Wash the Dishes

I once posted on LinkedIn about washing dishes.

I realize how dangerous that sentence sounds. All I needed was a photograph of myself beside the sink, sleeves rolled up, staring thoughtfully at a wet plate, followed by:

I washed the dishes today. Here are five things it taught me about leadership.

1. Great leaders clean up the mess.

2. Every plate needs a clear vision.

3. Soap is culture.

4. The sink is your market.

5. Rinse. Reflect. Scale.

Bollocks.

I mainly wanted to use that word because I love British television—Sherlock, Fleabag, and the first season of Black Mirror. British people can say bollocks and somehow the discussion is over. It works as criticism, conclusion, and complete editorial review.

The embarrassing part is that I really did post about washing dishes on LinkedIn. It received one or two comments, which was probably the appropriate level of public interest in my sink.

But I was not pretending about liking the dishes. I genuinely liked washing them. I had been doing it for years before I began thinking about why. That is how most of the theories in this book arrived. I lived something first, repeated it many times, and then, years later, started examining it until a perfectly ordinary activity could no longer enjoy its privacy.

I live on the East Coast of the United States and have spent much of my professional life working with people in different parts of the world. By the time I wake up, India has already completed half a working day. Europe is active. People in Africa may have sent messages. Someone has made a decision, delayed a decision, requested a revision, followed up on an unanswered email, or created a fresh problem while describing it as an update.

Sometimes I open my eyes and find a small international conference taking place inside my phone.

If the messages are good, wonderful. If they are not, the problem can enter my head before I have brushed my teeth. A delayed payment, a project issue, a confusing note from a partner, or a polite email beginning with “Just checking in” can occupy the morning before the morning has properly started.

Then there is the normal activity of a house with children. Someone cannot find a sock. Someone finds the sock and decides it is the wrong sock. A water bottle that was visible thirty seconds ago has disappeared. Breakfast is accepted and then rejected. A banana breaks in half, and we are expected to behave as though it can still be repaired.

The school bus is coming. Daycare has a drop-off time. My first meeting is approaching. Somewhere in another country, someone is waiting for an answer from me, while inside the house someone is refusing to wear pants.

And there are dishes in the sink.

I like starting there.

I am not claiming this makes me a particularly noble husband. I simply like washing dishes. There is a clear sequence. Turn on the water. Add soap. Pick up one thing. Scrub it, rinse it, and put it aside. Then take the next thing.

There may be a coffee mug with a brown ring inside, a plate with dried egg on it, lunch boxes, baby bottles, greasy pans, spoons hiding under bowls, and dal stuck to the pressure cooker from the night before. There are lids with no containers and containers whose lids have disappeared somewhere in the house. I do not know how this keeps happening. We are not secretly donating lids to another family.

The sink begins crowded. A little later, I can see the bottom again.

I like the warm water and the repetition. My hands have something clear to do while my mind moves around. Sometimes I think through a work problem. Sometimes I replay a conversation and come up with the perfect response twelve hours too late. Sometimes I think about absolutely nothing useful.

I am not standing there trying to be mindful. I am washing a cup.

For a long time, I assumed I liked doing dishes because I liked cleaning and because I was helpful. This was a flattering explanation, so naturally my wife corrected it.

We were arguing about household work. She was talking about cooking every day: deciding what everyone would eat, checking what ingredients were available, planning ahead, preparing the food at the right time, and then dealing with the changing preferences of people who may have requested a meal and later react as though it appeared without their consent.

I defended myself by pointing out that I cleaned. I washed the dishes, cleaned the sink, and wiped the counters. I did this regularly. I presented the evidence with considerable confidence.

She said something like, “Yes, but with cleaning, the outcome is guaranteed. With cooking, it isn’t. Cooking is time-bound. And even if you do it right, the outcome is still dynamic.”

She was right.

Cooking has to happen within a certain window because people become hungry. You need to decide what to make, check whether the ingredients exist, prepare it, and somehow account for taste, mood, appetite, age, health, and whatever opinion a child developed during the previous seven minutes.

You can make the same meal in the same way on two different days. On the first day, everyone loves it. On the second day, someone looks into the bowl as though you have betrayed the family.

Cleaning is more predictable. The plate starts dirty and ends clean. The sink starts full and ends empty. Unless I am doing something seriously wrong, I know what will happen.

I had been congratulating myself for doing the part of the work whose result I could control.

That did not make the cleaning unimportant, and it did not mean I washed dishes only for selfish reasons. But it explained why I found the task satisfying. Much of my professional work does not offer that kind of certainty.

I can spend several days writing a proposal and still lose the project. I can prepare carefully for a workshop and leave wondering whether it worked. I can send an important email and hear nothing. I can build something people asked for and then watch them ignore it. Effort and outcome do not always maintain a respectful relationship in my line of work.

With dishes, I do the work and can see what changed.

That feels good on a morning when everything else is unclear.

I do not walk toward the sink announcing that I need to restore my sense of control. That sentence alone could become another LinkedIn post, probably accompanied by sunlight falling across a coffee mug.

Usually I am just unsettled. I may have read a bad email, started worrying about money, become annoyed with someone, or become annoyed with myself, which is more difficult because that person follows me into the kitchen. There may be several problems in my head and no obvious place to begin.

So I pick up a plate.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the breakfast dishes are gone. I can see the counter again. The pressure cooker has finally given up the dal from the previous night. None of this fixes the company, answers the email, repairs the relationship, or tells me what to do next. I have never cleaned a pressure cooker and suddenly understood the future of Ycenter.

But I can look at the kitchen and know exactly what I did.

