Saturday Smorgasboard: Traditional Skills

What is Saturday Smorgasbord?

In Saturday Smorgasbord we celebrate all the skills, talents, resources, hobbies and ideas that humans can use to grow and prosper. You have everything you need to get started right now. So get up and start creating! Because there's no magic pill for life.

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Many of us have no need for traditional skills. Things like building a fire, sewing clothes and making shelter are of a past that most of us have a hard time imagining. Humans have made great strides in the past 100 years. And even greater strides in the past 10-20 years. It seems as though the human motto is "Faster & Easier".


I don't want to knock the Industrial Age, but in the grand scheme of things we have lost a lot of the skills we once knew because we have leveraged the power of machinery. This has left, at least countries like America, largely ignorant of the skills that got us where we are today.


Learning lost skills like fire making, building, growing your own food and pretty much any skill that requires you to get your hands dirty is extremely rewarding. Humans are also really big into instant gratification and while it may seem like a lot of work, creating things with your hands is the most gratifying thing I know. I'm sure you've never felt anything like it when you seed your first garden or pick the harvest several months later. Or the feeling when you finally light your first fire without using matches. There are only a few modern skills that make me feel this alive.


So without further ado, here are some common traditional skills to get you started:

• Building a fire
• Shooting a gun
• Sewing clothes
• Gardening and Composting
• Cooking and baking from scratch
• Car maintenance
• Building a shelter
• Archery
• Edible food identification
• Carpentry
• Blacksmithing
• Crocheting and Knitting
• Basket weaving
• Riding a horse
• Soap making

The first step to finding out more about these skills is to simply type them into Google. Keep a notebook to record what you learn, what you'd like to try next and any ideas or tips you run across. There are also many other bloggers teaching these skills including Country Farm Lifestyles and Save Our Skills.

There are so many traditional skills you will probably not be able to learn most of them in your lifetime. But you can focus on the ones you enjoy most and are already most familiar with. If you are a creative person you will probably be interested in sewing, crocheting or basket weaving. If you love to eat you'll probably be drawn to cooking and identifying edible foods. This list is to help you get started. Enjoy learning your new skills and follow your interests and excitement where they take you.


Have a great and creative weekend!

Why every Sane & Satisfied woman should have an Idea Notebook

Ideas make our world go round. Ideas are funny, sad, innovative, difficult and even offensive or scary. Ideas move our lives forward and are the first steps in creating new things. It is my strong belief that the reason many women feel unhappy or that they can't change their lives is because they've either run out of ideas or can't find confidence in the ideas they have.

Ideas are fragile. They are there, fully formed, in our minds one minute and poof, they are gone the next, without any trace they had been there at all. And if we actually do, by some magical happenstance, get them out of our heads and into the world someone is always there to tear them down.

10 SNS Steps to Being Productive

There are as many Productivity Secrets out there as there are people on this planet. But when you get right down to it they are all just tools and techniques. The trick is to get out of the quagmire of 12-step programs and secrets and simply see them for what they are. Ideas.

Stand above these things and pick them out as you need them instead of just accepting them as a package deal. Understand what each tool does, what its strengths and weaknesses are and if its the right tool for you to wield.

Saturday Smorgasbord: Finding New Skills

What is Saturday Smorgasbord?

Gurus and leading experts act like there's only one way to succeed. I believe there are so many ways to accomplish things that it's silly to narrow yourself to just one path.

So every Saturday I will list all the options, techniques and ways to accomplish various things from marketing your business to losing weight.

There is a Smorgasbord of tools at your disposal, why pick just one?

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Sane & Satisfied is mainly about learning new skills to improve your life. So what sorts of skills are out there for you to learn? Skills can be found in many areas of your life and also throughout the history of man. Below are two ways that I tend to categorize skills. It might help you discover skills you might not have thought about before.

Energy, Space & Time

I was surfing around the World Wide Web this morning and came across the words

Energy, Space & Time

These three words carry quite a punch. They speak of the universe and quantum physics. They speak of Star Trek and Firefly. But they also speak of what each of us strives for every single day.

We all want more energy to do what we love; start a business, work on hobbies and generally bring our dreams to reality. We all want more space to feel free and be ourselves. And we all want more time with our family, our friends and time to ourselves.

The great thing about these three simple words is that when they are put together in a magical way they lead to something much more than their individual parts. They can lead to happiness, success, wealth and satisfaction.

The Sane & Satisfied Way to Exercise

One of the tenants of Sane & Satisfied is that we are all individuals and just because a plan works for one person doesn't mean that it's the best plan for someone else. That tenant can be no truer for exercise.

Here on the Sane & Satisfied Blog I try to teach and encourage you to find your own way of doing things. Whether you are trying to lose weight, gain confidence, eat healthier or learn a new language you have a unique way of learning things. You also have your own unique set of motivations and inspirations to keep you going.

The Sane & Satisfied Checklist

The other day I saw something (doesn't matter what it was) and I automatically thought to myself, "That's Sane & Satisfied". And it occurred to me that I've never really laid down a set of criteria for something being Sane & Satisfied but somehow I just knew it was.

It's been difficult for me to put into words what exactly I mean by Sane & Satisfied but I thought it might be helpful for a newbie if I wrote a Sane & Satisfied Checklist. I envision this checklist being most helpful when you have to make a decision about something. That decision doesn't have to be life or death and can be as mundane as, "Should I say yes to helping out with the PTA this year?" Every choice we make takes up more of our time, energy and resources. So each choice can make us either more relaxed and happy or more stressed and unhappy. I find I'm most unhappy when I do things that go against my current path. Likewise, I'm most happy when I'm doing something in my element.

Why Sane & Satisfied: A Summary

In this video I cover the following things:

Happiness is when you gain a greater reward than the effort you expended.
You don't need to be fixed. We aren't broken, we are human.
Look for tools instead of answers.