Last week was about planting flowers and stopping to appreciate beauty.  This is the final entry in our home improvement series and focuses on running toilets and facing problems.

Recently, I had a toilet that wouldn’t stop running.  I knew it was an issue, I just didn’t feel like messing with it.  Instead, I avoided the problem by shutting the water off to the toilet.  While this allowed me to avoid the problem, it also inconvenienced everyone in the house.  Has anyone else out there just avoided a house repair problem because you didn’t want to mess with it?  Confession.  The water was shut off to that toilet for days.  During that time span I had time to address the problem, I just chose not to.  Eventually, I took the time on a Sunday to figure out what was going on.  I watched a 5-minute YouTube video, realized the issue was with the float, grabbed a screwdriver, and fixed the problem.  All in all, it probably took a total of 10 minutes, when I had been avoiding addressing the issue for days.   

What does this have to do with anything?  In the above example, I kept avoiding a problem, because I didn’t feel I had the energy to deal with it.  At the same time, the longer I avoided the problem, the bigger of a deal it became.  By the time I went to fix it, I assumed it was going to be some huge, horrible endeavor, and it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.  At the end of the day, the energy I put into avoiding the problem was SUBSTANTIALLY more than the energy it took to address the problem. 

Have you ever done that?  Have you ever spent more energy avoiding a situation than facing into it?  Maybe it was a project for work that looked particularly tricky.  Maybe you avoided a tough conversation.  Maybe you had a task that you knew would be difficult, and it was so much easier to just answer emails and other things.  I’ve experienced all those things.  For me, this home improvement story was a great reminder that sometimes you just need to dive into the thing you do not want to do.  It was also a great reminder that often the thing you think is going to be horrible, is not nearly as bad as you made it out to be.

The challenge: Will you face the problem, or will you continue to avoid it?

Have a jolly good day,

Andrew Embry