The Hidden Wisdom of Painting Closets

When I was younger, I learned that professional painters - people who paint homes - aren’t allowed to paint the walls of a house until they have perfected the art of painting closets. 

Until a painter could neatly coat the home’s interior-most corners with thorough, smooth brushstrokes—leaving no inch uncovered— only then could they graduate to the visible canvasses of hallways, bedrooms, and staircases. 

At my first job, the equivalent of painting closets was compiling tedious wrap-up reporting for advertising campaigns. I hated this work - it required a detail orientation that eluded me, and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t good at it. Nevertheless, I spent the majority of my first year out of college pulling complex reporting, calculating conversion metrics, deducing key insights and summarizing them in impossibly dense decks. Every penny of media spend needed to be accounted for, and if it wasn’t, well … I better track it down. 

I’d send drafts of the decks to my boss, who would immediately ping me from her desk across our small office with panic-inducing questions like “These numbers don’t add up. Why?” or “We didn’t even run on Facebook, why are Facebook numbers in here?” 

I wanted to die. I’d stare at excel sheets until my eyes hurt, begging the numbers to make sense. The work was neither fun nor rewarding; once I finally got the decks where they needed to be, they were passed off to higher-ups who presented the findings to rooms of people who didn’t even know I existed.

To earn my seat in those rooms, I had to master this type of work. I had to become intimately familiar with every slice of data and understand the story it told before I could field client questions. I had to learn what to watch out for, what numbers mattered and what didn’t, and which platforms had reporting that required more time to untangle. I needed to learn what questions to anticipate from my boss and what mattered to her. I needed to learn how to check my work and ask these questions of myself.

In short, I needed to become detail-oriented.

When you’re painting the inside of a closet, it’s easy to resent the work. Who cares if I get the back corner of the top shelf? LITERALLY, no one will ever see it. 

So much of that reporting felt like a waste of my time, and it was hard to escape my frustration. Usually, barely half the deck was presented because the clients would spin out on some metric early in the call. Afterwards, the report I’d spent days - sometimes weeks - putting together would be forgotten entirely as we rushed to launch the next campaign. I was blinded by my naive sense of futility; I didn’t understand why we were pouring so much time into something that seemed so pointless. I wanted to do MORE, solve problems, change the world.

Those reports might not have had the global impact every doe-eyed 22-year-old imagines the work awaiting them at their first job will have, but they taught me a priceless skill - the skill of paying attention. 

When I was young, I wanted the instant gratification of solving complex, visible problems. I wanted gold stars and seats in rooms I was far too young for. I wanted the rom-com version of corporate America, like Jenna Rink in 13-Going-On-30.

What I learned as I climbed the ranks of corporate America, though, was that to have impact, you need to have the basics mastered. Just like painters. 

By the time I had earned my right to the “fun” projects and secured seats in the rooms I so desperately wanted to be in, I almost missed those old reports. Gone were the tasks where I could put my headphones in and lose track of time in the simple Excel formulas. Once you ascend to those more visible places, a whole other skillset is waiting to be perfected; one that’s more political and nuanced.

To be honest with you, I wasn’t great at that either, for the same reason I struggled with my entry-level reporting: futility. It’s so easy, no matter what you’re doing or where you’re working, to lose sight of the work itself by focusing on what happens when the work is done.

As I shift my career to a place that’s more rooted in art; I’m constantly revisiting the age-old wisdom that so many who have come before me emphasize often - what happens once the work is released into the world (or into the hands of your boss, or company, or client) is not really in your control. 

What is in your control is the integrity you bring to the project, no matter how simple or mundane it might be. If you’re just starting out, you’re not going to be painting closets forever - so why not make the closets you are painting as perfect as can be? Why not enjoy the music you get to lose yourself to while you do it? Someday you might miss that work. If you’re more established in your career and struggling with a different kind of futility, maybe it’s about refocusing on the energy you’re bringing into the rooms you’re in, or what kind of example you’re setting for the people still very much working on their own mastery. Maybe it’s just savoring the cup of coffee you’re holding in your hands.

I spent far too much of my time in Corporate America focused on what was next, or what felt bad, or what I wished I was doing instead that I missed so much of what was right in front of me.

The greatest gift you can give yourself - and your work - is the gift of presence.

Maybe presence will reveal that you do need to pivot to more aligned work. But maybe, presence will give you an opportunity to simply show up to what’s in front of you. There, the wisdom of the work might just reveal itself to you. 

At the end of the day, any job is going to have its “work”. Whether it’s painting closets, or working on wrap-up reports, or navigating complex politics as you rise in the ranks of an organization. 

What I challenge you to think about as we settle into the fall is this: what can you show up to with a little more presence this season? You never know what magic will unfold when you do. 

I’m eyeing this Swatch in my favorite color… what do you think?