Go fix a broken window, or a scratch on your car. Don’t call for a specialist, get involved, see how you can have an impact on things around you. Work with your hands, prepare to sweat. It will instantly make you feel better.
I know it always makes me feel better. Although I can hurt my fingers with a hammer or spend double a time a specialist will spend replacing a broken pipe, I love doing it myself. I love to look at what I’ve done and say to myself: I did this.
Crafting something will make you feel like a little creator, giving shape and volume to the universe around you. It may sound exaggerated, but believe me, it isn’t. Even the smallest improvement in the physical universe around you will have an impact.
It often takes a little bit of positive outcome of a small action to give your more courage for the bigger things.
How To Make Friends With The Tools
Let’s be clear here: most likely your fix won’t be as good as one done by a specialist. Maybe it will keep for a while, but after that, you may have to call the real one. That’s ok. That’s more than ok, actually, that’s how it is supposed to be: let the people who know best do what they do best.
The real benefit for this is not becoming a plumber (or an electrician). I’m not even thinking to go there.The real benefit is making friends with the tools.
No matter if you’re a man or a woman, we all use tools. It’s one of our fundamental trait as human beings. There are some other beings who can do this (raccoons when they build their dams, for instance) but we took this tool thing on a whole different level.
The leverage we got from inventing millions of tools and combining them in more and more complex contraptions is immense. Look at how different our habitat is now: we live in buildings, sheltered from cold or heat or rain or snow, phonically isolated, secured against earthquakes, surrounded by sounds and images on demand. That’s amazing. Only 50 generations ago, this would have seem a god’s life. And, in many ways, we are gods now, compared with who we used to be a few millennia ago. And tools, or our ability to invent them, use them and adapt them to more and more situations, played a fundamental part in this shift.
So, by creating this subtle bond with the tools in the physical space, you will slowly (but steadily) grow a certain ability to use all kind of tools. And I’m talking about mental tools here, especially.
That’s where the real benefit is. Have you noticed that “fix-it-all” people usually have a better way in their lives than the rest? They’re witty, they get out of blocking situations faster, they’re inventive, they’re more optimistic, they even avoid trouble more than the rest of us. They know their ways around stuff.
Learning how to fix something by yourself, even if you can’t get it right from the first time, will make you more prone to using mental tools. Habit creation tools. Thoughts changing tools.
And from there, my friend, the sky is the limit.
