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—wealth-creating 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? Skill is defined as proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through training or experience. To me, this is painting all skills with the same brush and lumping the useful 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.

1. Practical skills for Frugal Living
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—wealth-
creating 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?
Skill is defined as proficiency, facility, or dexterity that is acquired or developed through
training or experience. To me, this is painting all skills with the same brush and lumping
the useful 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. 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. 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 – 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, 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
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 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.

2. 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. 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
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.
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 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, 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. 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.
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? 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? 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, 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. 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? 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, to as many people as possible, and you will
thrive.

3. 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, 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.
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. 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, 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.
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, 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 – 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. 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!
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 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!
Practical Skills for Frugal Living is required for every person who lives their life in frugal
manner. In Frugal Living you’ll learn about money saving tips, How to lives a better life
in a budget.