What Happened After Holly Went Viral
I’m a little embarrassed about how long it took me to fix it.
Our kitchen faucet was a single handled thing that you would lift to turn on the water. Move it to the left for hot…over to the right for cold. When you were done you pushed the handle down. It was the most elegant faucet I had ever owned.
Sadly, “elegant” is not Latin for “without flaw.” Over time something inside the faucet loosened so the handle would not stay up when you turned it on. It would slowly drop on its own which, of course, stopped the water. This, obviously, got annoying.
And, here’s where it gets embarrassing. It took me way too long to take the faucet apart and fix it. I didn’t know how and never thought about searching YouTube for a video. Eventually, I did and the fix was actually pretty easy.
It was also temporary. The offending part would stay tight for a few months and then slowly loosen. That was not a problem because I now had the knowledge and skill to make a quick fix.
And, that became the foundation for a moment even more embarrassing than how it took me to even attempt the repair.
Once again, it loosened to the point of needing another quick fix. I went to the basement and grabbed my tools. The repair was a three step process. The first step took a few seconds. The second step should have taken no longer, but this time was different. As I was removing a small screw, it broke. And, it broke in such a way that it couldn’t be fixed.
What I expected to be a repair lasting just a few minutes turned into something much larger. I would either have to replace the entire faucet or hire someone else to do it. In one brief moment my quick repair became transitioned into an expensive time-consuming job. And, in that moment, my frustration couldn’t be contained and I threw my screwdriver across the room.
Expectations are funny things. If I had gone into that repair expecting what actually happened, I would not have experienced those emotions. Some experts call the difference between our expectations and reality an Expectation Gap.
In early 2020, Holly Erickson experienced her own Expectation Gap. She writes a blog that one day went viral. One post changed Holly’s expectations. How she handled her Expectation Gap was very wise. What Holly did is something I’m learning to do and you’ll hear the story in Episode 2 of Long Story Short, my podcast about living an intentional life.
I hope it will impact you as much as it does me.
