Nobody Looks at Your Shoes
I’m not great at clothes.
What I mean by that is that I’m not great at matching shirts and pants. It’s not uncommon for me to leave the house in the morning with a brown belt that clashes with a black polo, and I’ll often go for a walk wearing khaki shorts and socks that go way above my shoes. Not a pretty picture.
It’s a stressful thing, actually. Thankfully I have my wife as a resident style advisor, so when I’m in a pinch, I can always grab her and ask, “Should I be wearing this thing or no?”
But lately, I’ve started telling myself the following:
“Nobody looks at your shoes.”When you talk to your friends and colleagues, where do you point your face? Their shoes?
Nope.
When you’re selling a product to someone, what are they inspecting to make sure you know what you’re talking about? Your footwear?
Nope.
Think about your last full day at work. Can you remember the shoes any one of your coworkers was wearing that day?
Nope - unless they had some really cool shoes on.
The phrase, “Nobody looks at your shoes,” isn’t bullet-proof, though. Odds are, some people look at your shoes. Especially people whose job it is to look at shoes – like personal stylists or people who work at shoe stores.
But I don’t mean it literally. For the most part, people don’t care what you’re wearing. People also don’t care about what you ate for breakfast, or how you felt about that morning’s commute, or how well you wrote that JavaScript function yesterday.
It’s so easy to get worked up about your appearance. I don’t just mean physical appearance. Most of us are tasked with keeping our Facebook profile fresh and making sure our Instagram photos have the Happy Busy Successful™ filter turned on. With so many parts of our life open to online inspection, we’re burdened with constantly managing our appearance to the masses.
But you can’t control what other people think, so don’t try to control what other people think. Go ahead – wear those shoes. Are they comfortable? Then, guess what – they’re perfect. Wear the hell out of them until your wife tells you a year later, “Wow, those shoes are falling apart. Let’s find you some new shoes.”
Nobody looks at your shoes.