Coach John Wooden taught players how to put on socks before letting them touch a basketball. He believed mastery comes from perfecting small fundamentals every single day, years before any wins showed up. Pick one overlooked thing in your life and improve it by one degree today.
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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Arete plus one degree. A micro chapter from our new book activate youe heroic potential.451 of my all time favorite, hopefully potentially life changing ideas. This is a micro chapter from the sixth objective in the book, Dominate youe Fundamentals. Here we go. Your Socks Coach Wooden on How to Put them on John Wooden's UCLA basketball teams won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years, including an 88 game winning streak. Go Bruins. ESPN says that Wooden was the greatest coach of the 20th century. That makes him arguably the greatest coach ever. Couple things to note here. First, quick question. You know how many years Wooden coached before he won his first championship? Answer. He was at UCLA for 15 seasons before he won his first title and he coached for a number of years before even showing up at ucla. As Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll points out in Win Forever, it took Wooden quite a while to figure it out, but once he did, he could win forever. Keep that in mind when you think about Wooden's awesomeness. He wasn't born a great coach, he made himself a great coach. One incrementally optimized masterpiece day at a time, aggregated and compounded over an extended period of time. Growth. Mindset. Style all the way. Second, another quick question. You know what Wooden did in the very first practice before he'd even let his players take the court? He'd teach them how to put on their socks. Imagine the absolute best players in the country coming to the absolute best program in the country. And their coach won't even let them touch a basketball until they learned how to properly roll a sock over their foot and put it on just right. Why'd Coach do that? Because he knew that championships are built on a solid foundation. There's nothing more fundamental for a basketball player than putting on their socks. If you can't slow down long enough to do that right, you're in trouble. You got to make sure those wrinkles were out of the socks lest we might get a blister in practice. Get a blister in our performance and games will suffer. Therefore, put your socks on Right, son. All that to arrive here. What are your socks? You know those super simple, mundane, unsexy easys that are too easy to overlook? Which one are you going to +1 degree today? Dominate the fundamentals and win forever starting today.
