Your Most Valuable and Portable Asset is Your Skill Set. Or, Have You Been Deskilled? “Who has a trade may go anywhere” ~Spanish Proverb Are you as skilled as your Grandparents? How do you define skills? What skills are practical skills and thus important—wealthcreating skills? Is there a shortage of people with practical skills? Meaning, are most people just not that useful? Are you skilled and useful? If you had to pick up and move, would your skills create value and earn you a living anywhere?

1. Practical skills for Frugal Living 3/9/2011 1

2. 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? 3/9/2011 2

3. How do you define skills? What skills are practical skills and thus important—wealth-creating skills? Is there a shortage of people with 3/9/2011 3

4. practical skills? Meaning, are most people just not that useful? Are you skilled and useful? If you had to pick up and move, 3/9/2011 4

5. would your skills create value and earn you a living anywhere? Skill is defined as proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is 3/9/2011 5

6. acquired or developed through training or experience. To me, this is painting all skills with the same brush and lumping the useful 3/9/2011 6

7. 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. 3/9/2011 7

8. 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. 3/9/2011 8

9. 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 – 3/9/2011 9

10. 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, 3/9/2011 10

11. , 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 3/9/2011 11

12. 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 3/9/2011 12

13. 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. 3/9/2011 13

14. 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. 3/9/2011 14

15. 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 3/9/2011 15

16. 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 3/9/2011 16

17. 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 3/9/2011 17

18. 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, 3/9/2011 18

19. 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. 3/9/2011 19

20. 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. 3/9/2011 20

21. 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? 3/9/2011 21

22. 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? 3/9/2011 22

23. 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, 3/9/2011 23

24. 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. 3/9/2011 24

25. 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? 3/9/2011 25

26. 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, 3/9/2011 26

27. 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, 3/9/2011 27

28. 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. 3/9/2011 28

29. 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. 3/9/2011 29

30. 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, 3/9/2011 30

31. 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. 3/9/2011 31

32. 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, 3/9/2011 32

33. 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 – 3/9/2011 33

34. 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. 3/9/2011 34

35. 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! 3/9/2011 35

36. 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 3/9/2011 36

37. 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 3/9/2011 37