I’m a big fan of Clint Eastwood.
He’s made a lot of good movies, both as an actor and a director.
A fairly recent one was when he played some old guy that worked on cars.
And he developed a relationship with his neighbor, who he helped to become a “man.”
In one scene, the kid was looking in Clint’s garage.
And was AMAZED at the amount of tools he had.
One of the “becoming a man” things the “kid” had to do was to get his own tools.
The underlying theme was that “boys borrow tools, while men own tools.”
Of course, if you just go down to Home Depot and buy a bunch of tools so you can look cool, you’re missing the point.
The idea is not only owning tools, but tools that you use.
Use to build things.
Or fix things.
Movies, books and stories are great ways to convey eternal truths of the human condition.
I used to know this guy that worked in a machine shop.
This guy had an AWESOME set of tools. In this HUGE tool case. Bigger than most dressers.
He’d take his tools with him wherever he worked.
It was understood that if you had a machine shop, and you were hiring a well-trained machinist, he’d bring his own set of tools.
Same goes with skills.
When hiring managers want qualified people, they’d like the people to have a certain set of skills.
Rightly or wrongly, they don’t want spend lots of time and money training somebody, only to have them quiet a couple years later.
The bottom line is that the more responsibility you take acquiring whatever tools and skills you need, the better off you’ll be.
Most people don’t like to hear this.
They’d rather be told what to do. Trained how to do it. Be paid while it happens.
Those that are self-starters, that take at least SOME initiative, are generally going to do better.
Rightly or wrongly, that’s how it is.
Think about it from a hiring managers point of view. Who would you rather hire? Somebody that wants six months of on the job training, or somebody who’s ready to go, right then and there? Or somebody who will at least take an ACTIVE PART in the learning process?
The truth is that your life belongs to you. It’s your job to build it up, as much as you can, using whatever you can.
Nobody is going to do it for you.
Because everybody else is foremost worried about THEIR lives, not yours.
Luckily, there are plenty of tools that can help.
You can find them right here:
