Clutterbug - Real-Life Hacks and Tips to Declutter, Organize and Clean your Home Fast - Want to be great at something?! You have to be CRAPPY at it first! | Clutterbug Podcast # 245

Episode Date: October 21, 2024

Sometimes to be really great at something, you have to give yourself permission to suck. A perfectionist mindset often gets in the way of progress and success. In today's podcast, I'm sharing real-life examples of how to embrace doing things "shitty".      You can find more Clutterbug content here: Website: http://www.clutterbug.me YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@clutterbug TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@clutterbug_me Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clutterbug_me/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Clutterbug.Me/   #clutterbug #podcast #motivation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today I'm giving you permission to really suck. Like to do things so epically bad that it might even be embarrassing. But that's okay because I'm also going to show you the power of growth. Hey, Clutterbugs. Welcome back to the Clutterbug podcast. Super excited about today's podcast. We're talking about something that I'm really, really passionate about lately. you know I want to be writing a book, I am writing a book, about the whole concept of doing things

shitty and giving yourself permission to epically suck at things. And the reason that I'm super passionate about this is because I've noticed over the years a definite pattern and a trend in a lot of people who I love dearly in their lives where I'm seeing that they're not feeling fulfilled. They're not feeling like they're reaching their absolute potential. And what I notice is kind of the underlying connector between these people, my friends and family, my children, my husband, who have kind of said to me, you know, I wish I was doing more, I wish I could do this or I'm not happy with where I am, little comments. But the underlying kind of reasoning of why they're not achieving it, it really does come down to a lot of fear.

Fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of doing something wrong, fear of wasting time. And if we dig a little deeper than that, really, it's a fear of doing things badly. It's the fear of doing things shitty. and why I find this so fascinating and I'm so passionate about it is because I've seen the other side of that coin. Part of me wants to say, you're afraid of doing things bad because you've lived this wonderful life where you've had so much success, where you got A's on your report cards, and where you tried out for the school soccer team and made it, where you graduated high school, where you had like actual success in your life. So of course you're afraid of failure because you haven't

had that much. You haven't had a lot of practice failing. Whereas I'm coming from a different side of the equation, which is just like a slew of epic failures. I'm so used to failure because sucking is, you know, basically what I've always done my whole life. I've always been the worst at everything. So before I jump in and really talk more about this and give you actual real life examples of what I'm talking about and how you can take the philosophy of doing it shitty and apply it to your real life and see real life results. I'm going to talk about that in a second. I want to encourage you while you're listening to this podcast to get up and take action on something, to do something and not just passively listen to this. You can listen and learn and get inspired

and get motivated while also kicking something's butt, whether it's catching up on the dishes, or putting away the laundry, or wet dusting your house, gardening, vacuuming, tidying, decluttering, get in it, do it, roll up your sleeves, and for the next 20 minutes, do something that's going to make you proud, do something that's checking something off that never-ending invisible to-do list that you have because you deserve this. And you can kind of turn, you can just listen. We're going to have a really cool conversation today and like let your body just do stuff. you're doing two things at once. You're growing and learning and you're getting stuff done at the same time because you are an incredible multitasker. And you can do anything for 20 minutes,

friends, even the stuff you really don't want to do. So get up, get moving, take action, and let's jump in. I'm going to really talk for a minute about how much I sucked. So you can really kind of get the concept that I'm talking about here. I have practiced doing things shitty because I've always pretty much done everything pretty crappy. I've never been good at anything. Growing up, I really struggled in school, and I know now it was because of undiagnosed ADHD, but I wasn't a straight-A student.

In fact, I spent a lot of my... time getting in trouble, sitting alone, definitely failing a lot of tests. Yeah, obviously I was not the smart kid. I was also not the athletic kid. So I didn't have parents that played sports with me. I wasn't really the kid to run in the backyard. I had zero practice being athletic in any way. And if you see kids on a playground, you know, kindergarten, they're running around, they're jumping, they're doing, that was not me, friends. I've never been a runny kid. I've always been very out of shape. I came out of the womb, nine pounds and three ounces of just blubber. And I just continued that way. So obviously, I was never really great at sports because I didn't have practice. And I never practice. and I kind of was like, well, I suck at it, so I'm not going to bother and I'm not going to try. And that, my friends, is kind of the underlying message here. Because I also felt that way about school.

