Edition 439 – Jumping To Conclusions
It’s early Monday morning. I’ve stayed up on the Northern Beaches on a Sunday night to make sure I’m fresh for the two days of meetings. They’re great clients and I always like to turn up on or before time, to get a good start on the day and catch up on proceedings since I was last there.
As I’m exiting the car park of the Narrabeen Sands Hotel, I hear a “pop”. I’m driving the beast, my 2016 Ford Falcon XR8 Sprint. It might be a cool morning, but the window were down so I can hear that 5.0 Iitre V8 rumble…and hence why the “pop” was so pronounced.
I pull over on the street outside the hotel and there it is, a builder’s screw wedged right into the rear tyre. It’s in tight, and I can’t prise my fingers in close enough to try and remove it. A hurried run back to the hotel to retrieve a set of multi grips has me trying some roadside repairs, all in the attire that I’m dressed for, for the day.
As I try and remove the screw, I hear the worst of sounds – a “hiss” as I Iever the screw. It’s busted the tyre. Quickly, I remove the multi grips and leave the screw in.
A quick check on Google Maps and there’s a tyre outlet about 4km up the road. As I wait in the Monday morning Sydney traffic, I keep thinking that if the lights don’t turn green sooner, we’re in a bit of trouble here.
As I’m waiting in the traffic, the windows still down and the cool winter air drifting inside the cabin, I’m mulling over various scenarios. If the tyre is gone, then it’ll need to be replaced, along with the corresponding one on the other side of the car. I’ve had about 30 000km out of them, and I never like driving with odd tyre wears, at the front, or the rear.
Being a high performance sedan, these are $600 a pop (pardon the pun), which means that’s more than a grand down, before the day has started.
What if they can’t source that tyre today, or even tomorrow, locally? Where does that leave me, with what I have to get on and do the next few days? The scenarios playing over in my head are all negative.
I roll into the tyre shop’s car park and speak to one of the employees. “We’ll have to remove the tyre, but I think it’s repairable”. Ooh, I remark to myself. Repairable. That’s a good outcome, if that’s the case.
Why do we jump to the worst of conclusions when something goes wrong?
Why do we think of the negative, rather than play through, in our mind, best and worst case scenarios?
When someone’s response to you seems off, one day, why do we automatically think, “what have I done?”
In the end, the tyre was repairable. I’d jumped to a negative conclusion, thinking the worst, and ending up with a much better result than I’d anticipated. In actual fact, the whole episode gave me time to wander down from the tyre shop, grab a coffee and pen this missive, all whilst I waited. A silver lining.
This Week’s Tip
“Have you ever noticed that you’re prone to thinking like this, if you’re a little stressed,
or have not allowed enough “wriggle room” in your diary?”