Apprenticing Ourselves

So just how do we apprentice ourselves to ourselves? These general principles will serve you well whatever your chosen “improvement area” is, but since we are thinking about living space maintenance (fancy for cleaning, chores, honey-do lists and the like), the specific suggestions will address that area.

First, arrange design, practice, and evaluation times. Improving yourself in any area is going to take time. The great advantage to the weekly Executive Oversight time is that it is an already scheduled, guaranteed-to-happen slot of life in which to design projects and then evaluate them after their test run. Only the actual doing part has to fit into your schedule.  

Second,collect some reference tools on your chosen topic. Cookbooks, science books, home repair manuals, gardening, cleaning: whatever you need to know, the information is available somewhere. Websites, the library, friends, well, maybe “experts.” Just be careful with human input to spread specific questions around a large array of people. Act like you are interviewing others for an article on the topic. This may help keep your ignorance level somewhat disguised!

Hiding my ignorance level may account for some of my love of libraries: I could start by accessing a broad range of helpful resources to at least find out what I didn’t know! Seriously, reading many sources helps us can think through the ideas presented. If you find a particularly effective resource, you can buy it for your own home reference library. The book that became my housekeeping reference is Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping Home by Cheryl Mendelson, usually available from Amazon. Pleasant to read, encyclopedic in content, the book communicates an honorable value to lowly housekeeping, just as the Joy of Cooking does for the world of food preparation. Speed Cleaning by Jeff Campbell, available from the Speed Cleaning website or from a library provides cleaning system information. Both are straightforward and tell you point blank what they think is best, no leeway for your own precious idea. A dogmatic friend may serve the same purpose.

Third, consider what you learn, but make it your own. This is the balance point to number two. When you don’t know much, it is so helpful to have concrete, defined steps to follow. But maturity demands moving beyond robotic adoption of another’s method for yourself, to a nuanced self-designed system built around your needs, experiences, and research.

Do not think someone has the very best and only answer just because they wrote a book, have a self-help business, post blogs, do workshops on their topic, or make a lot of money consulting. You must design what will work best for your situation. Do give others’ ideas a careful experiment, though. And when you modify or discard their options, don’t forget them. They may become the ideal advice for someone else combined with your enlightened insight. For example, Speed Cleaning recommends (and sells) a cleaning apron to wear while cleaning. I have never really done that but I know why they make the recommendation because of applying principle number four:

Fourth, look for principles and systems, not gimmicks, gadgets or hints when evaluating what you read and learn from others.  Re: the apron. The principle is to have at hand everything necessary for a range of cleaning tasks. A second principle is being focused on the task at hand, whatever you are doing. Putting on that apron means you are focused and ready to attend to cleaning. You aren’t likely to run to the post office or grocery with bottles and brushes clanking around your waist! Chatting on the phone with the apron still on won’t let you forget what you were intending to do! If you have some other way to effectively accomplish those two principles (right tools assembled and focused on task till completed), you may not need to make or buy an apron. If an apron gives you a fighting chance of consistently building those two principles into your life, it will be thirty dollars well spent. If an apron sends your apprentices into self-motivated success, it will be worth its weight in gold.

Fifth, no regrets for a failed experiment. No experiment is a failed experiment, unless you did not experiment. When you make a careful selection and it ends up not working well for you, chalk it up to research and development. Innovators EXPECT false starts and unsuccessful attempts and make better future decisions because of them. There will be dinners no one likes–but you may learn a cooking technique or a new food item you will use in the future. There will be meals you ruin–but you can analyze whether you were distracted, not trying your hardest, need to learn a different technique, or need to PRACTICE a skill a little more. Perfect gizmos may be poorly made–but you will have learned the design and construction trouble spots to watch for in the future. There will be books you’ll never finish–but you’ll know something to pass along about its content to someone else. There will be good ideas that just don’t work for you–but your advice to someone else can include what didn’t work for you as well as what was worthwhile.

Don’t act like you are a failure, a short-sighted nincompoop, or a miserable executive. You are simply a person moving forward in your life making careful choices and learning both helpful and less helpful things from those choices.