Well, why study, why try? Because I'm not going to be able to remember it anyways. I'm just going to get a bad grade anyways. So why bother trying? and that stayed with me my whole life. I was always kind of in all my friend groups, the worst at everything. I left home at the age of 15. I dropped out of high school.

I had many jobs. I struggled with alcohol and drugs and I had, I stole things, and I, you know, was involved with the law. And I just made so many terrible. terrible decisions that compounded and compounded and compounded because I thought I'm not good at keeping a job. I'm not good at school. I'm not good at so, you know, that obviously isn't the life for me. Why would I keep banging my head against the wall trying to do something that I wasn't good at, that I sucked at? The only thing I was good at was being bad, you know, because.

I had a lot of practice being bad. I got better at it. So I guess the point of me saying all of this is because eventually when I got to the point where I didn't want to live that life anymore and I really had to make a change, I had to embrace the fact that, okay, you're going to really suck at these things. You're going to suck at paying your bill on time, paying your rent. You're going to suck at earning money. You're going to suck at keeping a job. You're going to suck, but you're going to keep on, keep it on. It doesn't matter that you're the worst. It doesn't matter that it's not going to end up good. You got to keep going anyways. And I learned that lesson and I failed so much that I really got used to failure. I got used to being bad. I got used to the embarrassment.

didn't really embarrass me anymore when I would try something and suck at it because everything I tried I sucked at. So embarrassment just became like second nature and I became very, very immune to it and very, very immune to failure. And then fast forward to, you know, years, I'm going to give you an example of one thing in particular. Fast forward to like, I'm now a mom and a homeowner and I'm married. And my whole life I've sucked at getting organized. I've been like a hot mess disaster. And I was like, well, my goal, I got really clear on my goal, I want to have an organized home. And then when I started trying to implement that, it was not great. I was organizing things with like cut up cereal boxes and Kleenex boxes and it looked

terrible and it was I was nothing was really neatly folded and nothing was really it was just it was just bad but I kept going and I kept trying and it was like people would make fun of me namely my husband was like what is this is this your attempt at like jewelry organization be like popsicle sticks hot glued together to try to like make a jewelry box you know because I didn't know and it didn't have anything and I didn't really have money. But I just kept trying. And if something didn't work and I tried setting up a system and like it wouldn't stay tidy and it would still get messy, I was like, well, okay, that sucked back on the horse,

try something different. Because again, immune to failure, not afraid to fail, not afraid to fail, not afraid to do things badly because I really realized that's how you learn and that's how you grow. So I gave myself permission for things not to be perfect right off the bat. I gave myself permission for things to be bad and ugly and, you know, not really work. And this really amazing thing happened. When I let go of the idea of I couldn't do it unless I knew I could do it right. And I let go of the idea of, well, if I'm going to do it, I want it to end up looking like this or looking like how other people did it, kind of emulating this goal. When I was just like, I'm going to just try to make

this a little bit better. I'm just going to give myself permission for this to be kind of crappy, but at least it's like slightly better than it was before. This amazing thing happened. and my shitty, my crappy way of doing things just slowly improved. But it never felt like amounts, immense amounts of work. It never felt like, I was working 24-7 and just exerting all this effort because I was literally just like, well, I'll just try a little bit here and I'll try a little bit there and I'll give myself permission to just, me, it doesn't have to be great, just has to be slightly better. I just got to, you know, put in a 5% of effort. Just got to try a little bit. When I gave myself permission to do that, I never felt burnt out.

