I’ve been part of boy-scouts for only three days in my life. I always admired them, but wasn’t able to keep up the discipline of regularly joining when I was a little boy. As much as I enjoyed nature, I preferred active sports.
In my three days (and also thanks to my father), I learned one rule from them that I apply everywhere. Although I didn’t apply it for personal gain, I’ve received tremendous benefits from it (both external rewards and inner peace).
The rule is famous and simple: “Leave a place better than you found it.” But many people get it wrong. They focus on the literal meaning: “Clean the place before you leave.”
In its core, it’s about getting rid of the attitude of “it’s not my job” or “I’ll do it later.” You know, it’s often someone else’s job, and later time never comes, even if it’s your responsibility. So, instead of shifting the responsibility or postponing the inevitable, you might as well embrace the reality and make everyone’s (including your future self’s) lives a little better.
At work, you can correct a tiny grammar mistake in someone else’s document while you read or grab a dirty coffee cup that’s lying around while walking to the kitchen to get a drink. At home, you can take out trash while you’re heading outside instead of adding to your to-do list a task that says “take out trash.” You grab it on your way out; that’s the simplicity.
The “leave” word in the rule doesn’t have a literal meaning. When you move from the living room to the bathroom for a quick pee, you’re not leaving home for others. Before you stand up from the couch, grab the dirty clothes lying next to you and bring them to the laundry basket.
The rule is also popular in software engineering: before changing a single line of code to quickly fix a bug, rearranging 10-20 lines around it can improve overall readability. When these small refactorings accumulate, the team slows down, the likelihood of bugs increases, and untangling messy spaghetti code becomes a big effort. I had many debates with people at work after they spent five minutes creating a Jira task for a cleanup task that could have taken the same time to refactor.
The moment you grab those dirty socks from the ground on your way to brush your teeth, the moment you take that dirty cup with you on your way to drink water in the kitchen, you avoid accumulating work for your future self. Carrying one cup is always easier than cleaning a desk full of dirty cups; refactoring 10 lines of code is easier than refactoring the whole codebase.
There is one caveat with this rule: you should not expect any external appreciation while doing so. Otherwise, you can’t follow the rule sustainably. The state of the code is the motivation. The state of the living room or kitchen is the pride, not the “thank you” from a colleague or family. The more invisible the favor is and the more you can deal with being invisible, the more peaceful you’ll be.
The inner will or making things better should be the driving force, not the appreciation of others. When you correct a grammar mistake your colleague made in a document without anyone (including your colleague) noticing, you make your and your colleague’s world a little better. That mistake you fixed is an unknown unknown (they were not aware that the mistake existed) for the next person (even when that person is you). It takes no effort from you, and your colleague’s document doesn’t look sloppy anymore. Isn’t that a great thing?
And you know what: the moment this becomes a real habit is the moment others start noticing it. They realize your little efforts. You win people’s hearts almost without effort. But that is a secret. You don’t know it. Never heard of it. Because that’s not why you do it.
