Mary Panttaja

The Clean Garage

It is key to realize that we are not trying to create a single moment in time when our goals are reality, only to have those goals dissolve into dust. We want to create lives/products/businesses where our goals are continually realized and continually getting better. (They have to evolve as our dreams and goals continue to evolve.) It will never be enough to use a short-term technique (hire 10 people) to get the garage clean—unless they stay around, of course—for the patterns of life and action that got the garage in disarray are still there.

On the other side of the coin, if you figured out the behaviors and mechanisms that would keep a garage clean (just imagine it), then you wouldn’t actually have to clean the garage. You would just have to start living those mechanisms and the evolution of the clean garage would come into being. Get that—-you wouldn’t have to clean the garage, it would become clean as a matter of course.

What we really want is a life style or set of mechanisms (actions and use patterns) that evolve a clean garage. The clean garage is the state that we want to create—and we need to create a preponderance of potential that the clean garage will always (or mostly) exist in our future.

Silly way to think about it? Maybe. But if you substitute your future career, your growing business, the ability to continually evolve your product line, it starts to become a richer idea. The truth is that what you are trying to create is a particular state of the world in the future—and that means we need to build the potential of that now, in the present. And not for it to happen just once—one moment. We want it to exist with us until we dream of something better.

So what could a set of mechanisms look like for the garage? Let’s play with some ideas, some tactics and practices.

1. I will never set anything down in the garage except in the place where it belongs.
2. As I use each thing in the garage, I will make sure it has a place to live.
3. For each project that involves items in the garage (tools, toys, storage) I will allocate a little extra time in my project to organize those items.
4. Once a month I will sweep through the garage and look for 3 things that I can get rid of.
5. At the end of each season, I will put unneeded items away properly.

Maybe not a complete list; I’m sure you can do better. You never stop and clean the garage, but your actions will slowly evolve a more and more organized work space.

And darn, suddenly we realize that we have to rewrite all the rules as “we will”, and get everyone to agree. Mechanisms for group goals are more challenging—mechanisms for individual goals in which others can mess with you can be really tough (you want the garage clean but brother Sam doesn’t really care). But that is where leadership always lives—on the outside edge of what is easy to motivate in others where you need to develop the ability to empower and inspire others to participate.

And, of course, this is a relatively easy goal to visualize. Most of our personal goals are not so direct. But what we see is that we want to be continually building the potential of our goal state, so that the likelihood is that our goal will be realized. That’s what we mean by the preponderance of potential (the potential for our goal is greater in amount or value than that which is against our goal.) If we want to create anything, that is our job.

And a kicker is to notice that whatever is today is the the state that has had the most potential created; whether you like it or not. Our world is precisely as it is because this is what we have created together. Want something else? Then your job is to change the potential of the future to be different. And no one else can play your part in that evolution.

Note: Another time we’ll discuss control and lack of control—once we realize that we’re not in control the way we thought we should be, we sometimes just give up. We have to learn that there is a kind of control we do have (it’s just more subtle) and that giving up is not really an option.