Ship in Six

Lesson #9: The Life Changing Magic of Shipping, Part 1

We're coming down to the wire... and that's when all the excuses and old habits crop up.

Just about a year ago, I read a little book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Japanese organizing expert Marie Kondo. You've probably heard of it. You've probably rolled your eyes at it.

A book on tidying!! What the hell, people??

But I'm here to tell you: It's amazing. It really is life-changing. I can’t recommend it enough.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up isn’t just about tidy homes, it’s about life. It's about that moment where the excuses come out like slugs. And it's about salting the shit out of them. Forever.

The book itself is so good because it throws out every traditional piece of advice.

Marie proves it: Little by little won’t solve the problem. Storage won’t fix the problem. Fancy boxes and shelves and “one thing a day” won’t get you there, ever.

You have to do something radically different to get a radically different result. Otherwise you’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Here’s the thing:

The messy-house problem doesn’t occur on the day-to-day level.

You may think you “just aren’t good at it,” but that’s because you’ve been working on the wrong end of the problem your whole life. The problem occurs upstream. You can’t solve it on the day-to-day level. You have to attack it where it starts, and nothing else will do.

It’s true of tidying — Marie convinced me. And it struck me so forcefully because firstly she is an excellent teacher, and secondly because I know that it’s true of business, too.

Alex and I have taught so many students — business newbs, business failures — who have, altogether, gone on to gross multiple millions in revenue.

Most startup and productivity advice is on the day-to-day level: the little tactics. Try this, try that. Pivot. Split-test. But like tidying, the problem occurs upstream. These tactics will never fix the broken strategy.

The lessons from this book? Virtually the same lessons we have learned ourselves in business, and what we do our damnedest to teach our students. The previous failures, the negative self-talk, the self-perpetuating cycle, the backsliding that terrifies our students… it’s all exactly the same as Marie describes in her students. Only the implementation details change.

We’ve all spent a lifetime absorbing the wrong lessons, the wrong advice.

But, as Marie writes, if you do things right, just once… if you simply experience just how amazing the right way feels, just once… you will be forever changed.

The failures, the negative self-talk, the backsliding all become irrelevant. You’ll see them for what they are: fatal flailing in quicksand. Get yourself on firm ground for once, and you won’t need to flail any more.

But until you’ve felt solid ground, you simply don’t understand what you’ve been missing.

Sound at all familiar? It sure sounded familiar to me.

Alex and I recorded a wide-ranging conversation about the revolutionary approach Marie teaches for tidying, and how those lessons apply to shipping.

Listen to part one:

Did you get this lesson from a friend?

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