I see a couple of sibling comments giving you great tips already. I am still in the painful stage of failing my way to success (though closer to the end than the beginning)
I will suggest a few things. Follow up each of these points with more research if you can.
Spend as little money as possible and prove to yourself you’ll actually like it. Then buy only the good tools you actually need for the project at hand. I have tools I bought that remain unused and I regret spending the money. Its not the tool’s fault but me going in a different direction.
It doesn’t matter what species of wood your first projects use. Prefer wood with straight grain and you should be fine for your first half dozen projects.
Read widely or watch many YouTube videos. There’s a lot of space for ideas, from carving spoons to making stick chairs to making furniture of any style. Note what inspires you but be aware the path to making what you like may take awhile.
First project: make a cutting board (only one piece! Learn how to make it look great and learn a finish) Second project: make a simple box (learn how to make things square, learn some simple joinery)
Safety first! I put this last so it’ll be the first thing you remember. There are so many ways to ruin your health, from breathing sawdust to using toxic finishes. Hand tools are generally better for your lungs than power tools. Soap or wax finishes are healthy and easy to apply. Just about everything else is toxic and you must protect yourself accordingly. Invest in safety glasses, masks and gloves. And a first aid kit.
Woodworking is an extremely rewarding pastime and I hope you get hooked. Best of luck!
He's got a very nice approachable style (almost the Bob Ross of woodworking?) and has some great beginner videos. He also sells a course with plans for gradually increasingly challenging projects. No affiliation, just watched a lot of his videos when I was first getting started with woodworking.
There are also (as you'd expect) thousands of other Youtubers doing woodwork, too. Steve's just a great starting place.
While conventional tools are nice and necessary, having access to a gantry CNC machine for cutting wood is a HUGE thing.
A CNC makes many projects a single step. Anything having to do with cutting plywood to non-rectangular shape or stencils or carving letters or ... yeah, do it on the CNC.
And, even if the project isn't a single step, a CNC can compress a bunch of steps and make the project way easier. And even the canonical "cutting board" may require the CNC for a flattening pass (edge grain through a planer has issues).
Whatever you do, do not get suckered into buying a bunch of machines right at the outset. They're loud, expensive, often dangerous and there's no limit to how many you might need.
Start with small projects and hand tools. People have been building beautiful things with a small variety hand tools for centuries and the lack of noise alone changes the entire experience.
I spent a couple years buying books and watching YT, especially Paul Sellers[0] before building anything at all.
The reality is that fine woodworking is a craft and takes years to master (I certainly have not mastered it), but one can create objects pretty quickly that feel wonderful to hold.
When you do get down to buying machines, a decent track saw can be much more versatile (and space efficient) than a table saw for a first purchase. FWIW, I have both and use the track saw 2-3 times more frequently because it's easier (though much slower) to safely and accurately break down large sheet stock. It's also the only Festool product I own.
I'm going to counter this with a simple "I ain't got time for that". The "that" being hand tools. I did take a course from Roy Underhill and loved the crafty vibe of hand tools, even bought a No. 4 smoothing plane in the shop above the classroom that I use occasionally. My personal preference is to use power tools for the majority of work because hand tools take too long to learn in order to get good output. Given that its a hobby for me, I don't have a lot of time for projects so I want to complete them and not spend all my time just getting better with a hand plane or a chisel. I am impatient.
Another personal anecdote is having a US software engineer salary provides for a tool purchase not being a big deal. There are tons of people that have expensive hobbies like photography, guns, drones, 3D printers, etc. so to me I'd rather buy a $600 planer than have to hand plane boards to make a desktop. I did discover a Milwaukee track saw recently which hands down I should have gotten years ago. So I will agree that should be the first purchase for someone starting... you can likely use that for almost all use beginner use cases that might call for table or miter saws.
Learn to sharpen tools properly. A sharp chisel and plane, and something like a Japanese pull saw to handle the big stuff (with a measure of delicacy due to its flexibility) will get you an impressively long way. But such implements can dull quickly, and there’s nothing more dispiriting (or dangerous) than a dull tool.
See if your local community college offers a class. I know that's not a sexy answer but I think there is something to be said for having access to all the big tools and not filling up your garage with random bits of lumber before you know how serious your interest in woodworking is going to shape up to be.
The old PBS New Yankee Workshop episodes are on YouTube. Norm Abram uses a lot of power and specialty tools especially in the later seasons but in the first season or two his shop and projects are pretty simple.
I sense a hint of prejudice, the “you’ll understand once you have kids” trope. Surely counsellors training is more important than their personal situation?
Yes, but there's a difference between learning the theory and experiencing the practice. When you see a counsellor you need to trust them and know that they understand; if they say "I understand what it's like to have a child like that because I read about it in a book" you will never be able to take them seriously.
It depends on the type of therapy, I suppose, but I am not sure it’s reasonable to expect the therapist to have experienced all of the circumstances/problems you’re coming to them with. In my view, a good therapist should have the skills to ask the right _questions_, not give you the _answers_. They should help _you_ reflect and problem-solve.
Both matter, IME. The necessary empathy to make it work can be very hard to engender when the counselor can only understand the dynamics of what children do to a marriage on a detached, observational level.
> Ambition is about the magnitude of your end goals, not about your mental state on the way there.
The problem is that once you tie your self-image to your end goals, no matter the magnitude, how can your mental state _not_ suffer if you're not achieving them? If I want to be a millionaire by 30, and I am still working a low-paying job at 29, I either concede that my goal is unattainable, or I suffer.
Fundamentally, I think internal peace and ambition are at odds. The worlds is either good enough as it is (then why kill yourself over achieving your goals?), or it isn't = mental suffering. This is why I think extreme ambition can only come from/with unhappiness, which sucks for the individual, but seems to work well for the species.
