A very messy house and improving your life.

When things are a little disorganized, it takes a bit of effort to straighten things out. Nothing crazy, just some time. When things are very disorganized, it’s easy for a mind to go blank and not know where to start. Life, and the world around us is always messy. Since most people have seen a messy home before, it’s a reasonable analogy even if it isn’t always messy…for some of us.

You may not know the next step in your life or have a perfect plan, however just like a house that has become overwhelming cluttered for any set of circumstances, the only thing you can do is start with what is closest to you, until it reaches the manageable stage of disorganized. Once there start to decide which tasks make sense and prioritize. It starts with just an effort until things become clearer.

This seems easy, but it is a significant challenge because when we can’t see the plan, and calculate the effort, our brains go haywire. I’ve written about that here: A theory on the feeling of anxiety.

Coming from the house analogy to life, most of us feel stuck. It may happen at different levels of careers, different ages, different amounts of responsibility, but that feeling of being stuck is happening to everyone at some point. The tactic for getting out of it is always the same. Start with something that feels close and easy. Then the next thing. Gain some momentum, and eventually a moment of clarity will come, but you need to maintain faith until then.

An example might be a young person without much career direction. They are working in a restaurant as a bus boy and don’t know what to do next. They aren’t making enough money for a house, and can’t support a family. They may talk to the waiters and the chefs and decide what to do next. Perhaps the steady stability of cooking is appealing to them and comes with a pay bump. Or perhaps, waiters that hustle kill it with tips and make plenty of money, and they want to do that next. Keep following the progression, and perhaps owning a restaurant is in their future, or that experience may uncover what they hate doing and point them in the right direction. That’s the beauty of experience, there are few wrong answers, only things that get you closer to your goal and things that recalibrate your direction. One thing is certain, it never happens on the timelines we’d like it to.