I never felt the real sting of failure because I wasn't like putting in 110% 24-7. If I was doing that and it still ended up bad, yeah, I could see how that would feel very defeating. but I wasn't doing that. It was just consistently, just got to be a little bit better, a little bit better than yesterday. And I know you've heard this concept a lot of times, like the 1% right, just be 1% better today. We've heard this concept so many times, but that's because it works. That's because it 100% adds up to success without the the burnout without feeling like you're working 24-7 without having to add more onto your plate. You're just consistently building not only your muscles in this area and getting better at it

through practice, but you're building your brain muscle as well. You're building a new habit and a new thought process, a new way of thinking and doing. And so what I was really doing with all those terrible Kleenex boxes and serial boxes and just like constantly like, oh, I'm just going to rearrange this and I'm just going to make this slightly better. I'm going to try this here and move this year and try this paper system. Oh, it doesn't work. Okay, I'll try this paper system here. I mean, it was bad. You can go back and watch my old videos at Malatose 79 and see how epically bad a lot of my first organizing projects were, I got a fire. I got interrupted by a quick fire call, but honestly, it was probably a really good thing because I was rambling and maybe not being really

clear on what I mean. So I think a great thing that I can do is give you real life examples of not only what the kind of excuse trained looks like, but also real-life examples of how to just do things badly, do things really crappy. Organizing is a really easy one for me because I've been doing it crappy for so long. I have lots of examples, but maybe you're the person who is constantly kind of piling your mail and paperwork on the kitchen counter or you have a spot where you're stacking it and the pile's getting really big. A lot of people, most of the people, most of the people, Most people will think, I have to come up with a system to catch that. I have to come up with a, I have to research, maybe I need a Sunday basket, maybe I need to hang things on the wall,

maybe I need to create a command center. I'm going to have to see where the best spot is for that, what to buy for that. I'm not sure what it's going to look like. And in the meantime, we continue to pile on the counter. What if you just right now created a crappy system? what would be like a crappy paper system that you could make? What would be like the worst paper system? Not no system. You're already doing that. So I mean, I know that's crappy. No system is crappy. But no, I mean like doing it, but doing it badly. Maybe you look around and you're like, well, I've got that basket that I keep old coupons in. I can get rid of the coupons and I can use that basket. and that right now can just be the command center or the Sunday basket until I get something else.

Or maybe you're like, I know I have a container upstairs. It's filled with old magazines. I'm going to declutter the old magazines and I'm going to use that. And it's not great and it isn't perfect. And I definitely, that's not what I would buy for this. But it's a good enough crappy thing that I can do in the meantime. And that's the secret. literally that's the secret. You're supposed to do things bad in the beginning because that's how

you learn what works and what doesn't. We don't just jump from zero to perfect. First of all, perfect doesn't exist, but also how could you possibly know what's perfect until you've tried different things? So using a basket you already have, maybe you're like, okay, the baskets, I can't really see it. I'm forgetting what's in there. I'm forgetting what's in there. I'm going to need something visual. And then you look around and think, okay, how can I make this visual? Let's try a system. Maybe I have got that old bulletin board in the garage. I haven't been using. I can hang that on the wall real quick. It's not great. But let's give this a try. And I'm going to use pushpins. And then you're like, oh, I'm seeing it. This is kind of working. Okay. Well, maybe I want to adapt it. And I no longer want it in this spot. And I need another kind of visual system. And before you know it, You have the perfect paper organizing system for you and your family, and you didn't have to do a ton of research and try a bunch of expensive things. You literally did it crappy till it was no longer crappy. You adapted. You learned and you developed a system that really works for you. And this is the secret for

everything, not just organization. okay, I want to do this thing. I want to solve this problem. How can I do it just right now? How can I do it bad with what I got? How can I just make it better? Solve a quick problem and then move on. And this is the difference. This is the mentality from people who continually level up their life and see success and see growth, as opposed to someone who sees a problem and says, oh gosh, I don't even know where to start. I've got to do some research. I've got to figure out the best way. This is going to take forever. I don't know how to do this. I'm bad at this. Excuse, excuse, excuse. Procrastination. We're not going to get better at things if we don't practice. And we don't

practice doing things badly and adapting. And the really magical thing is when we give ourselves permission to just do a bad job at it, it's fast. It's easy. But every time we repeat and just do it a little bad, do it a little bad, do it a little bad, our bad gets better. But it doesn't feel harder. So eventually we're just doing this quick little thing kind of bad. It's no big deal for us. But we're proficient in it. We're fast. We are now experts at doing it. And to anyone else watching who's watching us do that thing, they're thinking, oh my gosh, this person is like amazing in doing this so perfectly. I could never do it that perfect. I could never be that good. Look at how great they are at this.

