My father is never without a car that needs fixing. The vehicles of friends and coworkers would always be left in front of our garage for days as my father would slowly fix them in his free time. Growing up, he would often drag me along with him so I could learn something about how to repair cars. Unwillingly, I would spend my time there nodding, holding a lamp, or taking off various bolts and misplacing them. Many years later, when I got into a big enough accident to wreck my car, my father became quite excited about the large project provided to us.
Over the course of a couple of months, my father took me step by step through the repair and replacement of the various damaged parts of my car. As I expected, he had me take the front seat for many of the repairs, but to my total surprise, I actually knew what I was doing for many of those repairs. We replaced the air conditioning, oil leaks, power steering leaks, wheel re-alignment, replaced various gaskets, and pulled and hammered the frame back into a car shape. For many of these steps I would insist that I had never worked on that part of the car before and had no idea how to fix it, but just by asking me a few relevant questions, my father would show me that I could figure it out myself. There were things out of my reach, but being so involved, I found myself learning much more than usual.
It was a long project, and I can still pick my car out of a parking lot based on the remnants of the damage, but this is one of my favorite experiences. The task seemed impossible, and I would have just consigned my car to the junkyard on my own, but my father taught me not only about how to fix a car, but how it’s important to work through the individual elements of a project or problem. Never assume that just because something is unfamiliar, you are incapable of solving it. Never be daunted by the size of a project, break it down into smaller parts and examine each part individually.