On work and quality

My bike Roland was stolen last year. I loved this bike: it was my mother's before me, older than I was, and four sizes too big, but I didn't care. He was a great bike.

In the past month, I decided that I wanted to get a new bike. And I started noticing that, seemingly everywhere I went, there were bikes parked on the street with "For Sale" signs on them. Some of them looked pretty good: nice bikes, reasonably priced. But I was reluctant to take the next step and contact the owners about the bikes. It was like pulling teeth, and made me feel all angsty. I tried wildly to find excuses for not pursuing the bikes: see that patch of rust on the wheel? The frame is probably a tad too small. The tires look flat. On and on.

So yesterday, after passing by yet another bike for sale, it hit me what was going on. I have a theory about the way the world works, that goes like this:

If you work hard, then you will reap nice rewards

That sounds like a pretty good theory to live by. The industrious ant storing up food for the winter, and such. But I have also developed a corollary to this theory:

If something comes to me with little work, it must be flawed.

Interesting. So I am essentially equating value with how much work I put in. This was why I didn't want to pursue the bikes for sale on the street, because what could be easier than just picking up a bike off the street on the way to the coffee shop? In order to find a quality bike, I felt I needed to search Craigslist, compare at least 10 bikes, visit them, negotiate, think about it... make the whole thing a huge ordeal. THEN I would find a quality bike. But picking one up off the street couldn't possibly result in my obtaining a quality bike.

Of course, this is a silly theory. There is no reason those bikes on the street couldn't be quality bikes. Who says I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find something great?

So the lesson I learned here is that I need to dump the theory that:

I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find quality

And replace it with a theory that works better for me. How about this one:

Quality isn't necessarily correlated with ordeal size.

So I tested out that last bike on the street, and guess what? Now I have a bike. No ordeal required :)

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