How do you deal with things out of your control?

I did not have a good day yesterday.

In the morning, I took our car in for an oil change and found out that two of the tires had nails in them and needed to be replaced. This cost a few hundred bucks and an extra two hours of time.

Then I got to work and it was all meetings, so I didn't get any real work done.

I was pretty happy to get home and hang with my kid and wifey. But soon after I arrived, I got a text message from the tenants renting our condo that there was a puddle of water in the hallway and a sections of the carpet were wet.

Unbelievable. This is the second time in under six months that the unit above us caused a water issue. You can read about the first time here.

So I headed down to the condo, and on the way into the building, a resident's dog bit me in the upper thigh. WTF? Maybe I should consider myself lucky it didn't bite me in my twig and berries.

I went to the condo to check out the damage. It didn't look too bad, but the water damage company had to do their analysis of the situation. And they didn't show up until 11:30PM, over five hours later!

And their assessment was much worse than I expected. Basically, there is moisture in every wall in the affected section of the condo.

Ugh.

What to do?

There is nothing different that we could have done to avoid any of this, so we'll just have to go through the process again, get our placed fix, and move on.

Nails in tires, flooded condos - there's not much you can do about things that are out of your control, so it's probably wasted energy to stress about this stuff.

Yeah, we can avoid driving through construction sites (not that we do that often) or other places where there may nails lying around, and maybe we can sell our condo to avoid any problems in the future.

But again, stressing about stuff we have no control over, like traffic and the weather, is just not helpful. It's better to prepare for the things you can control.

How do you deal with things that are out of your control?

I’d love to hear from you. Write your thoughts in the comments, tweet at me @mikewchan, or email me at [email protected].

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