We admit it.
We’re human. We screw up. A lot.
We do, however, think that one vital prepping skill is the ability to admit to our many prepping mistakes, and learn from them.
We also try to learn from other people’s mistakes so that we don’t make them ourselves.
Here’s a list of our six prepping mistakes we made in 2017, hopefully you can learn from them as well.
Here’s a podcast that goes along with this theme.
Over-concentration on purchasing instead of skill development
This is a constant issue for every prepper, and this is a trap that Salty falls into a lot, if he’s not careful. It isn’t about what you buy, it’s about how to USE what you have between your ears. The best tool kit in the world does you no good if you don’t know the first thing about the mechanics of what you are trying to fix.
Some stuff is necessary… you can’t have a gas heater if you don’t buy 1) the heater and 2) the gas… but many of us (including Salty) tend to want to “buy ourselves into preparedness” and it just doesn’t work.
Being disorganized causing key items to be misplaced/missing when needed
Salty: “Honey, where did you move my _____________ to? I left it right here just last week!
Spice: “You mean that thing that sat in the middle of my floor for a month?”
Salty: “Yes… was it a month?”
Spice: “More like six weeks!”
Salty: “So where did you put it?”
Spice: “Away, where it’s supposed to go!”
Salty: “Where’s that?”
Spice: “Ummm… I don’t remember, that was two weeks ago! You might try looking in the back storage room. It’s probably there.”
All too true at our house. Annoying (and somewhat funny) if times are good. If the SHTF? It could cost lives.
Not reaching physical fitness goals (Salty)
Spice is a maniac when it comes to fitness. She’s an absolute hammer. Salty? Not so much. He does go to the gym in the winter 5 times a week for a minimum of 30 minutes a day of cardio and he rides his bicycle outside in the summer or when the weather allows, so he’s not a total slacker, but (he’s writing this in the third person, which is kinda weird) he knows he needs to do better.
Letting ‘that’s not my strength’ stop me from diving in to a needed project.
The Place really needs a better water system — better than hauling water from the pond in buckets, I mean. I know the place to start is guttering the cabin and maybe the shipping container we use for secure storage and running the gutters into rain barrels. I also know I don’t have what one would call actual ‘skills’ in construction, but that’s what books and YouTube is for, right?
Still I’ve found it easier to move other projects that are closer to my wheelhouse up on the ToDo list instead of getting that done. I can’t be sad we made so much progress on the orchard and prairie, but I curse my cowardice every time I trudge up that hill with those buckets…
Using the winter safety gear in the car as an emergency cooler … then forgetting it.
It wasn’t that it was a bad idea to use the boot liner to keep the cottage cheese from getting too warm on a long drive home. It was that it was a bad idea to forget we’d done it …
Thinking that cheapo version would be ok for a little while.
Ok, who can turn down a FREE crank flashlight! Oh, I know, ME ME ME! Because the last one sat there in a very reasonable spot until the power went out, then broke on the third crank. Good thing I’d followed the prepper rule of “Two is one” and the other one was a good solar light. Stuff that’s likely to break when you need it is worse than nothing; nothing doesn’t give you a false sense of security.
