The Case of the Stray Shoelace

Grade five was my time to shine.

You see I had been working hard for months that year to get ready for the big cross-country races. This year was the year I was going to get past the divisional and regional meets and get all the way to the city race. I just knew it.

Boy was I wrong.

I started the divisional's hard. I came sprinting off the starting line and was with the top runners going into the first turn, about a hundred metres in.

That's when it all fell apart.

As I went to turn the corner my foot got tangled in my undone shoe lace and I took a tumble face first into the mud.

I got up dazed, in last place and covered in mud. I'd been dazed before; I'd built enough forts with shoddy workmanship to tell you how that felt. And the mud didn't bother me, I mean when you're an 11-year old boy, what's better than a mud bath. But being in last place, that had never happened.

I finished the race, coming in 25th overall, well short of my dream of reaching the all-Toronto finals.

But it all goes to show that even in grade five you can still learn some valuable life lessons.

You see I had trained for months and never missed one practice. But in the end I didn't do everything I could have done to be successful.

In life you can work hard and cover many of the angles, but many isn't all. I got lazy that day in grade five and figured an untied shoelace wouldn't matter much, but it did.

When you want to do something well, don't do it half way, or even 99 per cent of the way. Do it all out and more. Sometimes we do a homework assignment or a project for a business client and tend to do the bare minimum. Other times when we're teaching someone something we skip a lesson because we're tired and we don't think it's all that important anyways. And sometimes when we're cooking we drop something on the floor, but call it on the ten second rule and put it back in the pan.

I'm guilty, like everyone, of these sorts of things and believe me I've paid the price and learned from them. And when we do this we aren't being fair to ourselves or others.

We are capable of doing great things when we put our minds to it and doing the things we love and that we are good all the way to the finish, with no detail left out can only help improve ourselves and those around us.

In the immortal words of running great Steve Prefontaine, "To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift."

You wouldn't throw away your brand new x-box, designer Coach bag, blackberry or Ottawa Senators jersey (well maybe the last one), so why would you throw away your most precious gifts, your talent and passion, just because the lazy part of you whispers for you to so. Your gifts don't just help you succeed, but can make a fundamental difference in the lives of those around you.

So next time don't settle for what is good enough, strive for the best and the only time you'll find yourself in the mud is when you mean to be.