All The Adulting Skills You Were Never Taught - Erin Zammett Ruddy - #224

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends in Podcast Land. Welcome back. My guest today is Erin Zammett Ruddy, and we're talking about how to adult today. It's weird, right? You get sort of thrown into life at like 18 or 21 or something, and you just get popped out the door, and it's like, right, good luck. Remember that you need to be able to iron clothes and make a cheese board and reply to all your emails and wash the kitchen floor and fold a bed sheet and do like a million other things. But no one ever really teaches you how. You just kind of learn by doing. And today we go through Erin's favorite tips for a bunch of the biggest challenges that you face in your adult life. So today expect to learn how to wake up in the morning, how to never lose your keys, how to properly load a dishwasher, how to sit upright in your chair, how to tidy a room in 10 minutes or less, and much more. If any of you decide to do a life changing turnaround because of the stuff that we give you today, or if you've got any ideas, then send them to me at ChrisWillX wherever you follow me. I also require massive amounts of help in making it through adult life without setting myself on fire. So yeah, I would appreciate that. But for now, it's time to learn how to adult with Erin Zammett Ruddy.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Erin Zammett Ruddy. Erin, welcome to the show. Hi, Chris.

**Erin Zammett Ruddy** (1:41)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
Thank you for being here. Are you gonna teach us how to adult today? Is this an adulting seminar?

**Erin Zammett Ruddy** (1:50)
A little bit. I hope I am almost an adult. That was sort of the plan when I set out to write this book, that by the end, I might actually be an adult. So I'm getting there. I'm 42

**Chris Williamson** (2:00)
Well, there's hope for us all yet, then. Life doesn't come with an instruction manual. And upon reading Your Little Book Of Life Skills, I've realized how much of the stuff you realize kind of just emergently. It's like how to make your bed or how to properly load a dishwasher and stuff like that. No one actually does teach you these things. So is it just a desire for you to seek some advice from smart people that have got the answers and then compile them for yourself? Like a how to be Erin dot doc book?

**Erin Zammett Ruddy** (2:30)
Yeah, I think I did. I realized that I wasn't doing these things as efficiently as possible. And we all know those people who are super efficient and they just plow through every task and they do it like my father is one of those people. And when I started writing the book, I was 40 and I was like, I have three kids, I have a good job, I have all these things that make me seem like an adult, but I'm still a disaster and like a hot mess, like rolling, rolling around with like, I mean, you know, my car is anyway, I'm just like, I was a little bit of a mess and I thought, you know what, these people might be on to something, right? But I also knew that I didn't have it in me to like Marie Kondo my whole life. Because I would dump the contents of my closet and probably leave it there for three weeks and get a divorce.
So I was like, I need little things that I can do, small little step-by-step things that I can implement almost without noticing, right? Like just little things where I'm like, huh, this is a small thing and it has a huge impact on my day and my life. So yeah, I was like, let me set out to find best experts for each of these individual tasks which range from like waking up in the morning to making a great cheeseboard, to sending a proper email, to helping a friend through a crisis.
And then, you know, there's a ton of fun stuff. There's folding a fitted sheet, of course, doing laundry, which I was terrible at. And just doing it in a way that felt like I would do it. You know what I mean? This is a book that I could read, somebody like me. Like you don't have to go out and like buy a million things to try to redo your life. It's just like small little hacks, little things with big rewards.

**Chris Williamson** (4:10)