LIAM CHAI

I made a mistake on my cabin today. I wanted to get the third wall frame up after work and I only had about half an hour of daylight left. I got my brother to help lift the wall and position it in place. Then I nailed it into the floorboard. After that I measured the doorframe opening and realised I didn’t check if the opening was square before nailing it. It meant my door opening was 7cm narrower at the bottom compared to the top – the door would no longer fit.

This created two Liam’s: Liam 1, the logical planner self and Liam 2, the just-do-it self. Liam 1 is scolding Liam 2, he is telling him he should have taken a few minutes before nailing to check everything was being done correctly. It was such a silly mistake, what should have been a ten-minute task will now become several hours to fix this mistake. He is calling Liam 2 an irrational and impatient pig.

Liam 2 on the other hand is thinking, well I got that wall up, I’ve been putting it off for several days and it’s up now – great. And anyway, this isn’t the first mistake I’ve made on the cabin, and I’ve been OK correcting them all, so what if there’s another one? Besides, there’s no rush to finish this cabin.

After making the mistake I was quite negative with myself. Eventually Liam 1 came round to Liam 2’s thinking. Liam 1 even used his strengths to find solutions to the problem and it turns out it wouldn’t be that hard to fix. My door would just have to be thinner at the base.

The lesson I learned here was that if I became too much of Liam 1 and not enough of Liam 2, I became obsessed with worrying and predicting solutions for problems that might not even happen. If I became too much of Liam 2 I would end up doing things without thinking and some where down the line a mistake I couldn’t fix would happen.

I don’t think I can maintain this perfect balance all the time. It’s a constant shifting from extreme Liam 1 to extreme Liam 2, the secret is making each extreme closer to one another. With practice it would look like there was a perfect balance all the time.