Unit 2, Listening 1, A Perfect Mess

 


A Perfect Mess

Announcer:        A Perfect Mess is a new book that explores the benefits of being messy. Our reviewer, Henry Rubins, finds reasons in the book to embrace his own habits of chaos.

Henry Rubins: Finally, in A Perfect Mess by Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, I read the words I’ve been waiting for all my life:

Neatness is not a virtue[1]. It’s OK to be a little disorganized. As someone who is frequently criticized[2] for being messy, I know now I’m not such a bad person after all.

I’ve been messy since I was old enough to dress myself. As a child, I had the usual arguments with my mother about cleaning my room, putting my clothes and books away, and making my bed.

At college, I was even worse. Books, papers, and dirty dishes were everywhere. Oh, part of it was because I was lazy, but I also felt so stifled in a neat, too-tidy room. I couldn’t even think. I mean, I need a certain amount of chaos to feel comfortable.

But it wasn’t until I got my first job that I found out how deep the world’s bias toward neatness and order is. I mean, I didn’t know I would be expected to have a neat desk in order to do my job. But after reading A Perfect Mess, I see I have had it easy at work compared to other people.

The book mentions a woman who worked at a post office in Australia. She was fined[3] more than two thousand dollars at work. Why? Because she had four personal items on her desk. The post office only allowed her to have three. Maybe it was an extra photo of her kids—and for that she had to pay two thousand dollars? The police chief in a Pennsylvania town had it even worse. He was actually fired from his job because of a messy desk. At least I’ve never lost a job!

A Perfect Mess might help people like them, and me. The book begins with a description of the National Association of Professional Organizers, or NAPO, conference. NAPO is a professional organization I could never join. Anyway, NAPO has thousands of members. Thousands. These are people who have gone to graduate school in business, or education, or even law, and now devote their lives to helping the rest of us get organized.

The authors, Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman, interview dozens of members of NAPO. And they point out that not once in any of the interviews does anyone answer the big question: What’s wrong with being messy?

In fact, throughout the rest of the book, the authors show us that being moderately messy can actually be good for us. A Perfect Mess takes the reader on a tour of the various messy parts of our lives, starting with those messy desks. The book argues that a messy desk can actually help you find things more easily because they’re right out in the open.

And it can help people make connections between ideas in new ways.

Here’s a great example. Leon Heppel was a researcher at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in the 1950s. One day, he was working at his desk. He stumbled upon letters written by two different scientists. The letters were in the piles of paper on his messy desk. If the two letters had been neatly put away he would never have looked at them side by side. But he did, and he suddenly recognized an important connection between the two scientists’ research. This connection eventually led to a winning discovery and a Nobel Prize.

The book mentions he wasn’t the only scientist like this. Albert Einstein was another great scientist who was known for having a very messy office.

Next, the book looks at our messy homes. The authors say a messy home isn’t so bad either. A very neat home can be impersonal and cold, but a home full of photos, personal items, and pieces of clothing strewn about[4] shows others who we truly are.

Many people believe that an untidy house sets a bad example for children. Abrahamson and Freedman reassure us it’s not true. In fact, children may learn better in a messy space. The book gets support from research suggesting that a stimulating environment full of clutter[5], movement, and noise may actually help children remember information. And it turns out that keeping your house too clean can actually be bad for children’s health. Dirt and germs help children build up protection against diseases.

And the authors offered more evidence in favor of mess. It seems not only are messy people often more successful than neat people, they tend to be more creative and open-minded. Take, for example, the mystery writer Agatha Christie. The authors describe her disorganized approach to writing her 60-plus novels. Apparently, many times when she began writing a mystery, she had no idea how the mystery would be solved. She wrote down her ideas in notebooks, but they were completely disorganized. To make matters worse, Christie often lost her notebooks in the mess of her workspace and worked from several notebooks at one time. One notebook contained ideas for 17 novels!

In spite of this mess, Christie’s books were, and still are, wildly popular and have sold more than two billion copies in 45 languages. Clearly, an inflexible approach to organizing her stories didn’t work well for the creative genius Agatha Christie. As the authors Eric Abrahamson and David Freedman look into our messy lives, they show us how a little chaos can be good for us. They tell us that mess may help us relax, be more creative, learn better, or even make an important scientific discovery. A Perfect Mess is a fascinating look at the unexpected benefits of mess. I’d recommend it to anyone—except possibly my kids.


[1] virtue: noun a particular good quality or habit

[2] criticize: verb to say what you do not like or think is wrong about someone or something

[3] fine: verb to make somebody pay money as an official punishment

[4] strewn about: verb, usually passive covered a surface with things

[5] clutter: noun a lot of things in a messy state, especially things that are not necessary or not being used

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