Why Try Doing It Yourself?

Growing up, buying new things was hardly ever an option.

If something broke, it didn’t automatically get replaced — it got looked at. Taken apart. Poked at. I spent a lot of time tinkering with crystal radio kits, electronics, and anything that stopped working and needed attention. Sometimes things got fixed. Sometimes they didn’t. But the trying was never wasted.

That habit stuck with me.

I’ve started plenty of DIY projects that didn’t end the way I imagined.

Some never got fully finished. Some stalled halfway through. Some worked well enough to count as a win, even if they weren’t perfect. Along the way, I learned far more than I would have if I’d never tried at all.

And when I did finish a project — really finish it — the sense of accomplishment was real. Quiet, but real. It wasn’t about showing anyone else. It was about knowing I could take something from broken or incomplete to functional.

That matters more than it sounds.

DIY doesn’t always go according to plan. In fact, it usually doesn’t.

But that’s the point.

Trying stretches your sense of what you’re capable of. It forces you to think through problems, adjust when things don’t work, and keep going even when the outcome isn’t guaranteed. Every attempt widens your comfort zone just a little bit.

That widening builds confidence.

We often think of DIY as something physical — fixing a faucet, assembling furniture, repairing electronics.

But the same mindset applies to technical projects too.

Building a website. Setting up a blog. Learning how to deploy something on the internet. Writing code that doesn’t quite work the first time — or the fifth. These are modern DIY projects, even if they don’t involve tools you can hold in your hand.

They come with the same uncertainty. The same friction. The same temptation to stop and let someone else handle it.

And they offer the same reward when you push through.

I’ve watched people talk themselves out of technical projects before they even begin.

I’m not technical.

I’ll break something.

I’ll never get it right.

Those thoughts are familiar. I’ve had them too.

But building something — even clumsily — changes how you see yourself. When you’ve wrestled with a broken layout, a misconfigured setting, or a confusing error message and eventually figured it out, you walk away knowing something important: you’re capable of learning hard things.

That knowledge sticks.

Yes, there’s often a cost savings when you do things yourself. That’s real, and it helps.

But for me, the bigger value has always been independence.

DIY builds a belief in yourself — a sense that you’re not helpless when something goes wrong. That you have options. That you can at least try before defaulting to outsourcing every problem.

When you never try, you lose the opportunity to learn. You also lose the chance to discover what you’re capable of.

DIY changes how you see yourself.

You start to think of yourself as more capable. More competent. More adaptable. Even if you don’t end up fixing the thing, you’ve reduced the mystery around it. Fear shrinks when you understand how something works — or at least how it might work.

That reduction in uncertainty carries over into other parts of life.

Another underrated benefit of DIY — especially technical DIY — is optionality.

Sometimes calling an expert takes too long. Sometimes you don’t even know who to call. Sometimes the problem isn’t big enough to justify outside help — but it still needs solving.

DIY gives you another path.

Not the only path. Just another viable one.

I like to think of DIY not as a money-saving strategy, but as an agency-building one.

It’s about problem-solving. About trying before assuming you can’t. About reminding yourself that you’re allowed to engage with the world directly — whether that world is physical or digital — instead of only consuming solutions built by others.

DIY shrinks fear. It shrinks uncertainty. And over time, it builds a quiet confidence that says: I can figure this out — or at least get closer than I was before.

And that belief is useful far beyond the garage, the workbench, or the half-finished website sitting in a browser tab.