Sometimes success is about stepping up where there’s a need, even if you had nothing to do with the issue that was created. The other day we were anticipating our first real snowstorm of the year and I could see my neighbor was outside clearing up some of the junk that had accumulated between her property and her neighbor’s (they share a common outdoor space in the back of their properties). It wasn’t any of her junk, she has kids so she’s very tidy and consistently puts out her garbage and recycling on the appropriate days. But she knew with the snow coming she didn’t want to deal with the pile where it was so she went ahead and cleaned 90% of it up in such a way that it wasn’t going to be an issue for clearing snow should we actually get enough to clear (we did). She didn’t have to step up, but she knew that the only way it was going to get done before it snowed, since it had been sitting there for several months now, was if she did it because it moved from just an eyesore to something that was going to negatively impact her and her family.
No one wants to clean up someone else’s mess, but sometimes that’s what we have to do if we want to get to the next step in our lives and our own success journeys. There’s always the hope and possibility that someone will recognize that their mess or issue is negatively impacting others, but more often than not that recognition doesn’t come in the timeline that we think it should. So we’re left with a choice: do we find another way to be successful, do we leave other people’s problems to them and work around it, or do we step up and take the time and resources out of our journey and our life to make our path smooth?
An important side note is that I don’t think that the way to your own individual successes for anyone is to consistently be the cleanup person who is always picking up after other people. They shouldn’t think that they can just leave stuff around and you’ll take care of it, because that’s what you do. So any cleanup work you do should be done infrequently so that others don’t learn to rely on you, and you aren’t constantly behind on your work because you’re always picking up after them.
The lesson I was reminded of as I caught glimpses of my very nice neighbor out the window as I went about my busy day was that it isn’t always as hard or as time consuming as we may have anticipated to deal with the mess, compared to coming up with a new plan or risking our safety just to wait for them to deal with their problem. And maybe if we’re lucky the other person or people will recognize the hard work we put in and will change their ways going forward, or even better, offer to help us as a “thank you” for taking care of what they’ve struggled to work through. So before you jump to a work around the next time you’re faced with a mess, consider if it would be faster and smarter to just take care of it yourself.