I was at my gym in Chicago waiting for the leg press. It was occupied by a guy sitting in position, weights loaded, scrolling through his phone. I understand resting between sets. I give myself sixty seconds to catch my breath and let my heart rate settle, and how you spend those sixty seconds is your business.
Three minutes went by.
Bro. This 52-year-old is more locked in than you are, and I need that machine before my muscles turn to dust, which at my age is highly probable. So I skipped ahead to my barbell squats, finished all my sets, and returned to find him still scrolling. In the ten minutes I was gone he had managed one more set. I know because I watched.
I did what any normal person would do and set my water bottle down near the machine to signal I was next. Not close enough to crowd him. I’m not a monster. The social cue was ignored, refuted, or sailed clean over his head. I couldn’t tell you which.
Finally he punched out a set and stood up. Then he walked away. He left his plates loaded and his sweaty silhouette on the vinyl for me to wipe down, and he moved on to the next machine he would occupy like a parked car.
This made me angry. So angry that I maxed my leg press, because apparently rage is an underrated pre-workout. Who knew. I suppose I owe him that much.
Afterward I sat on a bench gathering my things and just watched. A man exited the quad machine, stripped his weights, and returned them to the rack. Then he grabbed a sanitizing wipe from one of the stations the gym has placed every ten feet so there is no excuse. He wiped the headrest. The seat. Then he wiped down the weights he had used. The weights.
I’m writing this on an airplane and before I boarded, I watched a woman in an airport restroom wash her hands, dry them, and then use her paper towel to wipe down the sink area before throwing it away. The puddle wasn’t hers. She just saw it and did something about it.
I have said for years that how you do one thing is how you do everything, and I have taken flack for it. The dissenters usually come armed with the sit-up defense. When our new officers took their physical agility test, they had to complete a minimum number of sit-ups in sixty seconds. Some would hit the minimum and stop with fifteen seconds still on the clock, and I diagnosed them as bare-minimum people. The rebuttal: they were conserving energy for the mile-and-a-half run that came next. Strategy, not character.
Fine. I’ll concede the sit-ups. Effort is situational. Nobody polishes every corner of their life, and the person who claims to is lying or exhausted.
But I won’t concede the machine.
Because the man scrolling on the leg press wasn’t guilty of low effort. He added weight. He did his sets. His sin was that nobody else in that gym existed for him. And the quad-machine man wasn’t maximizing anything. He was simply behaving as if the next person was real. That is the version of the maxim I will defend to the death: how you treat a machine you’re done with is how you treat people you’re done with.
The research is on my side here. Psychologists call it conscientiousness, and it is one of the most stubbornly consistent findings in the field. It predicts job performance across nearly every occupation. It predicts the health of your relationships. It even predicts how long you live. The reason it predicts so much is that it travels. The person who wipes down the machine is statistically the person who returns the shopping cart, shows up on time, and tells you the truth. Executives have known this forever. Bill Swanson made the waiter rule famous: watch how someone treats a server who can do nothing for them, and you will learn more than any interview will ever tell you.
So yes. If I were a younger woman looking for a partner, I would skip the dating apps and go sit on a gym bench. Watch who reracks the weights. Watch who wipes the seat. Marry that one.
And now the part I would rather not tell you.
My wife gets furious with me about my closet. I want the tee shirt at the bottom of the pile, so I pull it out and leave the rest disheveled behind the door, and my first instinct when I confessed this was to say it only affects me.
She’s furiously annoyed, Kristen. It does not only affect you.
Here is what my closet knows about me. I am a people pleaser, tuned to the external world. I will wipe down a machine for a stranger. I will rerack weights for people I will never see again. I would sooner die than have a hotel housekeeper think I left a mess. That airport woman was my spirit animal, because I wipe sinks in public bathrooms too, for people who will never know it was me.
Which makes the closet worse, not better. I can’t even claim I’m performing for an audience. I give my best to strangers who aren’t watching. And the person who shares my actual life gets the pile behind the door. Because strangers are still deciding what to think of me. She already decided. She chose me, and somewhere in the safety of being chosen, I stopped extending her the courtesy I hand out free to people I’ll never see again.
So here is what I’m asking you to do this week. Forget the gym. Go find your closet. The corner of your life where the person who already chose you gets what’s left of you. You know exactly where it is, because you just thought of it.
Wipe down the machine. Especially the one behind the closed door.
