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How tempting is it to go it alone? The American spirit celebrates the individual and treats achievements as if they were all self obtained. So each one of us has a little something in us that makes us want to be a trailblazer. We’ll look at someone doing something with ease and skill and think emphatically to ourselves, “I can do that.”

I’ve done it myself. I’ve seen a furnace put into a buddy’s rental property and after it was said and done, I thought I knew a few things about installing furnaces. I’ve tackled small plumbing jobs around the house on my own. I have even given myself a haircut. I have had varying degrees of success with each endeavor. I won’t go into details. But I will say that my degree of success was highly correlative to the amount of time and effort I put into practicing and studying the endeavor prior to attempting it which was very little.

I am a true believer that anyone, given enough time and the right tools, can learn to do anything. The question becomes, should anyone do anything. The answer is probably no. [Read more →]