I feel personally attacked. Really though, I wonder how many things are on my 'Someday Maybe' list, that really I should just make more money to accomplish and/or find a youtube subscription that satisfies the urge to tinker on a particular topic.
When you look back on your summer/year, what will you have accomplished? What skills will you have developed?
If you don't really value a process/skill, but just want the material result (i.e. a cabin), pay a pro for it. If you just have an itch that needs to be scratched, watch someone else do it on Youtube. If you want it to be a part of who you are, pruning your list by moving items to the former two strategies should leave you enough time to develop it yourself.
I know quite a few very senior people who are proper old, and when I mentioned this to one of them, his response was, "at this point I'm glad to be alive, and no one glad to be alive has time for that stuff." This was just before he retired.
I think my life got measurably better when I pivoted from "I want to do this myself" towards "It's just as satisfying to watch someone else do this".
Downhill extreme mountain biking is really cool. And fun to watch. And expensive. And requires much more physical fitness than I've got. And dangerous (esp. given my physical fitness :). )
So true! Works for a lot of things. It's why I stopped playing dota.
Dota - the worst 'awesome thing' that can happen to your life.
If mountain biking is your dream buy a Trek with electric motor in it. They can give you extra lift till you accelerate to 75 km/hour with a dongle of $120. Instant pro biking experience without much practicing.
You are too young to accept any physical limitations of your body. Navy Seals talk about that being tired is just an emotion like feeling happy. Its all about your mindset.
It's a sad state of affairs if the exchange needs to be "please share your situation with me so I can know if it's appropriate to offer words of encouragement" before offering words of encouragement.
Lets take an example of the most brilliant people of our time while also extremely handicapt Steven Hawkins.
What would he care he was excluded in a statement like this?
You don't need to be a great mountain biker to go dangerously fast, it's very easy to become overconfident, and the downhill nature means that you might also fall from certain heights on top of already carrying speed, and not necessarily on soft dirt, maybe onto rocks or into a tree. It's a gnarly sport.
The commentator you were talking to should at least go on some mellow bike rides or something.
I doubt you’ll hit 75kph with a 36V Motor though. My 52V mid drive would get me to around 40–50kph on a good day, flat terrain, no wind, and pedaling hard. I put it back to 25kph max because riding so fast on a bicycle was too dangerous in my opinion... cars don’t expect you to come so fast, and I was getting too dangerously confident. I was also worried about the consequences should I get in a crash and the bike is investigated to see whether it was legal.
For those interested in diy, the tsdz2 mid drive is a pretty good motor that has a torque sensor and that you can add to most bicycles. There is also an open source alternative firmware for it that’s pretty good. See https://github.com/OpenSource-EBike-firmware/TSDZ2_wiki/wiki
But it isn't really. Even taking that statement at face value you're still talking about people who are selected for their physical skills and then spend much of their prime training and preparing physically like their lives depended on it. Because it does. But they suck at many other things and they do have an excuse to not be able to do them.
One person cannot "specialize" in too many things and downhill extreme mountain biking is not a thing to do half-assed without risking your well-being. Getting the skill and the physical strength to do it is both time consuming but more importantly very risky.
BUD/S has like a 25% pass rate, of people who are even allowed to try.
Not saying that a navy seal can't just decide to not be tired anymore, but for the rest of us mere mortals....
It helps.
No critique. When you have to operate under circumstances like that and your life and your fellow soldiers lives are at stake it makes sense.
Has inherent problems though.
https://sofrep.com/news/navy-seals-get-addicted-drugs-doc-is...
... in the field. Same with pilots -- they issue speed to dudes flying bombers long distances.
But they're not taking speed during selection and training. That's just you, and figuring out if you can hack it is the point.
It did make me a way better street rider though!
Also glad to have read this article. Was thinking (more like daydreaming) of building a Korean Hanok one day but it seems unrealistic without a lot of professional help.
We're building a shop. I've contracted most of the build out, but found that I could save $20,000+ by DIY'ing the radiant heat portion myself. Took about a days worth of planning and research, another to lay down the pipe before the floor was poured, and another to hook everything up.
Honestly, the cost-differential was enough to make me think that I should start a company that installs radiant heating. I can't think of many other professions where I could clear $20,000 for 3-days of work.
I'm planning to DIY the solar-install on the same shop here in a couple of months, we'll see if that's as much of success story.
My wife went to school with a guy who didn’t like college. He took a summer job on a road crew, learned how to use an excavator and got hooked. Dropped out, saved up, and bought a used dump truck, which basically made him.
Started out hauling stuff and then got into water/sewer work and excavation.
He’s up to about 20 trucks a decade later, and pays the bills with the sewer work. He leveraged the assets he had (trucks, diggers) and won demolition contracts — they make money on demolition. Like $75-200k for an emergency demolition if they can get there in 90m.
When he quit his job the parents wept. He was the first kid to go/finish University in the family.
It went from 3 guys hanging board to a 40-50 million construction company in 2 decades.
Some jobs benefit so much from equipment and skill that it won't ever make sense to DIY. Some jobs are just a bunch of labor that you could do, and probably do better because you care to do it right.
DIY solar seems like a ROI for a DIY project. Just stay safe on that roof!
Yeah - I live in a state with essentially zero incentives, so to make Solar pay for itself I have to rely on net-metering plus the 26% federal tax rebate.
If I went with a commercially installed system, I'd be looking at a 15-20 year payback. If I can DIY, I should be looking at a 6-10 year payback.
Another benefit of going solo on my solar project was learning that I could legally install panels on a part of my roof that everyone else thought I couldn't use because of old setback rules. I was able to fit eight additional panels on my roof after discussing the issue with the city inspector.
Most of my prep time was spent writing my permit application. If you want to use mine as a reference or template, file an issue on my github repo for the project [1] and I'll upload it later. I'd also be happy to chat about the gear I chose, where I bought it, and share a list of materials.
[1] https://github.com/hamikm/solar-report (side note: I wrote this to help analyze my surprisingly complex electrical bill because custom date ranges were buggy in the Enphase app at the time)
And I don't mean that in a demeaning way at all. If anything, such folks have found a middle path in life. At opposite extremes, you have folks who actually have to go do all those things versus those who can squelch their own interest in nearly anything by merely thinking about it for a few moments...