Why Preppers Should Spend More Time Learning (and Less Time Shopping)

Author of How to Prep When You’re Broke and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course

Hey – you, with the shovel.  Stop building that bunker. I want to ask you a question. Also, you – the folks with the shopping cart full of shelf-stable food. Hold on a minute.

How much time do you spend learning?

And by learning, I don’t mean some required on-the-job training or skimming over an article here and there. I mean a time that you set aside on a regular basis, whether it is weekly or daily, to focus all of your attention on something you need to learn.

Many people, once they get out of school, don’t spend a lot of time in study. As far as actual, scheduled study time, it’s gone along with their childhoods once they get their degree or diploma. But recently, when I asked the community what you felt you should focus on to further your preparedness efforts, a huge portion of you said, “Skills and Information.”

Becoming adept or knowledgeable is not going to magically happen without some concentrated effort and some resources. Just owning some books on a topic isn’t enough. You have to delve into it deeply and try it out if you want to be able to depend on that skill or knowledge during a difficult situation.

And best of all, it can never be taken away from you. No government officials doing so “for the greater good.” No jerk whose entire survival plan revolves around taking what you stored. No natural disaster that destroys your homes, your preps, and all your worldly possessions. In a long-term scenario or exteme situation, the only way to be truly prepared is to be able to independently provide for your own needs, without relying on the government, the stores, or the supply chain.

Once you’ve learned something – really learned it and put it into practice – it’s yours forever.

If you’re on a budget, you’re in luck. It often costs very little to obtain the knowledge. Between books, local classes, and online courses, you can get a ton of information and practical steps to take for a very nominal fee. And, sometimes, it’s even free. Of course you need supplies, but stop shopping for a little while and focus on increasing your knowledge. Bonus: Your future purchases will be made with more discretion due to your new information.

But it won’t happen without some determination and some time blocked off specifically for that purpose. You have to learn like your life depends on it.

Because, one day, it could.

First, I’ll provide some of my favorite resources and then I’ll tell you my secrets for making learning a priority.

Build your library

Most of the time, people in the preparedness world like to have hard copies of important information. This way, if the power goes out and you can’t access the internet or recharge your Kindle, you still have access to vital advice.

Some of these books are for just such an event, while others are guides to building your self-reliance skills.  Commit to picking up a good book each pay period until you have a library to reference during any type of scenario. But don’t just buy it and stick it on a shelf. Read that book and put some of the ideas into action. You may not have time to sit down and read 200 pages in the midst of a crisis, right?

My own books are indicated with a star. *

• *The Prepper’s Canning Guide (It’s awesome to grow your food, but how will you make it last through the winter, particularly during an off-grid scenario?)
• *The Prepper’s Water Survival Guide (Water isn’t exactly a fascinating topic, but it’s certainly one of the most vital. This technical guide will walk you through storing, acquiring, and purifying water.)
• *Prepper’s Pantry (This book outlines building your healthful pantry while on a strict budget)
• The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster (This is the be-all and end-all Bible of prepping.  Tess’s book is the most complete compendium out there, broken into easy, manageable steps.)
• Prepper’s Natural Medicine (At some point, you may run into a scenario in which modern medicine is not available. I used this book recently when I was bitten by a black widow spider in the midst of a storm that kept us trapped at home for a week, unable to leave due to a mudslide.)
• SAS Survival Guide: How to Survive in the Wild, on Land or Sea  (I keep this little gem in my vehicle, my bug out bag, and in my kids’ backpacks. It doesn’t go into lots of detail, but if you find yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere, this small book could save your life.)
• The Encyclopedia of Country Living, 40th Anniversary Edition: The Original Manual of Living Off the Land & Doing It Yourself(A compendium of all things self-reliance)
• Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary (If you can’t protect it, you don’t own it. It’s that simple.)
• How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It: Tactics, Techniques, and Technologies for Uncertain Times (By James Wesley Rawles, who many consider the “Father” of the modern preparedness movement)
• The Survival Medicine Handbook: A Guide for When Help is Not on the Way (It’s vital to have a guide on hand that doesn’t rely on 911 for serious injuries, in the event that you’re completely on your own)
• The Complete Tightwad Gazette (While this book is about hardcore frugality, trust me, there’s crossover. There are a lot of great suggestions for creating stockpiles on a budget, living simply, and doing things the old-fashioned way. And saving money is always a good idea, so that you can use it to help you become more prepared.)

If you want to have our most popular articles in printed format, check out our series of Organic Prepper Anthologies.

For more resources at a great price, check out our online store at SelfRelianceandSurvival.com. There, you’ll find ebooks, printables, and online courses.

Be sure to check out used bookstores, libraries, and garage sales, too. Look for books that teach self-reliant skills like sewing, gardening, animal husbandry, carpentry, repair manuals, scratch cooking, and plant identification. You can often pick these up for pennies, and older books don’t rely on expensive new technology or tools for doing these tasks.

Bookmark some websites

The internet is a wonderful place, and best of all, a lot of this knowledge can be found for FREE! The more you know about crisis situations, the more ready you will be to face them.

Some sites are friendlier to beginners than others, so if you stumble upon a forum where people seem less than enthusiastic about helping people who are just starting out, don’t let it get you down. Move on and find a site that makes you feel comfortable.  If you see them utter the words, “If you aren’t already prepared, it’s too late,” run, don’t walk, away from them. No one needs that kind of doom and gloom. It’s stressful, unhelpful, and honestly, kind of mean. Plus, I firmly believe it’s never too late as long as you just get started.

To get the most out of a website, I strongly recommend subscribing to the newsletter. For example, I provide information to subscribers that isn’t available on my website, plus I share a lot of personal stories about how preparedness and frugality have helped our family live a comfortable and secure lifestyle. As well, when I find a really cool offer or discount, I can let you know about it ASAP. (You can subscribe to it here and get a free bundle of PDFs of the information readers have found to be the most helpful and inspiring over the years.)

Following are some of my favorite sites, and the link will take you to a good starting point on these sites. In no particular order:

• The Organic Prepper (obviously – and sign up for the newsletter here)
• Mind4Survival
• Survival Weekly
• Apartment Prepper
• Graywolf Survival (A former Army bad-a$$ writes about survival in an intelligent, easy-to-implement manner that cuts through all the nonsense.)
• Disaster Preparer (This is Dr. Arthur T. Bradley’s site. He’s a former NASA scientist. If you want to know about natural disasters, EMPs, and solar flares, he’s your guy.)
• SurvivalistPrepper.
• Prepper Website
• Urban Survival Site
• Common Sense Home

Bookmark these, subscribe to the newsletters, and learn for free!

You may notice that there are a couple of days per week on which I don’t usually post articles or send newsletters. That’s because, on at least one of them, I learn. I set aside the entire span of my workday for it, too. I don’t mess around. Here’s what my study schedule looks like:

Now, you may not have an entire day to spare but I’ll bet you could take a few hours away from other activities, right? Having the information at hand can help, but often, in a crisis, seconds count and you won’t want to waste that time looking things up in a book.

You can read and listen to podcasts until the cows come home, but until you actually put what you’ve learned into practice, it will be of as much use to you as the difference between an isosceles triangle and a scalene one – something you learned but never applied.