There’s a woman in my coworking space who cleans the space every morning. Today she is frazzled.
I hear her on the intercom radio thingy talking to management. She’s stumped. Someone is planning to have an event here at 11:30AM and they’ve (apparently) left food and plates and other party things out in anticipation of said event.
She’s fuming.
“I’m supposed to clean, but how can I clean if there’s stuff everywhere?!”
I get up to see if I can help her.
There’s no “stuff everywhere.”
There are two boxes of candy and cupcakes on the counter in the room. They are small and portable. She can easily move them and clean underneath.
“You can’t just leave @#&! out and expect me to clean it! I don’t get paid enough for this!” she screams at management on the intercom thingy.
I feel for her.
Resentment is a powerful deterrent to getting work done.
It’s easy to judge. She has a bad attitude. She’s emotionally exploding over what appears to be nothing. She’s near-sighted, petty, victimizing. DRAMATIC.
But so are you.
(and so am I)
How many times have we cursed the world for why we couldn’t do our work? Blamed everyone else when we could have just…moved the boxes.
It’s a slippery slope from there to hustle guilt, that overwhelming fear that you’re not hustling hard enough. You’re working hard (like this cupcake woman) but then 11PM rolls around and you have this sneaking suspicion you could have done more.
The reason we struggle with hustle guilt is that somewhere, deep down, we wonder if our Phantom GaryVee is right.
If we’re the woman choosing to lose her shit over cupcakes instead of just moving the boxes.
The people who win in the end never complain about moving the boxes. There’s no chest pumping or calling friends to “vent” about it. No screaming at management. No, “I deserve 30 mins on Facebook for dealing with this shit.”
No emotional explosion.
They. Just. Move. The. Boxes.
Move the boxes. Clean underneath. Move them back.
