Surprisingly profound life lessons I learnt from ironing clothes
Great wisdom and deep knowledge are strewn all around the universe,often in the most unremarkable and commonplace situations, times and places. A few months back I was ironing a particularly crumpled up shirt and I wasn’t having a lot of success. I am known to be exceptionally stubborn but the creases and wrinkles were ganging up against me, exuding a collective stubbornness that I was finding hard to match. Before long I took the whole thing personally and decided to engage them in a battle of wills. After a ‘tricep-workout-esque’ 10 mins I had flattened the annoying buggers. In a symbolic show of victory I put on the shirt and glanced at the mirror. The apparently vanquished wrinkles were not only still visible but they had sneakily moved to erstwhile smoother areas!
I realized something was wrong with the way I was ironing, so I decided to learn how to do it right and ended up drawing some interesting parallels with life itself.
Break the bigger picture into fragments. Isolate and attack!
When faced with a shirt that is completely crumpled, it is important to focus on one area at a time instead of trying to work on the whole thing at once. Start off with the collar. Forget about how crumpled up the rest of the shirt is and focus on fixing just the collar. Once the collar is completely smoothened out, simply forget about it and move onto the sleeve. This time concentrating on just the sleeve. In this manner, ironing just one part at a time is the best way to iron any large piece of clothing quickly and with minimum effort.
Similarly in life, we tend to get too caught up with the bigger picture. Any great goal or ambition should seem overwhelming when thought of as a whole. If it does not then it’s probably not even worth chasing.
The problem is that most people after working hard and smart for a while tend to lose motivation and give up when they realize that after all their effort there is still such a long time to go.
This is why we should break down our ambitions into smaller steps. Forget the bigger picture and just focus on one step at a time. Work hard, complete that one step and once that is out of the way push it out of your mind too and focus on the next one. The beauty is that not only does the whole process seem less daunting, every time you complete a step you gain a sense of achievement that replenishes your motivation to keep surging forward.
Preparation is the base upon which performance stands
While ironing, it is absolutely essential that you flatten out the area with your hand and stretch the fabric a bit to remove the little folds before running the hot iron over it. Because no matter how hard you press the iron, if it’s running over folds it will only make them further pronounced making the whole process unnecessarily tougher and complicated.
In life too building the right habits that support your primary goal is what helps streamline your efforts to efficiently produce results.
If you are an athlete, practicing the basics and focusing on nutrition will help you much more than just going out and giving everything on the field. If you are a programmer, following the best practices, and knowing the different methods by which the same requirement can be fulfilled will help you write better code in less time than if you were to just pounce on the code straight away.
Do not let off right till the very end
Once you have carefully ironed the shirt it can be very tempting to just hurriedly fold it up and get done. But it is when you fold it up neatly with same care and run the iron a couple more times over the folded fabric, that your work goes from just passable to truly impressive.
After putting monumental efforts into our endeavours, it is easy to get carried away by impatience when the finish line is finally within reach. It is natural that we feel fatigued from the sustained efforts and want to simply grab that feeling of fulfillment and gratification. But doing so tends to take the sheen out of the whole thing after doing just about everything right.
Ending correctly can often be the difference between good and great.
A real-life example would be going through your answers one last time before submitting a test paper. You might very well end up correcting a few careless mistakes that would’ve cost you a perfect score. Wouldn’t it be truly unfortunate to have your perfect efforts rewarded with an almost perfect score just because you got a little impatient at the end?
Those who truly seek beauty and wisdom can find it everywhere for the world and everything in it is beautifully wise!
