Making money and being successful in life is like cooking a meal. The ingredients are your ideas, but in the end, you have to get cooking. I went all over the internet getting great ideas on how to get ahead in life, but my mind was not ready to take those ingredients and turn them into the end goal. My kitchen was dirty meaning my mind wasn’t ready to turn those ideas into meals.
What Does it Mean to Clean One’s Kitchen?
I started using the phrase cleaning your kitchen a while now and don’t know if I made it up or got it from somewhere else. The kitchen in this sense is one’s mind. Like a real kitchen, I do my best cooking when the kitchen is clean from the start. When it comes to my mind, there are so many things that cloud my thoughts and act as noise that keeps my mind from working at maximum efficiency.
Really, this is what this site is all about. Getting the mind in a position so that it can do the things it is destined to do. I want to get where I want to go. I want to live life on my own terms, but until I clear out the mess in my mind, I will never be able to do so. I am, however, on the right track and I started with the biggest step which was me deciding that I was WILLING to do what it takes to start down this road. For me, it was to start taking accountability for my actions. I had a 20 year old DUI that I finally went to the courts to face the charges. I ended up doing jail time and I was on probation for a year and a half. I was told by many people at the time that I was treated unfairly, but I wouldn’t be where I am now without it. I’m not saying that everyone needs jail and a probation sentence to get thorough their mental hurdles. What I am saying is that a person may need to put themself in a position to encourage a change in behavior. So what could I have done to mitigate my shortcomings and get myself in this same position without having to involve the court system.
What Could/Should I Have Done Differently?
I see now the easiest thing I could have done was surrounded myself with people who were making their self better in some kind of way. A part of my sentence was to become a part of a sobriety program. Going through a program would have been a great place to start since I needed to get sober, but I wouldn’t have done it on my own. I had such a stigma about those programs that I would never have subjected myself to one.
Church could have been an option, but it could not have been the church I grew up in. I needed an entirely different environment. I had to fundamentally change everything, from friends, to habits, to where I went to church, to the books I read. They all needed to change, but I didn’t truly know that until I was on my path to mental fitness.