Two Years in the Dirt, One Year to Reach the Sky

The Coach Who Taught Future NBA Stars How to Put On Socks

​John Wooden won ten national championships in twelve years at UCLA.

Seven of them in a row.

Nobody has come close.

So when people first read about the man, they expect complicated strategy. Brilliant offensive schemes. Speeches that left players ready to run through walls.

They don’t expect to read about socks.

But in his book, Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court, the most famous story might be the one about the first day of practice. Every season. Didn’t matter if you were a freshman or a senior headed to the NBA.

Coach Wooden sat them all down on the locker room floor. He took off his own shoes and socks. Then he taught them how to put them back on.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

He showed them how to smooth out every wrinkle in the sock.

How to pull the fabric up so there were no folds or creases.

How to lace the shoe so the tension was even from toe to ankle: snug but not tight.

No pressure points.

No bunching.

His players thought it was ridiculous. These were elite athletes. They’d been putting on shoes since they were toddlers.

Wooden didn’t care.

He knew the chain reaction. A wrinkle in your sock becomes a hotspot by the second half. A hotspot becomes a blister. A blister changes how you plant your foot. A change in how you plant your foot changes your release. A changed release changes your shot. A changed shot changes the game.

One wrinkle in one sock.

That’s where it starts.

He wasn’t teaching basketball on that first day. He was teaching foundation.

What He Understood That Most People Miss

The kind of foundation Wooden insisted on has three qualities:

• It’s invisible. Nobody in the stands sees your socks. Nobody applauds the wrinkle you smoothed out.
• It takes forever. You have to do it every practice, every game, every season. You never graduate past it.
• It determines everything. The wins, the championships, the legacy. All of it rests on the thing nobody sees.

Most people skip this part. They want the visible results without the invisible preparation. They want the building to go up without spending any time in the dirt.

What Pedestrians Don’t See

I spent 35 years in construction.

Early on, I got lucky.

I landed on a few big commercial projects where I was there from the beginning.

The kind where you show up on day one and there’s nothing but dirt, a fence, and a port-a-potty.

Those jobs taught me a pattern I’d later put into words: two years in the dirt, one year to reach the sky.

If you’ve ever walked past a major construction site in a city, you know the scene. Plywood walls around the sidewalk. Scaffolding overhead to protect pedestrians.

Flag men at the entrances making sure nobody wanders into a truck’s blind spot.

(People will walk into anything. Distracted driving gets all the attention. Distracted walking around a jobsite is worse.)

You walk past that site every day for months. Sometimes for a year. Sometimes for two.

And you see nothing.

Dirt getting moved around. Equipment you don’t recognize. Maybe a hole getting deeper. Maybe some steel piles getting driven into the earth. But nothing that looks like a building. Nothing that looks like progress.

The Underground Phase

Here’s what you don’t see from the sidewalk:

• The soil gets tested. Boring samples taken at multiple depths. Sometimes the ground is too soft, so piles get driven deep until they hit something solid enough to carry the load.
• The utilities come in. Water lines. Sewer mains. Electrical conduits. Gas pipes. Every one of them gets laid, connected, inspected, and buried.
• The underground piping goes in. Storm drainage. Sanitary lines. Fire suppression feeds. All of it runs beneath where the building will stand, and all of it has to be right the first time because you’re about to pour concrete over it.
• If there’s a parking structure below grade, that gets built first. Entire floors of concrete and steel, completely invisible from the street.

Only when every inspection is passed. Only when the underground work is done and the foundation is ready to carry the full weight of what’s coming. Only then does the steel start going up.

When the Steel Goes Up

And when it goes up, it goes up fast.

Floor by floor. Week by week. The thing that looked like nothing for two years suddenly races toward the sky. Passersby who saw dirt yesterday see a skeleton today. They see glass and cladding next month. They see a finished tower next year.

They think construction finally started.

It didn’t. It just finally became visible.

The Pattern That Shows Up Everywhere

I learned this on the jobsite.

Then I started seeing it everywhere.

The BJJ white belt who wants to learn submissions in his first month.

He doesn’t want to drill shrimping.

He doesn’t want to work on frames.

He doesn’t want to spend three months escaping from bad positions while everyone else seems to be collecting armbars.

He wants the cool stuff.

He quits before the foundation sets.

The business owner who skips systems and processes because she wants revenue now.

She hires fast.

She trains nobody.

She wonders why things keep breaking and why every hire feels like a gamble.

She’s building on soft soil and doesn’t know it yet.

The guy who jumps.

New relationship.

New diet.

New career.

New city.

Never stays anywhere long enough for the underground work to get done.

Always chasing the part where the steel goes up.

Never willing to spend a year in the dirt.

The gym owner who wants more students.

He runs ads.

He offers discounts.

He chases leads.

But he spends zero time on what happens after the trial class.

No onboarding system.

No staff training.

No retention process.

