Simple solutions to weird problems

Years ago, I had a Motorola phone that came with a windshield mount that you could use for navigation. This was in the very early days of Google Maps having that support, and the mount held the phone in a landscape position, presumably to resemble GPS units of the time.

When I got my next phone, I struggled to find a way to get it to work well when laying in landscape mode on my windshield. Navigation would work fine, but most of the rest of the phone would show things in the typical portrait orientation, which was sideways when mounted like that.

I struggled for a while to find a solution until the obvious one hit me — just turn the phone upright in portrait mode and use it that way for navigation. That’s how we all do it now, of course, but at the time it felt like such a strange thing to do.

This came to mind while reading the book “ Upstream “ by Dan Heath, where he shares a story that’s a bit more logical than mine:

Which problems have you come to accept as inevitable that are, in fact, nothing of the kind? Maybe it’s something small: say, the irritation of finding a place to park in a crowded parking lot. I met a woman who told me about an epiphany: “I literally have a step-counter on my wrist and yet I was driving myself crazy trying to find a close space. It was madness. So now I always park in the most remote spot in the lot. I think of it as a ‘VIP spot,’ away from the other cars. I get some extra steps and don’t stress about finding a spot. It’s such a wonderful sense of relief, like I’ve purged that concern forever from my life.”

Finding those little gems in our life can be amazing, and it’s great when a tiny change can make things so much better

Originally published at https://www.mickmel.com on July 28, 2023.