So, someone asked me, “what’s a 14 out of 15?” and it got me thinking about this one time, not too long ago. I was all gung-ho about finally, finally getting my garage workshop organized. I mean, it was a disaster zone. Tools everywhere, bits of wood, half-finished projects giving me the evil eye. You know the type.
I made this list, a proper one. Fifteen distinct tasks. Things like “build new shelves,” “sort all screws and nails,” “create a charging station for power tools,” “clear out the cobweb city in the corner” – the works. I dedicated a whole weekend to it. No interruptions, phone off, just me and the chaos.
And you know what? I was flying. By Sunday afternoon, I was feeling like a champion. Shelves up? Check. Tools hung neatly on a pegboard? Check. Floor swept so clean you could almost eat off it (not that you’d want to in a garage)? Check. I went down my list, ticking things off, one by one. Thirteen done. Then fourteen. I stood back, hands on my hips, feeling pretty darn proud. It was looking like a proper workshop, a space I could actually work in without tripping over myself or spending half an hour looking for a specific screwdriver.
But there it was. Item number fifteen. The last one. Mocking me. “Dispose of old paint cans and chemicals responsibly.” Sounds simple, right? That’s what I thought. Turns out, our local hazardous waste disposal site? Only open on the first Saturday of the month. And guess what? This was the third Saturday. So, all those rusty, crusty cans of who-knows-what paint from twenty years ago, the mystery solvents, they all had to just sit there, in a neat little pile of shame in the corner, waiting. My otherwise pristine, organized workshop had this one glaring Achilles’ heel.
So, what’s a 14 out of 15? For me, that weekend, it was being so close to perfect, but still having that one annoying thing left undone. It was like having a tiny pebble in your shoe. The workshop was massively improved, usable, a hundred times better than before. I’d accomplished a ton. But my brain, oh, it just fixated on that one unticked box. That pile of cans.
It taught me a bit, though. Sometimes “good enough” has to be, well, good enough. Sometimes there are things outside your immediate control that stop you from hitting that perfect score. The important thing, I guess, was that I’d made a huge difference. The 14 tasks I did complete transformed the space. The 15th? It got done eventually, a couple of weeks later. But for a while there, my workshop was a living example of “14 out of 15.” Almost there, but not quite. And that’s okay. It’s just life, innit?
