picking-those-low-hanging-fruit

[timomeh]

cover_image: https://github.com/timomeh/timomeh.de/assets/4227520/7e2aba63-7458-4683-98ee-73dc27ad9d0f

Picking those low-hanging fruit in your life

When I moved into my first apartment over 11 years ago, I learned something that I continue to learn on a regular basis: solve the little problems in your life. Realize that they're just low-hanging fruit, ready to be picked.

Low-hanging fruit is a term I usually think of only in the context of work. And I still do! Thinking and writing about low-hanging fruit in the context of my personal life feels strange to me, but of course they exist.

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I never really liked the faucet in the kitchen of my new apartment. It was a little loose, and when you rotated it, the whole apparatus rotated a few degrees. It was tall, and the water always splashed more than usual when it fell into the sink, splattering water all over the dark granite countertop and stove. You couldn't pull the faucet down, and it didn't have a sprayer. It was inconvenient and annoying.

But I didn't do anything about it because... I don't know why? Because it's just a faucet? It didn't occur to me that this was a low-hanging fruit that I could solve. I just lived with the damn thing for 2 years. Until I realized that a new faucet only costs 50€ and is easy to replace. I could fix this annoyance in my life with the least amount of effort.

Even the little wiggle it had could have been fixed in a few minutes without any tools. Yet I never did.

And I began to avoid using it because it annoyed me so much. Instead of washing my hands in the kitchen, I didn't wash them at all I actually went from the kitchen to the bathroom sometimes and washed my hands there so I wouldn't have to wipe the counter because the water would splash everywhere.

I wasted 2 years on something I could have fixed with the click of a button on amazon and 30 minutes of "work".

That's just one of many. I've started to identify and fix more of them in my life, but it always takes some time to realize "yeah, this has been bothering me for a while, and it's easy to fix".

So here's my call to you: identify those low-hanging fruits and pick them. The big things in life are hard enough, and the little things make a difference.