Cooking
Also: cleaning. I’ve had flatmates who managed to take the same time for cleaning the bathroom or the kitchen and yet it somehow still wasn’t clean.
My mom was a fast order cook and when I was a teen she got me to help her run a fast food shop our family ran for a few years. She taught me how to work in a kitchen and how to cook.
Her basic rules were … if you aren’t cooking you’re cleaning, if you aren’t cleaning you’re cooking, and if you aren’t cooking or cleaning, get out of the kitchen.
If you aren’t cleaning as you go, the food prep area will get gross and unsanitary fast. This goes for cooking at home, too.
I learned one of my best cooking lessons from Hell’s Kitchen: taste taste taste!
As long as your food is safe to taste (i.e. not raw poultry or something), taste it, at every stage of cooking. You’ll find you get better at tasting foods and predicting what things your dish needs.
Learning how to say no. Having personal boundaries.
Critical thinking. Not enough people stop and think openly about a given problem, situation, or interaction. If everyone took just a moment or two to take into consideration someone else’s perspective, circumstances, or goals, the world would be a lot less divisive.
Critical thinking […] someone else’s perspective, circumstances, or goals,
Did you mean ‘empathy’ instead ?
Not really, no.
Empathy is about understanding the other person’s feelings or experience, usually by being able to share in those things, or experience them vicariously. Empathy can even be used negatively. I believe Donald Trump has at least some empathy. He knows damn fucking well what his stupid words and actions are doing to some people.
I’m talking about objectively taking into consideration the other person’s views, beliefs, and/or desired outcomes and adjusting actions or words based on that.
For example, I don’t have to have empathy for someone who is non-binary to be respectful of their situation. I can’t really know or understand their feelings, because I’m a heterosexual male. I can’t possibly share in their experiences of being confused about gender identity and being ostracised for it. I have no reference point for those feelings.
But I can certainly be objective about their situation and remember that their gender identity and desired pronouns have literally no impact on me. So, rather than be a divisive prick about it and insisting on referring to them in binary gender terms, I can respect those things about them and act accordingly.
Everyone should learn the basics of troubleshooting!
When trying to resolve a problem it’s really important to keep as many variables under control as possible so that you can find the root cause and fix it.
I see lots of people who try a bunch of things without isolating the issue first but can’t figure out what is wrong. Then because they messed with it so much it’s almost impossible to figure out.
This is important for car maintenance, home maintenance, electronics, computers. Just about everything that can break or stop working right in your life.
My skills at troubleshooting are pretty much limited to
“Turn it off and back on again. The slow way. Sometimes twice.”
But you know what? Mostly it works!
Your troubleshooting skills are above average, tbh.
You’ve identified that there’s an issue. You tried something simple to remedy. You even tried it again to make sure.
You didn’t make a bunch of crazy assumptions about what the problem was. You didn’t do a bunch of weird shit all at once to try to fix it. You didn’t do something to make the problem worse.
You’re doing great!
Oh I have to share what just happened! My husband’s power wheelchair suddenly wouldn’t drive. In tilt mode it would still tilt, but in the driving modes it had an error message. By asking in forums he learned that message could mean it thought it was tilted back too much for safe driving, even though it was fully upright. So he tilted way back, and I looked underneath for anything loose, finally tightened one loose screw that I frankly think was unrelated. Then he tilted upright again, giving it an extra couple seconds of push on the joystick, and I pushed forward on the back of the chair. Nothing moved, it was already fully upright. But it did the trick! It’s driving fine now.
My dad can’t do this. I’ve tried to teach him but it’s like, a piece of equipment breaks and I’m like “What have you tried so far?” the answer is always nothing because he doesn’t know cars/computers/watches/lights, etc etc.
I don’t know half of those things either but I’ll go over and press all the buttons, if that doesn’t work I google it. I’ve showed him this so many times but it’s like it doesn’t go in and he’s like “But you’re good with these things!” Nope, I’m just hitting it until it works.
A lot of the issues learning to troubleshoot are surrounded around not understanding the problem/not understanding the system enough to determine where the problem is. Generally, if you have no idea what the issues could be, you end up trying a bunch of stuff and messing everything up more and people get frustrated you didn’t ask for help sooner, or you do nothing and people get frustrated you haven’t tried anything before asking for help. This may be a perpetuated problem if someone doesn’t have the foundational knowledge to understand the type of system, or if it’s just totally out of their wheelhouse and they don’t have them mental capacity to try and understand any aspect. This can be seen when people have little to no understanding of: cooking and/or baking, car repair, computer repair, fruit and vegetable farming, sewing clothes or clothes mending, etc. we can pay people to do these things for us because there is so much complication in modern life most don’t know how to do everything.
Swimming. It could save your life.
