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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 important—wealth-creating 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, isn’t a

practical skill. It’s useless, worldwide,

except at McDonalds. Just because you were

trained to do something, doesn’t 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. They’ve 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 don’t 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 haven’t 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 don’t 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 you’ve 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 don’t know.”

If you’re 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. It’s 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.thriftculturen

ow.com