Here is a lie many of us have believed for years:
“I’m lazy.”
“I’m just messy.”
“There’s something wrong with me.”
But that’s not true.
Being organized is not a personality trait. It’s not a moral issue. It’s not proof that you’re disciplined or undisciplined.
It’s a learned skill.
No one expects you to speak Italian unless you’ve studied it. And yet we expect ourselves to “just know” how to run an organized home.
Pam and Peggy, authors of Sidetracked Home Executives, called us SLOBs — and they coined the phrase: spontaneous, light-hearted, optimistic, and beloved. That’s not an insult. That’s wiring.
Some people are born system-driven. List-oriented. Sequential thinkers.
Others are attention-diverse and happiness-driven — my version of ADHD. Same thing, different description.
That doesn’t make us broken. We just think differently.
It simply means we need the when, the what, and the how.
And here’s the hard truth:
We are not a mess because of our circumstances.
We are a mess because of our habits.
There is no excuse for a mess. That might sound harsh — but when you understand it, you’ll see how freeing it is to abandon the excuses.
If habits are the problem… habits can be changed.
It takes no more time to throw a wrapper in the trash than to leave it on the counter.
It takes seconds to rinse a mug.
The ADHD community says we have “time blindness.” I’ve been saying for years that we have a warped perception of time — which is just another way of saying it.
So I developed something called Counting Mississippis. It helps us see how much time actually is going by, and we teach ourselves that we can take the time — and that things don’t take as long as we think they do.
What steals our peace is unawareness and tiny, repeated neglect.
And the opposite is also true.
Tiny, repeated actions build order.
I give the example of someone bedridden and crippled due to a car accident, and someone with cancer and two small children at home with a husband who worked full time and went to school at night.
In both cases, the house was not a mess — not because life wasn’t hard, but because systems were in place and good habits had already been formed. The homes remained neat and clutter-free.
We’re not lazy.
We’re not broken.
We’re not unmotivated.
We just need to learn.
Let me know what you think of this video. And if you want more help, check out my Skool Community.
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