Today I'm grateful for double-knots

There are things in life that take a little bit of extra work up front that potentially save you a lot of time and trouble down the road, and I like to count double-knots as one of them. An extra 3 seconds and 5cm of valuable shoe lace is nothing compared to what could happen with your unsupported laces flapping in the breeze like breasts in the 60s. Things that can happen with loose laces:

• tripping while holding a pram, catapulting your baby or newly-purchased watermelons into oncoming traffic,
• your shoes falling off completely when attempting to kick a ball back to children, opening up the possibility of walking on dewy grass and further opening up the possibility for contracting trenchfoot by the end of the day,
• the worst fate of all: stepping on your laces and tearing off half of them. Now one side is long and the other a pitiful stump, forcing you to either re-thread the laces with one frayed end or try to make a sad mini-loop for ants with what’s left of one side, embarrassing us all.

Or of course, nothing could happen. You can chance your arm and pretend you’ve got the tightest single knots this side of the Mississippi, but honestly if you can’t afford to spend an extra 3 seconds an 5cm of laces in order to avoid the horror show above I don’t know what to tell you. One could argue the same point about buying insurance and throw that back in my face but with all due respect, I’d catch that argument one-handed like the enormous henchman in movies and slam it hard on some poorly-built wooden crates.

Here’s how:

They’re both gambles and the counterfactual (ie. what would happen if x didn’t happen) is unknown. But not all gambles are the same because not all risk-reward ratios are the same. If a lawyer told your startup to put a tiny meaningless disclaimer all the way down the bottom of your website in order to avoid a multi-billion dollar lawsuit you’d do it because the tradeoff is massively worth it. But if for some reason it cost your startup $1m in lawyer fees to formulate a separate disclaimer to protect you against an extremely rare occurrence that wouldn’t cost much to rectify, you probably wouldn’t do it.

While we can never know for sure that doing a double-knot today prevented a disaster from occurring it’s much easier to test than insurance because the only real variable that matters is how the foot interacts with the shoe and that range of movement is limited to walking, running, kicking, jumping, and taking off the shoe. It’s simple to run a control single-knot vs double-knot experiment in your life that covers 95% of the possible events in your laces’ lives. You test it for a fortnight or a month and you know where, when and how your laces come undone. Compare this with insurance, where the world happens around you. You can’t insulate yourself from the quadzillion variables happening in the world.

There’s a blurry line somewhere in all this where you have to make a difficult decision as to whether the risk-reward tradeoff is worth it, but double-knots ain’t anywhere near it.

I’m grateful for double-knots because I know that amid all the chaos going on in the world I can trust that my watermelons will never know the sweet pain of being obliterated by oncoming traffic.