“Champions don’t do extraordinary things. They do ordinary things, but they do them without thinking, too fast for the orther team to react. They follow the habits they’ve learned.” – Charles Duhigg | The Power of Habit
John Wooden — the all-time greatest coach in college basketball — often credited his success to making sure his player’s tied their shoes properly. He would spend entire practices making his students tie, untie, and retie their shoes. His point?
Small habits matter.
Wooden’s strategy of success began with the basics. He understood that if his players didn’t learn to tie their shoes properly, their feet would develop blisters. This would lead to improper footwork, poor body mechanics, and unnecessary injuries — resulting in failure on the court.
Just like basketball, habits in business matter. In marketing — a category filled with irresponsible messaging, ignorant strategy, and improper casting — the miniscule details make the maximum impact. Think of Apple’s smooth, sleek, and simple designs: no detail is left unturned, unplanned.
They’ve mastered the art of shoe-tying.
Wooden’s goal in coaching was “to create a correct habit that can be produced instinctively under great pressure.” There’s an enormous amount of pressure in marketing to break through the influx of information inundating consumers. That’s why at Outsource Marketing we evaluate, un-evaluate, and re-evaluate our habits everyday — so that how we do marketing is indeed responsible.
Or in Wooden’s words, “we begin with learning how to tie our shoes.”
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Photo Credit: Asher Isbrucker
