Is It Time to Pull the Pin?

We just spend a full hour looking at beverage centre options. Before I go further, I should clarify that prior to this somewhat bizarre comparison of can versus bottle capacity and wifi-control versus manual features I had no idea what the hell a ‘beverage centre’ is. Or why we needed one in our life.

In my last post I shared that we had quite suddenly and unexpectedly become homeless. The story has a good ending—not only is our special home going to a young family who we immediately knew on meeting them would treasure our home/project of many years as much as we have, but we found and purchased a new home in the same week.

Life moves fast when you get out of the way.

By ‘new home’ I mean a still-in-the-wrapper house nobody wanted until we came along. And now it’s our home and the way the deal works is the appliances are installed once the home is purchased. Fortunately, they are all selected by the contractor, all except the beverage centre - that one we have to choose between four options. And to complicate this crucial life decision further, each choice has tantalizing options (I hope you know I’m kidding.) Do we want independent control zones, “soft-blue LED lighting with two(!) intensity settings”, or enough can and bottle capacity for the “serial entertainer”?

Debate or Do?

Life is full of decisions; eat this or that? Say this or that? Do this or that? Buy this or that? It can be tempting to noodle away, dissecting decisions in life, building impressive spreadsheets, waiting for stars to align or a horoscope to whisper clues over your morning coffee.

Every decision has consequences but none greater than the cost of no decision. If you’re on a long drive and passing by every gas station because they don’t look “friendly” enough you better hope you packed a Jerry can.

When I was building my last business - a content management company - I was desperate for clients and took on anyone wanting our services who had a credit card. It didn’t take long for a few bad apples to start occupying more and more of my time. Staff were receiving negative - sometimes abusive - comments and my efforts to appease the chronic complainers only gained us short reprieves from more complaints.

My first reaction was to tighten up our process for selecting new clients and to dial back the services we were offering in the hope that future clients would have less to complain about. In a way it worked; new clients didn’t miss the extra services and they all seemed happy. But the perpetually unhappy ones were still, well, perpetually unhappy.

Until I fired them.

Pull the Pin

All it took was a few short phone calls and a holding my breath while I was told I was a horrible excuse of a business owner and then - just like a crappy bit of weather has passed and the sun came out - I was free to get on with being a horrible excuse of a business owner and to running my business. The pin was pulled, nobody died and we were back focussing on what we did well, not babysitting someone we could never please.

Life is like that. Everyday we have decisions to make, some so small that our habits let us run on autopilot and some that deserve a few more hums and haws. And sometimes “we can only see as far as our headlights”. For those, you should pull the pin and see what happens.

In the end we picked the beverage centre the contractor recommended.