A Life Lesson From Laces

When my brother's windshield wipers broke, he went through the house for the rattiest shoes he could find. He took out the lace from the shoe in the worst shape and used it to tie one wiper to the other. While we did homework together, he told me all about his MacGyver job, beaming with pride.

When my dad got to the gym in the morning, he couldn't figure out why the shoes he wore every single day were magically missing a lace. I'm sure he used words that I can't put in here. At dinner, Dad told us about the baffling case of the missing lace. Without skipping a beat, my brother dived right into his ingenious solution.

Here's what dinner looked like:

"But, AJ, I wear those shoes every day! They're my gym shoes! I had to walk around looking like an idiot!"

"Well, I looked for the worst shoes I could find!"

"Wouldn't it have made more sense to look for the shoes that looked like someone didn't wear them every day? Then no one would miss the lace!"

"In my defense, I didn't think of it that way..."

Early on, I learned that sometimes solving one problem causes another. And sometimes, the best solution requires us to see the problem from a new perspective.

Starting my own business has been full of challenges, but part of the reward of life is that there's always a new hurdle to jump. It's okay to see a set of obstacles and feel disappointed, but you can't let them get you down. AJ taught me that. He also taught me not to take laces out of shoes, especially the worn-down kind.