This is part of the transcript from a high school leadership workshop Dr. Lauber conducted in Indiana, PA in 2011.

Everybody, look up.  Stare straight up.  What color is the carpet in this room? Can’t answer it, can you?  OK, look down. I know you’re dying to know the answer.

How come you didn’t know the answer? It’s because you didn’t have any reason to learn the color of the carpet, right?  It wasn’t a task of yours.  That is one of my principle messages.  What you prioritize is what your mind is going to focus on.  What you find valuable is what your mind is going to focus on.  So you have to spend some time prioritizing, figuring out your goals, and that will help you do the things that you have to do to get those things you truly want in life.

All right, I need another volunteer.  Who has a shoe that needs to be tied and doesn’t mind bringing it up here and helping me with this demo?  Anybody have a shoe that has to be tied?  I have one.  I pick on people, but I don’t get volunteers.  Thank you.  Come on up and bring your shoe.  We need a chair.

Great.  Oh, these perfect shoes.  Okay, let’s put this where some people can see us.  Okay, pull your pants leg up a little bit and roll it up so people can see.  Untie your shoe.  Okay, all right, let me get my stopwatch.  Pull the strings out with your hands – and I’m going to time you.  On your mark, get set, go – done.   4.06 seconds.  All right, you time me now.  Let’s reset it.  That’s the start, and that’s the stop, okay?  Let’s see how fast I can tie my shoe.  You say, “Go.”

That starts and stops it.  Oh, I’m nervous – competition.  3.81, give me a hand.  Congratulations.  No, stay up here.

It doesn’t matter who’s fastest.  What really matters is the next part where you turn around and face the window. Here, you run our clock, ok?  That’s the start, and that’s the stop.  I’m going to reset that.  Now my new friend facing the window, do me a favor.  Will you tell me how to tie my shoe?

(Slow, confusing instructions on how to tie your shoe.)

Thanks.  You can stop now.  How did that go, folks?  Twenty-one seconds – I’m not there.  I’m going to tie my shoe.  Everybody, give my new friend a hand.  Thank you very much for coming up here.

Oh, my goodness, that was a lot slower.  Hey, does anybody think they can do better, that you could help me tie my shoe verbally and get it done in 3.8 seconds or faster?  Probably not.

I know this is true because I’ve got three kids.  I remember trying to teach them how to tie shoes.  That was hard.  It’s really hard to teach somebody else how to tie his shoe with your words.  I would say, “Here, do this,” boom.  I did that in four seconds.  And my 3-year-old is going, “What?  I can’t do that.”

One of the things I want to teach you today is there are different kinds of knowledge that you have inside of you.  One kind is verbalizable information.  We have fancy words for that – we call this semantic knowledge – it is knowledge that you can say out loud.  The knowledge you learn in social studies classes and English classes – the kind of stuff you’ve got to write out – you can read about.

But there’s another kind of knowledge we call procedural knowledge, knowledge that you know “how to do” but maybe you can’t say, like tying your shoe.  Knowledge of this kind develops in a different kind of way.  Lots of jobs actually use that kind of knowledge more than they use the other kind of knowledge.  You have to know how to do this.  You’ve got to go out there; you’ve got to get it done.