Thoughts on self learning and DIY

[yorkville]

Since discovering mustachism, I have been doing a lot self-learning and DIY. During this process, I find myself frequently searching online or offline for guidance. While I generally appreciate the help I receive,  I do have a criticism.

Let's say I am trying to figure out how to do a task, and the advice I get would be something along the line of this: "Here is how you do it, step 1, 2,3. But be very careful about x. if that happens, it will take a lot effort to fix. And I made that mistake back in the days. Man, that was paintful."  Usually, "x" would be some low probability event.

Sometimes, I wonder if these low probabilty "x"s get over-emphasized because (1) people have selective memory or bias for events that happened to them, or (2) people love to tell war stories.

The advice givers have managed to live through the occasional "x"s, which are generally not fatal. Perhaps surviving these "x"s from time to time, is just part of learning. If one has to account for all the "x"s,  one may never been able to even get started on the task.

Just some of my thoughts, hope it makes sense.

[oldmannickels]

I think that's true and it creates a lot of self doubt before starting a DIY project. That's why I always post my DIY ideas on here to get people to tell me I should at least try it or do it for moral encouragement.

[Linea_Norway]

If you learn from e.g. a youtube film, then try to read more about the job. If people warn a lot about it being difficult, you may presume it is difficult and maybe hire someone to do it for you. If most instructions say it is easy, you give it a try. It can also depend on how much time you have to try your job. Sometimes a failure is a big problem, othertimes it is not.

[ixtap]

I firmly believe in learning from other people's mistakes, as well as my own.

The stories help people remember to look out for some niggly bit that might seem otherwise unimportant.

[Posthumane]

I'm a big fan of DIY for as much stuff as I can, and self learning when the outcome of doing it wrong is not dangerous. There have been times when I made some mistakes, but often living through those mistakes makes you remember them and learn the lesson better than if someone had warned you about them. In fact, there have been countless times when I have been warned about something, acknowledged the warning as worthwhile, and then made the mistake anyway. Only then did I learn from it. Perhaps I'm just stubborn. :)

Anyway, I think learning to do most things yourself pays dividends in unexpected ways, even after you account for all the time and money lost to mistakes. There is a surprising amount of skill/knowledge carryover between seemingly unrelated fields, and learning to get good at doing a few things often makes you better at doing things you have yet to try.

[yorkville]

Echoing what Posthumane said, sometimes I feel learning from other people's mistakes don't always work. I read an article about this experiment basically showed when people struggle through something on their own before giving the answer actually learn the stuff  better than those were given the answer initially.

[John Galt incarnate!]

I firmly believe in learning from other people's mistakes, as well as my own.

+1 

I put a sign on the wall behind my desk.

It says "You May Be Wrong."

"You" refers to me.

I was told that Lincoln said "I never met a man who couldn't teach me something and what he taught me was what I should not do."