I know how to replace a kitchen faucet. If you have a janky old faucet that needs to be replaced with a smoothly operating new one, I can do that for you or show you how.

This wasn’t always true. It became true May 27, 2024, after pulling everything out of the under-sink cupboard, lying uncomfortably on my back inside it, and fiddling my way through several sets of internet-derived instructions.

The exact moment in which I became capable of faucet-replacing is hard to pin down precisely, but it was a real moment in time, sometime that afternoon, in that sweaty and contorted position under the sink.

Just before that, I had been dismayed to discover that the various hoses and hardware coming out of the fixture didn’t correspond to the ones in the instructional YouTube video. I could easily have abandoned the mission there, telling myself I’d “come back to it later” or “figure something else out.” Instead, I chose to lay uncomfortably a little longer, pondering the problem, testing my hunches. Within an hour I had a sparkling new tap that worked perfectly.

Now that I’ve done it once, the mechanics of faucet installation seem straightforward and self-evident, and I’m confident I could do it a hundred times over.  

This new skill is one of thousands I’ve picked up over the years, including making a stir-fry, calming down an upset person, calculating compound interest, hosting a dinner party, and polishing leather boots, to name only a few. Like each of these capabilities, the skill of faucet-replacing will reduce certain constraints on my life, add ease and/or pleasure, and save me some amount of time, money, and frustration, basically forever.

You may have different capabilities than those, but all of us have a lot of them. Each one you gain pays dividends for life. But you have to learn each one manually. They don’t appear in your life off-screen, while you’re sleeping. They appear as a result of your response to certain, consciously experienced moments — limit-testing, confounding moments like the one I had under the sink — when you just as easily could have backed off.

If instead of treating the difficulty as a hard boundary, you move consciously into the fence, into the awkward, groundless feeling of not-yet-knowing, you might just emerge with a new capability.

Gains of territory made here are gains for good. Because you pushed on this one part of the fence, until the fence moved, you now get to reside in a larger and more varied natural habitat. In this new territory, you’re able to ride a bike without training wheels, host a great party, complete a short story, or make small talk with a stranger. You’ve added a new colorful landscape to the area you get to live in. What was once without is now within.

A new bit of plumbing knowledge may sound like a small thing, and it is, but it’s turned a many-times-daily annoyance into a many-times-daily pleasure, and might save me a few thousand dollars in plumbing bills over the course of my life. And it’s only one capability among thousands, earned in one sweaty afternoon.

Life is riddled with problems and challenges, which means life is riddled with these sorts of crux moments, in which you have a chance to push on the fence, and maybe move it outward. You’ve been through so many already. Everything you know how to do – cook an omelet, mow the lawn, walk upright – you once didn’t. There were specific moments in which you pushed past your previous limit of capability, out of opportunity or necessity, and expanded into a new space. The fence used to be way behind you.

And so if expansions of capability are basically permanent, and they happen in moments when you act against the gravity of habit and familiarity, imagine the immense difference between two possible versions of yourself: one who recognizes and exploits such moments, and one who succumbs to gravity whenever possible.

There were certainly many moments when you didn’t push on the fence, but could have. The fence in these places might now seem like actual personal limits. I can’t do math. I can’t earn much more than this. I can’t be open and gregarious.

Ideally, you’d have a reliable way of cranking yourself through these crux moments and on to the other side – a hill-climbing gear to kick into, a nitro boost of some sort. We know that all-out, all-the-time effort isn’t feasible. Energy levels and mood fluctuate. However, being able to engage in an uncompromising 5, 15, or 30 minutes of hard fence-pushing, for those decisive crux moments, would result in many more of these victories, and a much freer and more capable You.

How to Push

In Richard Carlson’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff, he suggests a deceptively simple practice for strengthening your patience, regardless of what’s happening around you. Throughout your day, you perform short, intentional, timed periods of patience.

You can start with as little as five minutes and build up your capacity for patience, over time. Start by saying to yourself, “Okay, for the next five minutes I won’t allow myself to be bothered by anything. I’ll be patient.” What you’ll discover is truly amazing. Your intention to be patient, especially if you know it’s only for a short while, immediately strengthens your capacity for patience.

Try it, it works. Genuine intention is much easier to muster if you know it’s only for a short period. When you try to embody a good quality indefinitely, you know you’re going to fail or give up at some point, and in all likelihood that will be right at the crux, right when it hits peak toughness. With a short but definite “pushing” period, the start and finish time can bridge the crux moment, and let you into new territories.

This technique is analogous to my method for consistently getting work done despite having a very strong natural pull towards procrastination and compromise. You declare your “practice period,” set a timer, and spend those minutes moving directly towards the completion of your task. You do this uncompromisingly, setting aside the whole rest of the world, which you can do easily enough because it’s only for a short, predetermined stint.

I recommend actually setting a physical timer for these periods. The hard timeframe makes it clear that you will NOT consider succumbing to gravity before the buzzer goes. Until then, you push. If this pushing is uncomfortable, at least you know the discomfort is limited to this period. When the timer goes, you can stop and assess your next step.

By committing to a short, serious stretch of this pushing (25 minutes is a recognized sweet spot) you greatly de-complicate the inner battle of doing anything hard. You’re no longer constantly negotiating with yourself. You’re free of the internal threat of giving up, putting off, letting “later” handle it. You make a small and doable commitment, achieve it, and do it again if you want.

These chunks of intentional work, of pushing, are what I call “Blocks”, because you can build things out of them — permanent improvements to your life. You can knock down your to-do list one Block at a time, or you can rapidly stack them up in 20s, 50s, or 100s to achieve major personal goals.

Whatever you call them, having this sturdy little tool for spanning those fence-pushing moments can easily net you many more capabilities over time. You can almost guarantee the resolve required to finally master that tricky Excel function, get through the slow boarding school part of Jane Eyre, or do whatever else you think is worthwhile and enriching. You can systematically expand the territories you get to live your life in. And you get to keep them for good.

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If you don’t yet use Blocks, you can learn my method in about an hour. The instructional book, How to Do Things: Productivity for the Productivity-Challenged is currently on sale.

You can make your first Blocks today if you want. Knock off a nagging task. Take on a fun project. Fix your faucet!

Also, in August I’m going to reopen the One Big Win course for a second group. You’ll use the Block method to knock off a major personal goal, in your spare time, over eight weeks. Owners of How to Do Things will get a major discount. [More info on the course].

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Photos by Martin Olsen, Steven Unger, Max Bohme, Ethan Olarte, Sunorwind, and Wikimedia Commons