So you have a new skill you want to pick up but don’t need to go very deep – or the skill is very basic. Don’t underestimate the power of the internet to help you here. I recently bought a lawnmower and couldn’t figure out for the life of me how to put the dang thing together – enter YouTube. A quick search revealed a kindly older gentleman putting together the exact same make and model and in no time I had it put together and up and running. My only mistake was not turning to the web faster.

There are a plethora of quick tutorials out there for virtually anything you need to figure out – in fact, I often will look to free videos posted to YouTube before checking the major online learning platforms like Lynda, Coursera, Khan Academy or the dozens of other sites out there just to see if I’m really interested in learning more. Just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. Many gurus out there in a vast number of fields will give away much of their content for free – they have found that this is the best way to attract people willing to pay a premium for their “full packages” – this gives you the opportunity to check out the content that will be covered and allow you to get a feel for the teaching style and let you see if the material is something you would want to invest in.

Given the fact that I live in an older house and can’t afford to pay somebody to come out and fix every little thing that goes wrong I find myself turning to the internet all the time (seriously, it feels like my house is falling down around me at times). I didn’t grow up with a Dad that was teaching me how to fix things, so I have to figure things out for myself. Fortunately for me there are kindly old gentlemen filming themselves putting together lawnmowers.