But you're thinking, I'm over here doing like very minimal craptacular effort. That's the secret. That's the secret. All that craptacular effort ends up adding up to proficiency. So now when I'm organizing a space, I can organize someone's entire kitchen in a few hours. And it can be super functional. But it doesn't feel to me like hard work and huge amounts of effort. And I still see it as like kind of a crappy solution sometimes because I've just learned. I've learned so much. And it's not just about organization. I'm going to give you another example. My daughter, she's 18 and she, for since I can remember, has really been stuck on this mentality of, of I would rather not try and fail than try and fail because then that's embarrassing.

And she has these expectations that she puts on herself of what things are supposed to look like, whether it's cleaning her room or her job or her schoolwork. She has these huge expectations of what success in these areas really looks like. and when she can't attain that, or she thinks like even the, she has this goal in her mind, and it's so big and it's going to take so much time that she's like, oh, why even bother? That's exhausting. I don't even have time for that right now. In her room is one example I'm going to talk about.

I see that she has this cycle of it's immaculate or it's a disaster and it's never in between. because to her to clean her room has to be like insane levels. Like everything's spotless. Everything's put away. But she is in school and she works a lot and she's got a boyfriend and she has a friend she hangs out with. She doesn't have time to clean to that level. We're talking like two hours to clean her room on a regular basis. So therefore, because she doesn't have time to do it perfectly or to get that vision in her mind of what it's supposed to look like, she does nothing at all. And it just accumulates and accumulates and accumulates. And I'm really trying to help her change her mindset to embrace this do it crappy thing. And here's an example of how a conversation we have. I go into a room. There's dirty dishes everywhere.

There's pop cans. There's plates with food on it. There's just garbage everywhere. There's dirty clothes all over the floor. And I'm like, Broski, you got to clean this up. And she'll say, I know, it's really bugging me. But I don't have time. I have to go to school. I have to leave for school and a half an hour. And then when I get home, I have to go to work. I don't have time to clean my room. But I said to her, what would it look like if you just cleaned your room really, really, really, really badly? Like what would a five-minute clean in this room look like? She's like, what would be the point? It's not going to get clean in five minutes, what would be the point? And I was like, just hear me out. Just please, what would that look like? And she's like, I don't know, mom. I don't know. I guess I could take the

dirty dishes down. There's still going to have dirty clothes on the floor, but I could take the dishes in garbage. But it's going to take like six different loads. And I was like, you have a laundry hamper right there on your floor. It's already got dirty clothes anyways. Dump it out. Fill it with dirty dishes in the trash and take it down to the kitchen. How long will that take you? Let's go. Come on. So she begrudgingly does it. She fills up, you know, so many pop cans, so much trash, all the dishes, takes it down to the kitchen. She comes up like five minutes later. She's loaded them all into the dishwasher, throwing the things out, recycled the cans, comes back, scoops up the dirty clothes off the floor, puts them in the hamper, and her room

looks a million times better. She pulls. up the blankets on the bed. Literally, we're talking like under 10 minutes, seriously. And she stands back and I'm like smirking because I know. And she's like, oh, it looks clean. Now, she didn't do what she normally does is focus on the details and straighten all her books and straighten all our CDs and wipe all the tables down and kind of like reorganize her makeup and really get down in the weeds with the cleaning that she does, she literally just took out the trash and the garbage and put the dirty clothes in the hamper. But that was enough. Now imagine if she did that every day, just spent five minutes every day. It would never get bad. It would never get messy. And she would get more

