus of how we choose to love, how we choose to be. The authentic doer, the real sportspeople and real artists know that ‘being’ is actually the highest form of doing. It is where doing becomes effortless, becomes an action of the universe or God in us all.

It is no accident that some of Nike’s many fallen sporting icons, Marion Jones and Lance Armstrong, were absolute slaves of the ‘just do it’ mentality. For them drugs were permissible because the goal was to just do, if they had made their goal to be, they would have realised there was no room for anything as unloving to themselves or to their sport.

There is nothing authentic about just doing, to be authentic, to be real, we also have to be. No matter the time, place or situation - be love anyway..

This is not to say that doing is bad, it is that doing without being is at best, a waste of time, at worst, a real distraction from our life’s purpose. Doing is the theatre of how we choose to love.

And doing is what we are here for, it is only that for doing to reach its highest potential, it also has to become ‘being’.

So the short story is don’t just do it, be it.