Stop Being Useless

Originally titled Acquiring Functional Skills: Always Learn Everything You Have the Opportunity to Learn

By Andrew Anglin (Support The Author Here)

A study recently showed that millennials are much less handy than boomers. There are a number of reasons for this: boomers didn’t teach us anything, computer skills were more important to us than physical skills and so on.

You should always learn how to do anything you can learn how to do, whatever it is. You will never regret learning how to do something.

(I’m not talking about computer skills in this article, as I assume you all have decent skills on that front. If you don’t, of course you should.)

For example, here are some things I know how to do:

• Change oil on a car
• Light a pilot light in a furnace
• Make a fire
• Build a shelter in the woods out of sticks and leaves
• Use guns
• Basic bamboo structure construction
• Fishing
• Cleaning fish and chickens
• Some gardening
• Sew-up holes in clothing
• Organize boxes efficiently in a truck
• Scuba diving
• Rock climbing
• Basic motorcycle maintenance
• Basic plumbing
• Drywall repair, painting and other simple home maintenance skills
• Very minimal cooking skills
• Boxing
• Operate a chainsaw
• Chop wood
• Canoeing
• Dig a hole and bury a dead animal
• Basic pottery
• Use chopsticks
• Ride a horse
• Play poker
• Write and edit
• Negotiation
• Badminton

I certainly know more than most millennials and I still feel like I know much less than most boomers knew with regards to functional skills.

For example, I wish I knew how to do the following:

• Identify trees and other plant life
• Higher level hunting skills
• Sail a sailboat
• Better constellation identification
• Cooking
• Track animals
• Fly a small plane
• Proper rock-throwing form
• How to pull out a bullet and sew up the wound
• How to drive a large truck
• Jumping on and off of moving trains
• Identify various types of cheeses based on texture and shape
• Ferment things
• Mix and pour concrete
• Refinish wood
• Repair wood furniture
• Sword fighting
• Parachuting
• Preventing an infection without access to modern medicine
• Identifying styles of architecture competently
• Card tricks
• Electrical engineering skills
• Read MRIs
• Train a dog
• Manage livestock
• Make cheese
• Whitewater rafting
• Dancing
• Buy and properly wear a nice suit
• Iron a shirt
• Feng shui
• Eat according to traditional etiquette rules
• Bow hunting
• Make sausage
• Meditation

What you should understand about life is that people who know skills enjoy teaching them to other people. This is the case with almost all people. It makes a person feel important and useful to teach someone else how to do something, especially if the person they are teaching asks them to learn and is eager about it and especially if it is something they like doing.

There is no reason to be shy or embarrassed about asking someone if they will teach you something. Even if you are embarrassed that you don’t already know how to do something, understand that this embarrassment will stay with you for the rest of your life if you don’t learn how to do it. And the older you get, the more embarrassing it is. Imagine being 45 years old and not knowing how to change a tire – it’s much better to be 25 years old and ask someone to teach you, is it not?

You should look at your life and the people you know and consider the people you come into contact with always having the idea that you are looking for people with skills you can learn. As you learn more skills, you will gain more confidence in yourself as a person. Being able to do something competently gains you the respect of other people. It will also make women more interested in you, as a rule.

Many years ago, I stopped to help a woman change a tire – and she had a man with her who was unable to do it. She insisted to me that he was not her boyfriend and gave me her phone number. The man, who was trying to become her boyfriend, was forever emasculated in her eyes for not being able to perform this simple task.

As a young man, one is usually looking at women purely for their appearance and the pleasantness of their personality. However, as you age you start to look for women who are helpful. A woman naturally looks at all of these things from the start, in that her actual sexual attraction is largely based on a man’s competence. Even the man’s physical appearance is attractive to a woman based on the level of competence it presents. Whereas men are attracted to perky breasts and tight butts, which are indicators of fertility, women are attracted to size and muscles, which are indicators of physical strength. Strength represents the ability to perform tasks.

Furthermore, men who are competent at performing real world tasks are going to be respected by other men, and women are attracted to men who gain the respect of other men.

Learning extra skills and performing them is also a good way to pass time. Many anti-Semites are opposed to entertainment media – and for good reason. However, when people come out and say “how can you spend your time watching TV and playing video games when you know it is Jewish?” others will answer that they don’t really have anything else to do. And it is true that in the modern world, we have much more free time than we used to. So there is a definite need to fill all of this time.

Just think of how much time you could spend cooking if you knew how to cook. This would save you money too. And you could have get-togethers at your home where people come because they want to eat your delicious food. You could start regularly having such events, which would be social and also help you with professional networking and meeting women. You would also be invited to the homes of others and asked to cook.

A whole new world opens up if you simply learn to cook. And cooking is a life long learning experience, where you are always learning new tricks.

Imagine if you were also really good at playing cards and doing card tricks. You would be beloved.

Then imagine you knew a lot about wine and you could serve wine and comment on the different wines. And you knew how to do tango and/or salsa dancing and could teach people how to do that.

Having skills makes you socially valuable to other people. It makes you more important and more attractive.

Acquiring a good set of skills at a young age can also lead to the development of a professional career. As you begin to acquire more skills, you will learn more about yourself and what you like doing and you will have a better idea of the kind of career you want to pursue.

I have said no person ever regrets eating right, working out and maintaining health, just so, there is no point at which a person will ever regret learning a useful skill. A person may likely say “I wish I hadn’t spent my Saturday playing video games,” and feel it was a waste of time, but no person will ever say “I wish I hadn’t spent my Saturday with my neighbor learning how to fell a tree.”

As I always say: we have problems in our society which we want to fix, but almost all of that is out of our individual control. We do, however, have control over our own lives, and we can make decisions about the kinds of lives we live. I am always suspicious of people who claim to want to change the world but show no interest in bettering themselves – for example, a fat person calling for a revolution.

No one is perfect and no one can ever overcome all of their flaws, but the only people who ever change the world are people who first respect and take care of themselves and try to make themselves better men.