Resources: YouTube is an incredible resource, AND- a surprising number of creators will actually reply if you ask questions! With repairs, I can often find a video doing the EXACT thing I want to do on my EXACT MODEL, or pretty close. (i.e., "replace window in 2021 Chevy Aveo," "replace trunk latch on 1996 Honda Civic" etc.
It's decent, though mostly (at least to me) quite maddening. "A handheld cell phone camera, lit by a jar of half dead lightning bugs, with half your life story in the video" type stuff just... bugs me.
Mindset: If something is broke, and you fail to fix it, and you call for repair? You're no worse off than when you started, and you're better-educated. I have twice had to call in a friend or an actual plumber because things got hairier than I expected. It worked out okay.
Absolutely. And even if you have to pay a bit of a "... you made this
worse, ugh, now I have to undo your attempts..." fee on occasion, you still come out far ahead in total. You'll see the "Labor, $50/hr, labor if you tried to fix it yourself first, $70/hr, labor if you want to stand and tell me how to do the job you failed and brought to me, $100/hr" signs on shop walls as a not-quite-joke, but most people are pretty reasonable about it. Just get out of the way and let them fix it, and if you're watching, watch quietly.
But it's amazing how many things I've been able to fix over the years from that mindset - "It's broken. I can't make it worse than broken and not working. So, where are my screwdrivers?"
What's even better is living somewhere with a culture of people who do this - so if I'm a bit over my head, I know a couple people I can call (or just BS with about the job before I start). And I'm able to be a resource for a lot of people too, either in tools or experience. I've done a lot of automotive work over the years, and while I'm less useful on modern stuff, I don't know that many people who drive terribly modern cars either...
-Waiting a long time. Sometimes, you just need to sit on a project for a long time, watching a lot of videos, reading a lot of books, until your bravery or frustration finally get the best of you and you dig in.
I'm... not going to discuss how many projects I've spun doing this on, trying to figure out the best and most efficient way to do X. The reality is that in most cases, I end up spending more time (by "add an order of magnitude") trying to learn how to optimize X than I do just doing it the inefficient way. And often enough, by the end of the project, I've got my ideas for how to do it faster. On a good day, I even figure them out halfway through!
But I just accept that by the end of a project, I'll know how to do it far better the second time. Ideally, those skills can be used somewhere, but if they're not, oh well.
... but 35 or so joists into a 55 joist deck, I
am getting faster at them!