proficient at cleaning her bedroom badly. So maybe instead of the 10 minutes, it takes five and then it takes two and then it takes three. And then before she knows it, every time she goes downstairs, she's just taking a load of dishes with her because she's in the habit of doing that. And now she doesn't have to spend any time cleaning her room because it's maintaining itself. Yeah, she'll have to vacuum occasionally in dust. But she doesn't have to pick up the trash off the floor and the dirty clothes off the floor and pick up, because she's trained her brain to just do this automatically through doing it crappy. So instead of waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting in once a week or once every two weeks, doing this huge, big, insane, hard, tough, clean and getting it to perfect,

she's embracing really, really, really doing it badly because you're supposed to do things. in this little crappy, anti-perfect way. That's the secret of building habits. That's the secret of slowly building momentum and having long-term change and long-term personal growth. Maybe you're in debt and you're like, oh, I would have to buy thousands of dollars of credit card debt. I can't possibly pay this off. I'm going to have to get a second job. I'm going to have to wait for my tax refund. I'm going to have to wait and see if I get money

gifts for Christmas or if I get a bonus from work. And in the meantime, you're just paying the minimum, paying the minimum, paying the minimum. What if every time you pay your credit card bill, instead of paying the minimum, you pay the minimum plus $50. And when I've said this to people before, when I've been coaching them and this is one of the issues they have, they say, well, that's not even going to make a difference. An extra $20. extra $50 isn't even going to make a difference. Yeah, friend, it is. Because you don't have to do it perfectly. We don't have to pay it all off. We don't have to put hundreds of dollars down. We don't have to do these big things. The magic is in the little tiny, crappy steps that we take.

Because all those crappy steps don't sting as much as the big, hard work and effort. they don't feel hard. Doing things crappy doesn't feel like exhausting and overwhelming. It feels like, me, I'll just do this little crappy thing. That's probably not going to make a difference, except it makes all the difference because they add up. So here we are feeling like we're not putting in any extra effort or more effort. We're feeling like we're just, you know, a little bit, but we're able to be consistent.

and do it on a regular basis because it doesn't feel hard. And before we know it, we are paid off all the debt. We are fitter. We have a cleaner house. We've learned more. We've developed new skills. We're doing cool things. We've written a book.

We've started a business. I don't know. I mean, there's a million things that you could do. There are goals I know you have or wishes and dreams. you're not even brave enough to make it a goal. Something. You're craving more. The secret to getting it is allowing yourself to do things badly. Before I end this podcast, I just want to congratulate you for getting whatever it was done that you got done today and celebrate that and be proud. And maybe it's not everything. Maybe it's not 100% done. Maybe it's not all the things you wish you had done.

it could be even something so small that it doesn't even check a box on your never-ending to-do list, but you push the needle forward today. And that's what matters. And you're going to get up and you're going to push the needle forward tomorrow. And if you are just starting a journey of decluttering and organizing your house, you're going to make mistakes. It's going to look not great. It's not going to be perfect. But you just keep solid. problems with crappy solutions. Until you get to the point where one day you step back and realize, holy crap, look how far I've come.

Look at how awesome my house looks. Look at how easy it is to manage. Maybe your goal is fitness. Maybe your goal is getting out of debt or saving money or whatever it is. Little baby crappy steps, man. that's the secret. Let me know in the comments, please, please, please, if you're feeling like this resonates with you. And if you are brave enough to take some crappy steps towards your bigger goal, maybe you have some ideas, put them in the comments to inspire other people, small things

that you can do for me when it comes to fitness every day, I'm just walking, friends. I'm walking and I'm going up and down my stairs because I need to increase my fitness. And I was like, I'm going to run 5K and I'm going to do all these things. I'm going to join couch to 5K. I'm going to join a running group and I'm going to run every day. It was too big. Those were too big of goals. I got to do it crappy.

How do I build up my cardiovascular in a really crappy way? I just take the stairs. I just like double them up. If I'm going up the stairs, I'll go back down and back up one more time. I know. It's not great. It's not great, friends. It's a crappy way to work out, but I'm working out and I'm seeing huge progress. It's amazing how being bad can be so, so good. Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you next time.