You're right, and that's one of my internal conflicts. I think there still is a way to have "internal peace" while still believing the world isn't good enough.
You're at peace because you're doing the best you can to fix or improve things. Part of that peace comes from focussing on the journey and not the outcome.
I agree focusing on the journey is more healthy (many cognitive therapies focus on trying to re-frame your thinking like this), but realistically all of our social/rewards structures are focused on the outcome, hence it's so difficult to detach from it.
If we could detach from the negative connotation of being "non-ambitious", we could reason like this: am I less likely to become a millionaire if I don't obsess over it? Yes. Will I be OK even if I don't become one? Yes. So I'll give it my best shot, but I won't sacrifice the rest of my life for something that might not happen even if I did obsess over it.
I don't know if they're totally at odds if you separate your ambition from your identity and sense of self-worth. I live in a fairly constant state of discontentment (maybe as a symptom of ambition), but when I step back and self-evaluate I rest easy.
A steady state of always feeling peace in the background seems pretty impossible though under any circumstances.
> if you separate your ambition from your identity and sense of self-worth
If you can do this and stay ambitious, I'd like to buy your course. I don't know if generally people can stay hyper-motivated and hyper-ambitious unless it's tied to their identity and self-worth. If you're content with the way you are or the world is -- why bother?
I disagree that the two are fundamentally at odds. If your goal is specifically to be a millionaire by 30, yeah, you're bound to be unhappy if you aren't near that by 29. But on the other hand, if you're more open minded about the flexibility of your goals, it can be a lot less painful. You just need the self-confidence that even if things don't go as expected, you're capable of finding another way or of changing the goal to something else that you find to give you similar or greater value.
I am a very harshly self-critical person in all my pursuits. Ordinarily it'd probably be pretty unhealthy, but I've always had a confidence in regards to technical pursuits (learning a new skill etc) that I could eventually figure them out, which has allowed me to reframe harsher criticism into stronger motivation. I didn't have this confidence regarding other things, which used to cause me a lot of stress and fears about being a 'failure'. Lately I've been building up this confidence for those things too, reframing being a 'failure' from someone who hasn't been able to achieve their core goals to someone who has given up on trying to achieve or change their core goals.
The buddhists would say that expectation and attachment are the root of suffering, and to completely let go of them is the only way to transcend the pain of being.
I don't know if I'd go that far, more like the middle way or Aristotelian golden mean.
I think to an extent there is some inevitable pain in wanting for something that is not yet there, but that doesn't have to be the primary emotion.
It's like in relationships or flirting, if there's no friction at all, it's not compelling, it's boring.
But the underlying thing that makes these relationships worth it, just like pursuing your aspirations, is less about the outcome and more about the process of growing and learning. Or optimally, it should be. Paradoxically, a focus on the process and engaging with it sustainably will oftentimes get you closer to the end goal than excessive goal focus and beating yourself up for the whole time you have not yet reached your goal.
The tragic part of aspiration is that often those that are ambitious are also incredibly critical thinkers, and are thus not as able or willing to count the small wins and gradual progress that comes from a sustainable approach.
We also have a tendency to move goalposts, so that by the time we achieve an original goal, we already have the next ones lined up. So the feeling ends up being inadequacy and disappointment.
"Why am I never meeting all of my goals? There must be something wrong with me..."
"There's always something left to try to crack at the end of the day, and until I figure it out I can't let myself off the hook."
This can lead to burnout, cynicism, and frankly a pretty toxic social life.
It's been a process to be in the paradoxical state of constantly wanting to improve and realizing the human constraints I have aren't typically existential flaws, they're just parts of the experience.
Pausing to assess my progress, optimally with objective data, to be able to come to a conclusion and adjust if needed allows me to "give it a rest" with the constant cross examination of self.
Over time, it becomes less constant.
Over time, I've learned to appreciate my progress.
One of the big things recently is learning to appreciate myself for WHO I am rather than what I can do to "create value".
Unlikely given the dimensionality and complexity of the search space. Besides, we probably don’t even care about the global minimum: the loss we’re optimising is a proxy for what we really care about (performance on unseen data). Counter-example: a model that perfectly memorises the training data can be globally optimal (ignoring regularization), but is not very useful.
> The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable.
Couldn't be bothered to verify the numbers, but even if they're true: you've compared London to New York. The vast majority of Brits and Americans don't live in these two cities. I'd argue that these two cities are not representative of the rest of the two countries.
> Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
Have you considered that your sample is biased? It's akin to looking at the top 1% of earners in the UK and concluding that nobody uses the NHS.
> It's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US.
For some definition of "poor" this means that it's much more pleasant for the _majority_ of people to live in the UK than in the US. This seems to contradict your prior claims.
US: Real median household income was $70,784 in 2021, not statistically different from the 2020 estimate of $71,186 (Figure 1 and Table A-1). [1]
UK: Median household disposable income in the UK was £32,300 in the financial year ending (FYE) 2022, a decrease of 0.6% from FYE 2021, based on estimates from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) Household Finances Survey. [2]
I think the GP’s claims are true (the UK is poorer and many people don’t realise it). It used to be a bit less obvious when GBP was strong so you needed to look at things like PPP (or like, how good the tumble driers are) to see the difference.
I think you're strawmanning me here, I didn't say it's boring to push yourself to get better at something. I said to "not take these words as permission to be mediocre", as in, don't settle for mediocrity, i.e. DO push yourself to get better
Ah I understand that my pivot in the second sentence has thrown you off, I will edit my original comment so it flows better.
And after all of this work your resume gets ignored because the recruiter got distracted for the 5 seconds that he has to look at each of 1000 resumes in his pile.
