This site has now been retired. I've moved to my new site Silverknife, where you'll find new blog posts and all my latest projects and photos. These pages will remain for at least a while, as I know some of you are still looking through the archives, but I'm reposting my travel journals and many other articles on the new site. Come and check it out.
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Well, no-one's complaining about the styles so I assume they're working. Yay!
A general note of clarification: I'm going to be updating this journal every weekday until further notice. Updates will go up sometime between about 7pm and 10pm, with luck. If I find myself with enough time I might do an entry on Sunday night as well. You can track updates by using the RSS feed.
I want to talk a bit about skills, which is going to lead in to a bunch of other articles as well as link back to SAEL. In theory. We shall see how it actually develops.
I want to talk about skills because I think they're pretty much the most awesome and underrated thing we can experience. Throughout our lives we are constantly accumulating these little bits of information, which are like keys to whole universes, but most of the time we take them completely for granted. An example:
Say you spend a day doing some boring and monotonous temp job. Take, for example, loading hundreds of identical crates onto lorries. I can state with certainty that this is boring and monotonous, because I have spent several weeks doing it. At the end of the day you have gained maybe £30.00 after tax, if you're doing well, and you spend that £30.00 on a takeaway and two DVDs. The takeaway is gone in an hour and digested in a day, and the proteins etc. which you gain from it will have finished their role in your body in, say...a year. (I can't be bothered to look it up, but it's something like that). The DVDs, unless they're awful, will give you considerable pleasure once, moderate pleasure maybe 3 or 4 more times unless you really really like them. They'll probably be scratched and unplayable in 5 years, if they're not lost of broken in half, or covered in something you can't scrape off.
Now, say you spent that day learning how to carve wood. At the end of the day you are about equally tired, probably bleeding more than you would have been, but you've mastered the basics of carving, enough to go and get a couple of cheap chisels and learn for yourself from there on in. In your head you have a new piece, a mental tool which will be with you until you die. For the rest of your life, you have the power to pick up a piece of wood and, as long as you have some kind of tool, make it into any shape you want (unless you don't practice, in which case you'll have the power to make a wobbly owl with what appears to be a nasty head wound. In case you're wondering, that's the current level of my wood carving power). Isn't that amazing?
Now that's a particularly positive and clear example, but we do this all the time. We keep learning these new abilities, which we immediately take for granted. But what could be more amazing than a piece of knowledge which we can keep in our head, and enables us to change the world? Better still, we can pass them on to other people, or even invent new ones!
The most amazing skills, to me, are the ones which work almost completely unaided. The ability to install, maintain, fix and upgrade computer systems is my biggest skill. A lot of people think it's a pretty good one, and a lot of people aspire to it. It gives me a lot of pleasure, and occasionally it brings me money. But it's a completely dependent skill. It requires at least one computer, which is the end result of a massive industry involving hundreds of skilled people and dozens of different materials (many of them rare). That industry also incidentally sucks up natural resources and pollutes and damages the planet, exploits the vulnerable and distorts politics and human society in fairly horrible ways, but that's not my (main) point. Any one of a million things could go wrong or change, and my skill would be utterly useless. Separated from my very artificial and fortunate environment in the middle-class West it would be of little use to me. If I was dumped on an island somewhere (apart from the island in Lost where I might conceivably find technology to occupy me), that skill would be completely without purpose, just wasted space in my head (and a lot of time out of my life).
Now, take another skill, one which I must admit I do not have. The skill to fart the theme song from Braveheart. Not, on the surface, as useful a skill. Unlikely to provide income, although people might pay you to stop. Of limited entertainment value. But the amazing thing is this: Anywhere you go, whatever resources are available (as long as they include starchy foods), you can fart the theme from Braveheart. How incredible is that? By the power of this skill, using resources which are available to you anywhere in the world (if they're not available you'll shortly be dead anyway) you can change the world just a little bit. You can make it include a flatulent rendition of the theme from Braveheart. Isn't that extraordinary?
And that's the worst possible example of an independent skill. You could have the skill to bake bread - that's actually one I do have (at a low level), and I hope to include a couple of articles here about it. You might be able to catch, gut and cook a fish, or do somersaults, or hold your breath for ages. Maybe you can make shelter out of any available materials, or fire, or awesome hats. These possibilities are dizzying to me. Just these little bundles of information that we carry around in our heads, and they open doors.
Of course I'm a big gaming geek too (actually I've written several of my own game systems, most of them playable. For those of you not involved in gaming culture, that's somewhere around Third Dan gaming geek. I only get slapped down by the Grand Masters who have managed to get theirs published. Damn you Steve Jackson. My Dragon Style is no match for your massive income), so skills for me are like upgrading your character to become more powerful, which is an idea that gives me happy geek tingles (in my defence Randall Munroe feels the same way).
So, let's all celebrate our amazing skill collections! Let's print them on our shirts, put them on flags, tattoo lists of them on our most sensitive places! Weirdly the Scouts nailed this one years ago, although the badges aren't very portable unless you want to wear the same jersey everywhere - why not trading cards? I'm dead serious about this, frankly if I get a chance this week I'm going to design a template. My business card already looks like this, and I'm rapidly running out of space.
In the process of Seeking An Extraordinary Life, I'm going to be divesting myself of every possession I can. I'm going to be reducing my set of tools and resources to what I can carry and what I can obtain or use along the way. More than ever before, the idea of accumulating those independent skills is exciting to me, because I'm going to carry around as little as possible that isn't inside my head. Given the right set of skills, I could take it all the way. I could throw everything I own away and start again that minute, making or finding everything I need. That blows my mind. If I can get a little bit closer to that aim, I think Extraordinariness can't be far away.
Instructables
Make Magazine
wikiHow
eHow
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