If you are the one who is ultimately responsible for getting a thing done, you will often find yourself needing to do a task you don’t know how to do—there isn’t time to find someone else to do it, or the task is small enough that it would be easier to learn to do it yourself, or it is critical enough that you can’t risk someone else doing a bad job of it. Or maybe you just want to learn to do something new. A teachable spirit is the key to getting through such patches.
We are fortunate enough to live in an age where just about everything ever written is easily obtained. And so if you find yourself needing to learn a new skill, your problem won’t be so much finding a book on the subject as choosing among a dizzying array of possibilities. As far as how to choose, I can only suggest the obvious—ask friends for suggestions, look for reviews and recommendations on the internet, visit a large bookstore and skim through the various possibilities. I will note, though, that the more often you do this, the better you will get at judging the contents of a book; even if you’ve never encountered the topic before, you will learn to recognize a quality presentation.
As long as you are fairly certain you will need to learn a skill, don’t hesitate to buy a good how-to book on the topic, or even more than one. My shelves are full of books which have paid for themselves many times over, even though I have only looked through them briefly in order to find a critical paragraph or two. The time and money I have saved by having at my fingertips the answer to the moment’s question, or good directions for performing the moment’s task, far outweighs the cost of the book. Some of those books you will end up turning to time and again, and they will prove to be worth their weight in gold.
As much as a book can teach you, a knowledgeable person can teach you more. Chris and I have taken music lessons from many different people over the past two years. During that time we have learned to look at our teachers as resources rather than as taskmasters; we collaborate with them on how we can most effectively spend our time together. Usually it involves doing the obvious rote work on our own, outside of class, so that we don’t waste valuable lesson time on it. Often it takes some careful thinking beforehand on our part, deciding exactly what things the teacher could tell us that we aren’t likely to figure out on our own. We’ve spent lesson time having our peformance skills evaluated, learning how to sequence songs in a set, asking about life as a working musician—things that it would be much more expensive and time-consuming to learn through trial and error. If someone is in the business of teaching the skill you need, don’t hesitate to pay them for their time—and then to use that time to get exactly the training and answers that you need.
Even better than paying for lessons is apprenticing. If you need to learn how to do something, try to find someone who knows how to do it and could use some help getting it done. A homesteading friend of mine is blessed with an admirable combination of humility, charm, and fearlessness that has enabled him to quickly acquire the myriad skills needed to run a small farm. Every time I see him he has new stories about how he arranged to help a neighbor with some work he’d been wanting to learn about, or to have a knowledgeable friend help him complete a job he’d never done. It takes a meek and attentitive attitude to benefit from such opportunities, but such an attitude is well worth developing.
