And This Is Why We Clean Our Rooms
“I’m not picking this stuff up.”
“My room is fine.”
“Of course, Dad. I’m going to clean my room, put all my clothes away, throw out all the trash, and take all the dirty dishes that have accumulated next to my bed down to the kitchen, wash them, and put them away.”
Said no child, ever.
Almost every week, without fail, there’s a struggle over keeping rooms clean. My daughter seems perfectly content wading through a floor covered in clothes to get to her bed.
My son, meanwhile, has a Lego minefield growing in his room…
After nearly 18 years as a dad, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve felt the frustration of trying to get kids to keep their rooms clean.
Recently, I had a teaching moment. One of our apartment properties had a fire in a unit, and my business partner sent me a video of the aftermath…
When I watched the footage, my jaw hit the floor.
How does someone actually live like this? Then again, with shows like Hoarders, we know there are people who never throw anything away. Their homes are overflowing with junk, garbage, and refuse.
But watching it on TV didn’t hit the same way as seeing it in a unit I own.
As soon as I got the video, I walked over to my son and said, “Hey man, check this out. You’re not going to believe this.”
I watched as his eyes widened and his jaw dropped.
We couldn’t even count how many Little Caesars pizza boxes were in that video-easily over 100.
(I totally understand my wife’s reaction to an empty pizza box lying on the kitchen counter/on top of the trash bin now…)
I used this a teaching moment specifically for picking stuff up, for keeping up with the never ending work of putting stuff away, throwing away garbage, keeping things clean.
But the real lesson isn’t about cleaning.
To borrow from Andy Frisella, creator of 75Hard, it’s about choosing your hard.
It feels hard to keep things clean. It’s work to pick all that crap up!
Leaving it for later…ignoring it… feels easy.
But that ‘easy’ path? It leads to a much harder route over time.
Reminds me of when I started real estate and was listening to a cassette training program my Uncle Foster gave me.
Yes, you read that right. I’m that old that I was listening to cassette tapes in my little white Toyota.
I still remember hearing “Real estate work is easy. It’s just easier to NOT do it…”
Picking up isn’t really that hard. Pretty easy actually.
It’s just easier to NOT do it.
So whatever today brings, whether picking up the house, cleaning the kitchen, making that next call to an investor, analyzing that next deal, reaching out to a broker, whatever…
Choose your hard.
The hard of doing the work. Or the hard of living with the ‘easy’ path.
It’s always a choice.
Originally published at https://yeadonsmith.substack.com.
