Often by aiming for perfection, we waste our time and money.
I’ll give you an example. I recently shared that I lost the battle with the toilet flapper. Here is where I realize I went wrong.
For months I tried to fix it without spending money. In all that time, I had some success and failures and thought I was making progress. I was making progress, and eventually it would have worked. I would have stretched the flapper into a shape eventually.
However with that said, what is the value of my time and frustration? When I realized how much time I had wasted trying to rehabilitate this old rubber flapper I realized that I had made a mistake. At some point buying a replacement makes more sense for the future than trying to fix a broken thing. I was trying to fix a broken thing, and even if I had fixed it, it would have broken again because it wasn’t the right equipment for the job.
The reason that I know it wasn’t the right equipment is that it was only 2 inches and when the 3 inch flapper was put in it worked perfectly. The old one didn’t fit, and I was trying to stretch it to do something it wasn’t designed to do. You can get things to temporarily work in ways they weren’t designed to do, but it isn’t a good idea and it is full of frustration.
In jobs we are often asked to use IT tools in ways they weren’t designed for. I am surprised that I was so stubborn with this repair. I should have cut my losses and learned earlier. It is just that it was an occasional bother so it didn’t rise to the level of spending money. However when I realized how much time I had spent on it, I wanted a permanent solution.
Now I have one and silence has never sounded so sweet.