Students walk in the front door and right out the back.

He keeps pouring water into a leaky bucket and blaming the faucet.

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about the foundation phase:

Nobody takes pictures of it.

The construction company doesn’t send out a press release when the underground piping passes inspection.

There's always a "topping out" party and BBQ.

But there’s no ribbon-cutting ceremony for “the soil finally tested solid enough to build on.”

The work that matters most is the work nobody applauds.

And this is where most people break.

They’ve been grinding. Showing up. Doing the work. But nobody notices. Nothing visible is happening.

They scroll through other people’s highlight reels and wonder what’s wrong with them.

Nothing’s wrong. They’re still underground.

The problem is comparison. They’re measuring their foundation phase against someone else’s steel erection phase. They’re looking at a finished building and wondering why their own hole in the ground doesn’t look like that.

It can’t. It’s not supposed to. The hole comes first.

Two Monuments to Skipping the Foundation

The Leaning Tower of Pisa

I used to joke with my wife Amy about this one.

We’d go on Mediterranean cruises. The ship would dock in Livorno, a thirty-minute shuttle ride from Pisa. Amy would ask if I wanted to go see the tower. Every time, I’d say the same thing.

I meant it.

Thirty-five years building things the right way. I had no interest in checking out something built wrong.

But a few years ago, after I’d started this newsletter, I realized I had to go.

If for no other reason than to take pictures. Because the Leaning Tower of Pisa is the perfect illustration of what happens when you rush the foundation and get it wrong.

Construction started in 1173. They got a few floors up and realized the ground was too soft on one side. The foundation was settling unevenly. The tower was already leaning.

Instead of starting over, they just kept going.

Eight hundred years later, people fly across the world to take selfies with a mistake. It’s charming when it’s a bell tower in Italy.

The Billion-Dollar Lean

It’s less charming when it’s 161 Maiden Lane in Lower Manhattan.

One Seaport was supposed to be a 60-story luxury residential tower. Million-dollar views of the East River. A gleaming addition to the New York skyline.

The developers wanted to save money on the foundation.

Manhattan has some of the best bedrock in the world for building skyscrapers.

But the land at 161 Maiden Lane sits on old landfill, not bedrock. Layers of sand and soil, unpredictable and unstable.

The right move would have been driving deep piles down to solid rock.

Expensive.

Slow.

Nobody would see it.

Instead, they used a cheaper method. Jet grout soil improvement. Inject a mixture into the ground to stabilize it. Budget-friendly. Faster.

By 2018, the building was leaning three inches to the north.

Three inches. The width of a smartphone. But it was enough to stop construction entirely. Lawsuits followed. The building sits there now, unfinished, abandoned. A billion-dollar monument to the idea that you can skip the underground work and still reach the sky.

You can’t.

The Foundation Is the Work

This is the part where most articles tell you to be patient. That’s fine advice. It’s also not enough.

Patience is passive. Patience is waiting.

The crews working underground on a construction site aren’t waiting.

They’re doing the most important work on the entire project. They’re just doing it where nobody can see it.

The lesson isn’t “be patient until your foundation is done.”

The lesson is: the foundation IS the work.

It’s not a phase you get through on your way to the real thing. The steel erection goes fast precisely because the foundation was done right. The visible success is a byproduct of invisible preparation.

John Wooden’s players didn’t win ten national championships because of his offensive schemes.

They won because, on the first day of practice every single year, he taught them how to put on their socks. The wrinkle matters. The fold matters.

The thing you think is too small to care about is the thing everything else rests on.

If you’re in the dirt right now, if nobody’s noticing, ask yourself a different question.

Not “When do I get to the part where people see my progress?”

“What am I building underground that I can be proud of?”

Because one day the steel goes up. And when it goes up, it goes up fast. Everyone who walked past for two years wondering what was taking so long will look up and say, “Where did that come from?”

You’ll know.

It came from the dirt. It came from the years nobody applauded. It came from the foundation you refused to skip.

⚔️ The Dojo Drill

Today’s training:

The Foundation Check

Pick one area of your life where you’ve been frustrated by a lack of visible progress.

• Business
• Training
• A relationship
• A skill

Now ask yourself: is the problem that nothing is happening, or is the problem that you’re still underground?

Write down the invisible work you’re doing that nobody sees.

If the answer is nothing, you have your next move.

📚 Leader’s Library

Book I recommend this week:

​Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wooden

Why?

Because the man who won ten national championships spent the first day of practice teaching his players how to put on their socks.

The details aren’t small. The details are the foundation.

P.S. Most gym owners I talk to want more students. They want leads, ads, funnels. They want the steel going up.

But the gyms that actually last are the ones where the owner spent years underground: building systems, training staff, writing down processes nobody will ever applaud.

If you know an owner who’s ready to do the foundation work instead of just chasing the next student, send them to The Leader’s Dōjō. That’s what I help with.

Chuck