The University of California, Los Angeles [1] began its basketball program in 1919. Despite the rise of powerhouse programs along the West Coast, basketball at UCLA was little more than a side activity. No resources. No tradition. No fan base.

In the 1920’s through 30’s - things were so bad UCLA played in local gyms with barely a hundred spectators. The coaching situation didn’t do the program any favors either. Caddy Works, head coach through 1921 to 1939, was a full-time lawyer who just so happened to coach in the evenings. Although he cared deeply about the team, his ability to dedicate the same focus as full-time coaches at rival schools along the coast was, understandably, much lower.

At the time, there were no national championships acclaimed to the Bruins. Not even a division title, and not even a shot at the final four. Their overall record was rarely above a .500 - they had about as many losses as wins. Wilbur Johns, head coach through 1939 to 1949 had an overall record of 93-120 across almost a decade of competition.

To put into perspective how bad this was, that is the equivalent of going 14-18 every season, for 9 straight seasons. Modern programs that bad, like 2024 DePaul (3-29) or 2023 Louisville (4-28) [2] would immediately fire the head coach and rebuild the program. Nobody today survives more than two or three seasons below a .450 record. Patrick Ewing, the acclaimed Knicks legend and Hall of Famer survived six seasons with Georgetown averaging a .408 win-point record.

By the time the 40’s rolled around, the money was going elsewhere. Games were held in gyms with no air conditioning and poor lightning. There was no basketball culture, and there was expectation of winning, let alone dominance - and there was certainly no reason to believe that UCLA would ever become more than a middle-of the-pack program.

In 1948, things changed when Jon Wooden arrived in Los Angeles [3]. Few had heard of him. He was the farthest thing from a star hire. A soft spoken man, one from Indiana, the heartland of basketball, who carried himself like a schoolteacher more than a coach.

Taking over a losing program, at a college where excellence was expected in other sports, one that was obtaining recognition - is a hard feat. So you’d expect Wooden to walk into practice and talk about changing the script. To gather on how to become a better team and fix the issues plaguing nearly 20 years of players.

So the story goes, Wooden walked into “The B.O Barn” in Westwood Village and skipped all of this. No basketballs, no sprints, no drills. He brought them, instead, into the locker room for a lesson. Not on plays or defense, but instead on a very simple action: how to put on socks.

You heard that right, how to put on socks. He told them to smooth every wrinkle, to lace their shoes properly - not too loose, not too tight. How to tie them, close to the eyelet as to not become unlaced during the game or practice. Bizarre, as it sounds to us, it was to the players. Players chuckled, how could they not? These were grown adults being told how to dress themselves.

Wooden was dead serious, and he made sure they knew why. He explained that one wrinkle in a sock could lead to blisters, which could slow a player down (in the best case) costing them the game. In the worst case, it sidelines a player and screws up the season.

This may sound trivial. But this was the point. Wooden believed that excellence came from consistency in the little things, in the small details - to yield high performance.

“It’s the little details that make the big things come about” as he said. And so, the big things came about.

In his first season, Wooden turned around the legacy of no winning seasons to a 22-7 record. Two seasons in, they won their first conference title. in school history. And that was just the start.

From 1966 to 1975, the Bruin’s won an unfathomable 10 national championships in 12 years. Seven straight from 1967 to 1973, a streak that has never been matched in any major college sport. His teams once won 88 consecutive games, spanning almost three full seasons without a single loss. That is the best record, by a margin that’s not even close, in men’s NCAA college sporting- and still stands nearly half a century later. [4]

Most modern dynasties, like Duke under Coach K, measure the success of the program between two to three championships across decades. Wooden did ten, in barely more than one. [5]

So is the point to put your socks in hopes of achieving success? Of course not. The point of this exercise is to show that little things matter. You cannot get the big things right if you dismiss the small ones.

Here I narrow in on leadership. The issue with leadership is that it often times requires you to make a myriad of choices with some sort of framework of “what’s important?”. Of course you don’t need one, but then you’d be haphazardly making choices with no real direction or vision. This isn’t good. There is a tendency to focus on the big things and treat them as important. To dismiss how something gets done in preference of the thing getting done. Equally as much, to excuse small mishaps as long as the final product is okay.

To assess weather this is a good thing or not, we should investigate why Wooden placed such a big emphasis on the socks. The problem with not putting the socks on correctly was that the small things cost the team, not just the player. Above the player not being able to play the reason of the season if they got a blister or injury, the true downfall was that the team had a lower likelihood of winning in the absence of another. It meant that someone else had to sacrifice their position on the team, had to exert extra minutes. The small things lead to big negatives. It also true that if all players wore their socks correctly, the advantage may be to the player (in the sense they individually get more playing time) - but the team as a whole retains the major plus of not having any injured players.

I’ve spoke in abstract quite a bit here. Let’s take a concrete example. A very prudent one is kindness. You may think being kind, expressing gratitude, being understanding to a team member only affects that team member. But the truth is that practiced on scale, it can change the entire demeanor and feeling of a team. It certainly is the case that in this situation, although everyone benefits on a person to person basis to be kind - the entire team also benefits from it as well.

Something that may be less obvious from reading the Wooden story is that the big things are not possible without the small ones. If you want to win a championship, who cares if you start on day one with this goal? It’s almost entirely useless to do this, not because it won’t happen but because you can’t just manifest the win’s into reality. But you need some wins, and you need to start somewhere. The effectiveness of the socks story is that you start with something. You place an emphasis on something, even something small. Because it doesn’t really matter what the thing is, the point is in the practice of focusing, and paying attention to the details. When you’re lacing shoes for practice versus drawing the play up for a championship point, there is no difference - you’re still paying attention to the details. But if the first time you’ve ever been paying attention is when you’re drafting the play up - you’re losing.

So the real crux of the argument here, is mostly that you need to be precise to succeed. The idea of looking at the big picture works only if you understand the nitty-gritty. You need to pay attention to the small things, because when the big - huge pressure choices come, you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your preparation. You are entirely a product of the small, boring, menial things you may not think are important but are the direct precursor to your performance in high stakes situations.

If you’re a leader and there’s a crisis, you don’t become calm in the crisis by deciding to be calm in the crisis. You do it because you were calm in countless situations where it mattered far less how you reacted. When you were calm in the face of adversity, when you were calm when you dealt with mistakes.

The lesson is not about perfection, it is instead about care. The care for precision is the care for small things, the care that makes the small things matter is the care that allows the big things to happen easily.

Notes