Clean the Kitchen

How discipline in the small things leads to success

In an earlier post, I wrote about my hatred for taking out the trash. What I didn’t make note of, is that I love having a clean kitchen. There’s nothing more satisfying than walking into the kitchen and seeing no dirty dishes, a shiny clean stove, a crumb free floor, counters with nothing on them but what belongs in a nice orderly fashion. It just feels better not walking into a mess. If I want to cook something, I have a nice clean space to work in. The best part is that if the kitchen is clean, I don’t have the looming anxiety of needing to put in the work to clean it, it’s done. The problem of course is getting to that point. The process of cleaning the kitchen is not so fun. Not because it’s particularly difficult, there are just things that are more fun that I’d rather be doing.

I believe that personal discipline is one of the most important qualities for anyone who wants to make an improvement in their life. The process of making the little things important is what gives us the skills, patience, and qualifications to start working on the big things. Even though I don’t want to spend time cleaning, in the end I will love the outcome every time. By repeating the process, I even start doing the things that make the kitchen dirty more effectively so I have less mess to clean later.

The phrase ‘clean the kitchen’ became a bit of a motto that I shared with my team last year. We had several operational mishaps that led to problems and ultimately money lost. As I thought about how to bring my leadership team through the challenges I remembered my days as a server at a restaurant in Florida. It was a high end Mediterranean café. When we closed after dinner service, no one could leave until the entire building was spotless. The chef and prep chef would be bleaching countertops and washing dishes, the other servers and I would be cleaning the dining room and prepping for lunch the next day. Only after the chef had walked the front and back of the house and declared it perfect could we start to make our way out. That level of professional discipline meant that no one who was served at our restaurant the next day would have any less of a positive experience because of something we missed. The same applied to the challenges we faced in our store last year. Our “kitchen” or back room, salesfloor, the way we dealt with our members, the processes that drive our business have to be clean. We have to execute at a high level with all the little things, the details, the things that are easy to pass off as not important. That’s when we could be successful. That’s when we could spend more time focusing on the things that bring in the most profit.

Here are several strategies to help develop the personal discipline that will serve you whatever your endeavor.

Make a list

One of things that drives up my productivity at work and at home is when I make a list of what I need to do. It helps to keep the tasks at hand manageable and organized since after I write down everything I need to do, I can read it over and number the tasks by priority. Even if I don’t finish everything on the list every day, it helps me to not be overwhelmed because I’m not working on a hundred different things, I’m just working the list one job at a time.

Set a timer

Sometimes it just doesn’t make sense to spend too much time on chores or tasks. There are only so many hours in a day and you need to make sure you are spending some of them on the things you value like family. If after dinner comes and the kitchen is a disaster, maybe set a timer for 25 minutes and stop when it goes off. The kitchen might not be spotless but I’m sure you made a dent in it. The same goes for the other parts of your life. All work and no play doesn’t equal a fulfilled life.

Evaluate and execute

In order to get your kitchen clean (whatever it may be) you have to spend time evaluating the areas of your life that you need to improve to get there. If you want to be more effective at communicating, how much time do you spend listening to or reading books by great communicators? If you want to get promoted at work, have you asked for feedback and been willing to grow in your areas of professional weakness? If you want to be better in the relationships in your life, you have to learn how from resources on the subject. If you want a clean kitchen, you have to look at the mess, and make a decision that even though the process will not be fun, you’re going to have to go through it to make your clean kitchen dream a reality.

 Professional quarterbacks don’t show up on gameday and have great results because they think about great results, or have more desire to win. They don’t win because they visualize themselves performing well. They win because of the effort they have put in off the field. They produce great results because they have studied the defense. They have drilled thousands of times with their receivers. They have spent countless hours improving their footwork. They have memorized how to read and adjust the play to different defensive looks and blitzes. Most of all, great quarterbacks are great because they have earned the trust of everyone else on the team on and off the field.

You will never get the outcome you want by thinking about the outcome. You will achieve it by thinking about and executing the actions that will lead to it. If it takes years of discipline and practice to be great at football, why should it take any less effort to be great leaders, parents, spouses, or whatever we are. There are a lot of things I’d rather be doing than cleaning the kitchen, but if I have learned one thing in my life, it’s that it won’t clean itself.