“You’ve probably heard the old saying, “people don’t buy the drill; they buy the hole.” Well, I think you need to drill down deeper than that! What they want is not the hole in the wall; they want their wife to stop bitching at them because they haven’t hung that picture yet. They want their kid to be happy because they were able to put the nice neat hole in the front of the birdhouse or make the holes to bolt the jungle gym together.” — Jim Edwards in “Copywriting Secrets”
This is the whole “Five whys” sort of thing.
Anyway, I literally drilled a hole into the wall tonight. It’s my first time actually drilling into a wall. I’m not counting the times where I’ve used a screwdriver and pressed down very hard to then get an anchor into the wall.
I bought a drill and level and all sorts of other stuff that wasn’t entirely necessary. But now I have some holes in the wall.
I’m happy to hire people to do things around the house.
Or I was. But after buying a house, we started paying $100 here, $200 there to do some things that amounted to, well, mostly just drilling into walls.
Now I’m happy to hire some people to do things around the house.
Let’s just say I was much more satisfied paying the plumber to crawl into the crawlspace to cut into the floor and run a water line to the fridge vs. paying the electrician to drill a couple holes to mount a wifi doorbell.
Both jobs were about the same price!
It was all good work. So the unhappiness isn’t toward the people. Just toward myself for not knowing how to drill into a wall. I’ll be useless when the zombies come.
I saw a video on Instagram of someone making fun of the person he hired to mount a TV. The comments, as you might guess, was filled filled with people disparaging the guy for having to hire someone to mount a TV in the first place.
I don’t want to be that guy. (I at least don’t go around making fun of the people doing the work.)
I’m feeling some of the IKEA effect with this new shade: I’m much happier with it than I should be just because I put some of the work in. Like cracking a couple eggs to mix into the cake mix.
Anyway, here’s a book quote that has nothing to do with all of this except that it mentions IKEA. Mark Hunt with a nice analogy about the uselessness of instructions depending on context.
“Yoshida locked in one of my arms and it looked like he was going to get me in an arm bar, but I managed, with pure instinct, to get my knee on his face and out of that position. There was more yelling from my corner, but it was like having Ikea instructions read to you in the original Swedish. As it turns out, it’s pretty much impossible to undertake high-level Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu remotely.” — Mark Hunt in “Born to Fight”
And some puppy tax:
