How To Tie Your Shoes

April 14

Basketball coach John Wooden used to begin the first practice of the year by sitting his players down and teaching them how to tie their shoes.

This has been commented on by business execs talking about greatness in the details. It’s been the source for coaches ranting on excellence and standard of performance. It’s the kind of easy fodder for overly specific analogies—like parents telling heavy-handed stories where the punch line always involve ‘listening up’ or ‘obeying’ or ‘not building a drum set out of the pots and pans in the kitchen.’

Maybe, as people who become experts on our fields, we forget there was a time we didn’t know how to do something that feels as obvious as how to tie our shoes—and could show a little humility when we meet someone who doesn’t do it quite right?

Most curious of all, the shoe industry has been awfully quiet about the whole affair. No rebuttals from the bigwigs of the boot companies, or press releases from shoelace HQ.

They seem perfectly content to defer the task of teaching people how to tie their shoes to parents all around the globe and, in one exception, one very particular basketball coach.

But how far would any of us get in life with untied shoes?

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