Practical Skills for Frugal Living

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Practical skills for Frugal Living
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1. Your Most Valuable and Portable Asset is Your
Skill Set. Or, Have You Been Deskilled? 2.
Who has a trade may go anywhere Spanish
Proverb 3. Are you as skilled as your
Grandparents?
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How do you define skills? What skills are
practical skills and thus importantwealth-creatin
g skills? Is there a shortage of people with
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practical skills? Meaning, are most people just
not that useful? Are you skilled and useful? If
you had to pick up and move,
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would your skills create value and earn you a
living anywhere? Skill is defined as
proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is
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acquired or developed through training or
experience. To me, this is painting all skills
with the same brush and lumping the useful
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and the useless altogether. Pushing a button at
McDonalds, to make the fries, isnt a practical
skill. Its useless, worldwide, except at
McDonalds. Just because you were trained to do
something, doesnt make it practical or useful.
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Take the people who work on assembly lines, doing
one action over and over. They may be trained
and practiced, but is what they do really
useful? A person who makes one cut on a
slaughterhouse floor is not a butcher.
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This sort of one dimensional work is rampant in
our culture, in offices and factories the super
specialists are actually useless. Are you one of
them? What a specialist does may only be useful
in one company or factory
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not practical and not that useful. If the plant,
factory, or office shuts down, what do they have?
From our meat cutting example, they have the
ability to make one cut. The skill is pretty
useless. Theyve allowed themselves to be
deskilled,
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, like millions of others in America, by the
division of labor. Not very practical. Adam
Smith said division of labor would be
economically destructive (emphasis added). So,
what is a practical skill? What is useful in this
day and age? You have to look at what
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people actually need to survive and thrive and
then discover the associated skills. What do we
need to survive and thrive? Water, food and
shelter are required for survival, right? To
thrive, we need more varied practical skills.
So, an understanding of how to find and
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use water is important plumbing, water
management, water purification, desalinization.
What skills, besides plumbing, are necessary?
Irrigation puts water to good use raising crops,
so skills in proper irrigation are practical.
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For food, farmers are the obvious personified
answer, but what are the skills associated with
farming? We dont have enough space here, there
are so many skills a farmer must know if they
raise crops and animals.
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They have to know everything about each crop and
each animal in order to produce and get their
goods to the market farmers have a lot of
practical skills. Food production, preparation
and storage are all necessary skills in order to
take raw food
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stuffs and convert them into more useful forms.
Butchers, produce managers, grocers, bakers,
chefs, all have their hands on raw food, and all
use their practical skills to add value to the
food. They do what they do, and it betters you
life
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How about shelter? This one is vast also. Just
think about all the skills that are necessary in
order to build a home excavation, masonry,
carpentry, plumbing, electric, finishing, etc.
Really, we are just beginning to scratch the
surface of some of the skills
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necessary for maintaining normal life in North
America and we havent even touched on what
practical skills are necessary for our culture to
thrive. What about cars? Wow,
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there is a lot to know in order to build and
maintain these, but our culture relies upon cars
and other motor vehicles in order to thrive get
around quicker, transport more and do it all very
easily.
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Engineers, mechanics, welders and trades people
of all sorts all add value to this equation. They
build and maintain our vehicles so that our
economies can thrive.
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How about the roads? Clearing the trees to build
or maintain those roads, preparing the ground to
build or maintain roads, designing roads. I dont
even know where this could lead. What about
commercial builders?
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Imagine if we look at computers. So many skills
required. Are you useful in a variety of ways
that relate to surviving and thriving? Do you
possess practical skills that are useful to many
and useful anywhere?
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These are very important questions. Imagine, you
have just graduated with a philosophy degree, an
undergraduate degree from a college or
university. In the summers between years at
school,
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you worked in a convenience store or on a factory
floor. You may have made yourself relatively
useless, lacking practical skills. The fact that
so many university and collage grads are out of
work is very telling.
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People over-specialized themselves into
uselessness. Sorry. Becoming de-skilled is a
very real possibility if you follow a certain
path. So, what are you going to do about it?
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I guess it depends on who you are. If you are
practically skilled in a variety of useful ways,
keep learning more make yourself as useful as
possible anywhere in the world,
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to as many people as possible, and you will
thrive. If youve just finished up a degree from
college or university and you have zero debt, but
zero prospects because you studied gender studies
and the history of feminism,
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consider learning a trade through on-the-job
training, if you can. Read books on practical
skills farming, carpentry, cooking, auto repair,
natural medicine and so many more do it yourself
ideas.
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If you have finished up a useless degree and have
immense debt, you have to be aware of the fact
that you have just wasted time and money. It
happens, get over it, and get on with making
better choices.
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Read books from the library or online and learn
practical skills from here on. If you are a
parent, be very aware of how you are influencing
the choices of your children. One of the best
answers in life,
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though used far too little, is I dont know. If
youre honest, you will use it often. Many
parents who suggested degrees as the answer to
how to earn a living?, did not know.
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Many parents have unfortunately become obsessed
with this foolish, narrow idea that college and
university are the way to wealth. Its totally
false. If you aim to become a doctor, lawyer,
dentist,
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engineer, or study any science deeply, then sure,
college and university are logical choices.
Otherwise, no. They are in the business of
earning tuition and, therefore, selling degree
programs
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as many as possible, regardless of merit.
Parents, encourage your children to work for
owner-operated businesses, where they can learn
practical skills. Forget about jobs at the bottom
of the corporate hierarchy.
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They are useless to the individual over the long
term. If a child works hard and is taken under
the wing of an owner-operator, they can learn
many practical skills and be paid for it!
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Practical skills travel with you wherever you go
and help you to add value, enriching yourself and
others. Practical skills are your most valuable
and portable asset. For an amazingly close look
at the downside
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of public education and division of labor, have a
look at the film, Human Resources. Exercise your
critical thinking and create value for your
fellow man! http//www.thriftculturenow.com