Washing Dishes to Grow Your Business and Yourself

By Michael Mark, Creative Director/CEO @ NYCA

Ask a Zen master how to make your life complete and he’ll tell you to wash the dish. That’s it. The same goes for your business, I would think. Wash the dish. Totally. Feel the warmth of the water. Look at the reflection of the light on the surfaces of things. Let your fingers touch the sides of the knife blade – being mindful of the edge. Feel the flat of the spatula. Don’t think about things – any other thing. These thoughts are just distractions and diversions from what it is you’re doing. So just wash the dishes. Focus and giving over to the act without distraction will enhance your experience, your effectiveness, your life and your business.

This, of course, goes beyond washing dishes. It applies to your strategies, your conversations, all your actions, your relationships, financial spreadsheets. To compare: when washing dishes, notice the different materials that your dish is made from and you better understand the dish, just as you would when researching the demographics for your next product launch. This focus is not easy when you have your calendar backed-up. But if you just do what it is you are doing you will see that these audiences have emotions, behavioral patterns and, in fact, are not targets at all but human beings. And you can relate more deeply – which in itself is a wonderful reward. Then later it will help you to sell to those people. Later.

In dish washing, it’s not just a wooden salad bowl that you need to get clean – it’s taking care of the wooden salad bowl given to you by your grandmother who picked it out in Denmark from a lady who sang when she spoke, you remember now as you wash it. It’s about looking closely, past routine’s dullness, past conventional thought, past your next waiting activity, to being there in the action. It’s not stats it’s the way people behave. It’s your time with them to appreciate their consumer journey.

When you wash your bowl, you wash everything. When you enter fully into any single activity, there is nothing anywhere else — you are not in your next or last meeting. This is hard to do in this time of time-shifting, multi-tasking, life-juggling. But what a relief to be only here, only now. And in the now, you can begin to experience the true joy of dish washing or creating that marketing plan, and your children, yourself, your job, the joy of this moment.

You may even catch a glimpse of yourself smiling, in the reflection of a shining plate or financial plan.