The solution may be closer than you think

My Filson water bottle was taken out of rotation months previous due to a damaged handle that was making it hard to carry around.

I had yet to make time to order a new lid or to attempt the elaborate repair that I had been ideating. A cool new braided handle would be cleverly compression fitted with a hose clamp… or plastic weld… or epoxy of some type… maybe I hadn’t quite figured it out yet.

While gazing up at the cupboard for an interim replacement bottle, I noticed my daughter’s unused Hydroflask that housed a lid roughly the same diameter as the Filson. “The thread pattern and design will surely be different”, I mused as I brought it down for a closer look deciding to try it either way.

“What the What?”... it fits!

The solution had been sitting in my cupboard all along, simply waiting to be located and used.

This seems like the perfect anecdote to so many problems in our world. While we elaborately plan complicated solutions and designs, an off the shelf, low tech option is often only a mouse click away.

Give yourself a shift in perspective, look at a problem from a new angle, and consider what pre-made solution is just waiting to ‘come off the shelf’.

• Now that’s a peak ethos.