It took me a while to admit this, but I suck at washing dishes; well sucked, but when 8 of the 10 roommates you’ve lived with always complaining about it, you have to take a step back and in look in the mirror. The thing is I HATE washing dishes, it just seemed like such an inconvenience.
Why do I have to do this? If I could I would just use paper plates for everything, I would. Dishes just didn’t seem that important to me, but, nonetheless, they were important to my roommates and I didn’t want to be that “guy” who was a pain to live with.
So, I started to step up my “dishes game” so to speak. I embarrassingly even had to google how to wash dishes properly (try not to judge me too harshly), and with my new honed skills, I went back in prepared to do a better job and not be yelled at by my current roommate anymore.
Letting go of my resentment against dishes, I tried to go in with an open mind. Surprisingly, I started to enjoy it. As I actually took my time to wash every dish and not just plow through them like some dishwasher at Applebee’s (no offense?).
I began to understand why it was so important to scrub everything down to the bone. I started to address every single stain on every dish with a meticulous detail. As I was doing this it kind of dawned on me; I remember my father always telling me “Do everything you do with passion and work hard, it will transfer into every area of your life”. I never really understood that or thought it was true.
Who cares if I slacked off on dishes? That doesn’t mean I wasn’t a hard worker or cared about anything else in my life. Which, it doesn’t, BUT, it means something. It means there’s a part of myself I’m not willing to unlock. We hold ourselves back from ourselves.
After a couple of week of doing dishes and being more detailed and scrubbing everything thoroughly, I noticed how in other areas of my life, I started to thrive even more. I took notice of tiny details I would usually gloss over. I realized all these tiny gaps in my work ethic I simply ignored or didn’t think mattered.
It took the letting go of my stubbornness about dishes to realize it was never about the dishes. It was about my work ethic, it was about caring about the tiny details. Caring about my roommate and not being selfish, thinking of others before myself.
It all started with something as making sure I scrubbed everything down and never left something with a stain. After all, who wants to eat on a dirty plate? Not this guy and neither should you.
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