Self-Driving Screws

With Winter coming, I had to fix the roof of my patio dojo-gym. In strong winds a few of the roof panels were popping up. To fix it, I had to go up on a fragile roof, drill new holes into hard to locate steel supports from above, and then put in roofing screws. I kept putting it off.

Finally I went to buy a drill bit that would go through steel and roofing screws. Roofing screws come with fitted washers to seal against the weather, I went to get them first. Reading the labels, I realized that some of them were self-driving. Each screw has its own tiny drill bit on the tip. They are the same price as the old ones, it is just a tiny change in design. The label said they were for screwing into metal. 

This took about ten minutes to sink in. How many generations of people have been using screws that had to have holes drilled for them first? And now, freedom. Total freedom. 

Think about this as a martial arts problem. Humans are stimulus response creatures. Get the stimulus right and you create fantastic abilities. Get it wrong and you waste a lot of time. Get if half right and you are in a sea of trial and error that might eventually get you there. How many techniques or training methods are like the old screws? What tiny change could you make that would turn seemingly endless trial and error in to fantastic skill overnight? What if there are thirty or forty such tiny changes that you could make today but you just don't know about them? 

Now repeat after me: My Kungfu is a self-driving screw!