Struggle.
Struggle.
Struggle.
Ready to give up.
Then . . . discover a faster way.
Accomplish the task with much less effort.
I was in a hurry yesterday.
I needed to get to Chicago to catch a flight to Los Angeles. I wanted to replace the car seat in our van with a bigger seat for my daughter while I was away. I checked traffic and there were multiple slow downs along the way.
“I can do this quickly,” I thought.
But the old seat was stuck. I pulled as hard as I could and it didn’t nudge. I yelled in exasperation and was about to give up, but remembered a principle I had established for myself a few weeks earlier:
There is always a faster way.
I took a breath.
I stepped back.
I looked at the van seat rather than the car seat. I leaned the chair back and the car seat base went loose. It came right out.
There is always a faster way.
A few weeks ago when we were frantically trying to save the basement from flooding, I was using a small ShopVac to suck the water out of the leaking cracks in the floor. It filled up in five minutes or less.
After hours of this, I was ready to give up.
“Don’t let the water touch the dry wall. That is your mission,” my wife’s dad told her on the phone.
There is always a faster way.
I drove as quickly as I could to Lowe’s and bought a fourteen gallon ShopVac, nearly six times as large as the one I was using.
This one filled up in 20-30 minutes instead of five.
There is always a faster way.
Sometimes when you focus on the problem and the task at hand, you get into the habit of trying to overcome a challenge in one way.
Recognize, however, that there is always a faster way.
See the whole situation.
Sometimes hard work and brute force are not the best solution.
