First Things First, Clean Up Your Mess

“If you cook in a mess, you’ll produce a mess” — Gordon Ramsay

The lesson of this article is simple. Clean up your mess before you start doing anything else.

I remember a couple of years ago, when I still was a beer brewer and I had all the beer in the world I could drink (not necessarily a good thing), my partner and I got up really early to brew the delicious Weizen beer everyone liked so much, including ourselves!

We learned the hard way (spoiling thousands of liters of beer) that the brewery needed to be the cleanest place, otherwise, our deadly enemies, the dreaded bacteria, would come and spoil our beer, as they did so many times.

We had tons and tons and tons of work to do, physical and mental. Numbers, marketing, crushing the grain, you name it.

There were times we had so much to do we didn’t even know where to begin. So my partner, on automatic mode, began cleaning. That was his answer to stress, I thought it was dumb, having so many other (more important in my mind) things to do. But the years have passed now, and I copied him. First thing that I do when I don’t know what to do is cleaning, ordering and organizing.

I’ve learned now that what cleaning does is that it gives your mind space to think. If you cook in a mess, you’ll produce a mess.