That is not always true of my work. I can spend an entire day doing a lot and still feel as though I got nothing done. I have heard many people say some version of this: “I didn’t get to work today. It was just meetings after meetings.”

Meetings are technically work, of course. But they often do not feel like work, especially on Zoom, where you can spend six hours talking about what needs to happen and then discover that the actual work is still waiting at the end of the day. You discussed it, reviewed it, invited two more people to discuss it, scheduled another meeting, and perhaps created a shared document. Yet when someone asks what you did all day, you struggle to answer without sounding as though you were held hostage by your calendar.

I have had days full of calls, emails, decisions, feedback, introductions, planning, and revisions where I worked continuously and still ended the day thinking, I did not get any work done.

What I usually mean is that I did not make the thing I had hoped to make. I did not write the chapter, finish the proposal, build the program, or create anything I could see outside the activity of coordinating with other people.

Writing this book forced me to think about what done means.

I told myself that the book will be done when I am done writing it. Not when I find a publisher. Not when it reaches a bookstore. Not after it receives 4.2 stars on Goodreads and 4.1 on Amazon because, apparently, the readers on one platform found me 0.1 more tolerable.

Someone may read half a chapter and write, “Wannabe Adam Grant.”

Someone else may write, “Terrible book. Don’t buy.”

By the way, thank you for buying it, reading enough to become angry, and taking the time to leave a review.

Of course publishing matters to me. Sales matter. Reviews will matter, even the ones I pretend not to read while reading them several times. I am not going to claim that I have reached a spiritually advanced state where I do not care whether anyone likes the book. I care.

But I cannot make those things the point at which the writing becomes complete. Finding a publisher involves other people. Sales involve other people. Reviews definitely involve other people, including people who may dislike my use of the word bollocks. I can influence some of that, but I cannot control it.

The part I can complete is the writing.

The dishes make that distinction easy. I know what I am trying to do. I know when I have done it. The fact that somebody will use another cup twenty minutes later does not change what happened at the sink.

And the cups always return.

Children can use an astonishing number of cups before noon. I do not know whether they are drinking that much or simply selecting a fresh cup every time they enter the kitchen. Either way, the sink rarely remains empty for long.

I do not mind that the dishes come back. The earlier washing was not pointless. People ate. Someone made tea. Lunch happened. The house continued.

There is a difference between work returning because life continues and work returning because nobody fixed the underlying problem. If the same form confuses people every week, redesign the form. If the same meeting solves nothing, stop having the meeting. If the same customer keeps reporting the same issue, something needs attention.

Dishes return because people keep eating.

The task is not broken. It is part of maintaining a home.

Starting things usually comes with energy. A new company, project, course, diet, website, garden, or home-organization system arrives with possibility. Maintaining it means returning after that energy has faded. The website still needs updating. The customer still needs a reply. The plant still needs water. The kitchen becomes dirty again.

Most of this work does not need a launch announcement. It simply needs somebody to do it.

I know this is getting dangerously close to becoming a leadership lesson, so let me be clear: washing dishes did not make me a great leader. It made the dishes clean.

That is already useful.

The task also has no interest in how important I felt earlier in the day. I may have taught at a university, spoken at an event, advised a company, or spent an afternoon discussing the future of education. Then I return home and find dried dal waiting in the pressure cooker.

The dal does not care.

I do not find this deeply humbling in a spiritual sense. I am usually trying to clean the pan without splashing water onto the shirt I plan to wear for a video call. But there is something helpful about returning to a task that does not require a title, strategy, presentation, or explanation.

Some people hate washing dishes. I understand that too. I am not suggesting that everyone respond to stress by cleaning the kitchen. Telling someone who despises dishes to wash dishes for their mental health may produce a cleaner plate and an angrier person.

For somebody else, the equivalent may be folding laundry, sweeping, watering plants, chopping vegetables, fixing something small, walking the dog, or organizing a drawer. It does not need to become meditation. It may simply be a task close enough and manageable enough that you can see the effect of your effort.

That can help when the larger problem refuses to move.

My wife’s comment also stopped me from turning my preferred task into evidence that I understood all the work happening at home. Cooking carried a different burden. Planning carried a burden. Knowing what was running out, what needed to be packed, when everyone had to eat, and which child had suddenly stopped liking a food they requested the previous week—all of that was work too.

The clean sink was useful. It was not the whole kitchen.

I had chosen a task I enjoyed, with an outcome I could see, and then used it during an argument as evidence of my contribution. My contribution was real. So was the larger system I had not fully noticed.

Which, unfortunately, sounds exactly like the ending of another LinkedIn post:

My wife challenged how I thought about invisible labor. Here are five ways leaders can recognize the work behind the work.

No.

Bollocks again.

The actual sequence was less impressive. I liked washing dishes. My wife said something during an argument. I continued washing dishes. Years later, I understood a little more about why I kept returning to the sink.

That order matters because most of this book was built that way. I did not begin with theories and then search for stories that could prove them. I lived the stories first. Sometimes I understood them much later. Sometimes another person understood what I was doing before I did and had to explain my own behavior to me.

On many mornings, I still begin with the dishes.

Not every morning. I do not want to present myself as a man with a perfect routine. Sometimes I check the phone first and immediately regret it. Sometimes everyone is late. Sometimes the sink stays full while I run into a meeting. Sometimes I wash only the mug I need and leave the rest for later.

But when I stand there, I know what I am doing. The plates become clean. The dal eventually comes off the pressure cooker. The cups return to the cabinet, although several of them will be back before lunch.

Then I dry my hands, make coffee, and open the laptop.

The emails are still there. So are the meetings, proposals, decisions, and problems that may or may not respond to the effort I put into them.

At least the pressure cooker is clean.