Love More, Fear Less: How a Pair of Pink Socks Sparked a Global Movement

What if a single spontaneous act of kindness at a hotel pool in San Francisco could spark a global movement? That’s the story Nicholas Adkins tells, and it starts with a pair of robot monkey socks gifted to a retired Israeli man named Shlomo.

Nick is the founder of Pink Socks Life Inc., a 501(c)3 nonprofit, and author of Pink Socks: How a Pair of Socks Became a Symbol of Love and Connection. He’s also a former healthcare CEO who walked into a boardroom after a week at Burning Man, voted to sell the company, moved to Portland, and never looked back.

From Graceland to the Boardroom to Burning Man

Nick grew up just behind Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee, where his mom was friends with Elvis’s stepmother. He was riding his Huffy down the street the day Elvis died, pedaling home to find his mother crying in front of the TV. That upbringing planted something in him about community, story, and memory that never quite left.

His adult years were spent in Nashville as a suit-and-tie CEO of a national healthcare practice management software company operating in 37 states. In 2010, he went to Burning Man for the first time, ostensibly to clear his head about a major business decision. He came back, walked into the boardroom in blue jeans and Tevas, and voted to sell. “I’m going to move to Portland, Oregon and become a hippie,” he told his board. And that’s exactly what he did.

The Ethos of Gifting

Burning Man runs on 10 guiding principles, and one of them is gifting. Not the transactional kind where someone gives you something and you feel obligated to reciprocate. True gifting, Nick explains, means accepting someone’s gift is the gift back to them. No quid pro quo. No expectation.

That philosophy eventually led to the Phoenix Hotel pool in San Francisco. Nick was wearing funky knee-high robot monkey socks (he’d switched to kilts full-time in 2012 and discovered immediately that kilts demand interesting socks). An older Israeli couple sitting nearby, Shlomo and his wife, couldn’t stop smiling at them. Nick ran back to his room, grabbed a spare pair still in the packaging, and handed them over. Shlomo lit up like he’d been handed the keys to the city.

Nick went home and asked himself: what would it look like to gift at scale?

How a Retweet Changed Everything

In 2015, Nick and his co-founder Andrew Richards packed 100 pairs of pink socks with mustache designs into their backpacks and showed up at a 42,000-person healthcare IT conference in Chicago. No booth. No business cards. Just socks and a willingness to connect.

By chance, they crossed paths with Dr. Eric Topel, a giant in the healthcare social media world. Nick gave him a pair, asked if he could tweet about it, and Topel said go ahead. Within moments of hitting publish, Topel retweeted it, and suddenly reps from Intel, Dell, and Microsoft were finding them on the convention floor. The hashtag #pinksocks went viral. The movement had a name.

A TED Talk in San Francisco followed in 2017. More than 300,000 pairs of pink socks have now been gifted in 11 years. There are pink socks in 34 schools across 9 states, pink socks in the hands of 5 astronauts, and a pink socks school right outside of Philadelphia in Royersford, where a fourth-grade teacher named Brian Aikens is teaching kids zen meditation, emotional regulation, and kindness through a curriculum he calls Chill Skills.