Let me start off by noting that success comes in many different shapes and forms. Success for one individual often looks very different from the picture of success another person paints. One individual may see a stable corporate job with fixed hours and the chance to go home and forget about work as dream come true. Another may see working long hours into the night on a creative small business that doesn’t pay nearly as well as more rewarding, and therefore his or her personal idea of success. Thus, what can be classified as a success really depends on the individual who is assessing the goal.
The same success can also be attained in many different ways: while one person may be able to acquire financial success by putting in long hours, another may use a valuable acquired skill to fast-track how long it takes them to reach the same financial success goal.
Having a successful career may mean investing long hours to get hard-earned promotions, or it could mean learning to charm your way to the top. Being successful financially could mean finding a new, better job, or it could mean taking public transportation instead of using hard earned cash on a car, insurance, and gas. Being successful at school could mean sacrificing social time for the sake of studying, or it could mean blowing the summer cash fund to live on campus during the year: so that valuable time isn’t wasted on commutes.
But what does success look like for a prepper?
Again here, it’s important to remember that the picture of success will look different for every individual. It’s likely that no two preppers will have the same exact idea of what the ultimate prepper success would look like for them. While some will picture having their ideal stockpile and an underground bunker in their house as the ultimate preparedness success, others will likely imagine the perfect bug-out location, pimped out and ready for action in case the SHTF. Others yet are likely to imagine their home being a completely self-sufficient haven, where electricity, food, water, and shelter are all fully off-the-grid.
There are so many different facets of prepping that it can become overwhelming to really think of what success as a prepper might look like to you. That’s why it’s beneficial to have a plan, no matter how vague that plan may be. If you do have a plan in place, once you’ve fulfilled it you can take a look back and see that you’ve attained at least the first glimpse of your success as a prepper. From there you’ll be able to make more complicated plans, set more difficult goals to accomplish, and continue on your life long quest to be the most prepared that you can be for any SHTF or TEOTWAWKI situation.
Each of your plans and goals, once accomplished, should be considered a separate success, all boosting the ideal of your life as a prepper to be the most prepared you can be. Having a 1-3 month stockpile is no small feat. You should feel good about having accomplished that goal, even though there’s of course more to be done as a prepper. Having doubled that stockpile to last 2-6 months is a second feat, and again, you should feel extremely successful for having accomplished yet another very important prepper task. Growing a fruit and vegetable garden that will allow you to be more self-sufficient is a further success. Don’t belittle your individual successes just because you haven’t yet attained your ultimate prepper goal to have a vast stockpile, say, and a garden that will never run out of fruits and vegetables to feed your family.
The ultimate picture of success for a prepper would likely involve a level of complete self-sufficiency. If a prepper manages to be completely self-sufficient, and can defend themselves and their preps in case of an emergency or SHTF situation, there’s not really much that can happen in the outside world that said prepper won’t be able to handle. Thus, self-sufficiency should be involved in one’s ultimate prepper goal.
But there are many ways one can plan out their route to self-sufficiency, and thus ultimately, how one gets there is up to them. A prepper can be self-sufficient with or without a self-sufficient form of electricity, for instance. A person doesn’t need electricity to be self-sufficient, and so while having solar panels may be very important to one prepper, it may feel completely unnecessary to another prepper, one who does not deem electricity ultimately important for their own self-sufficiency.
Successfully attaining your prepper vision is difficult: we all know that. As prepping is a lifestyle, it’s also true that we will likely never be finished prepping. Even once you do reach your ultimate idea of prepper success, there will likely be a new idea; a few more things you thought up to do, buy, or learn, that will help you further in emergency situations once completed. This is why each step of the way should be seen as a separate success, and you should begin to see yourself as being a successful prepper as soon as your picture of success finally starts to come together.
Have you begun to count your successes as a prepper, watching some very important preps of yours come together? And what does ultimate success as a prepper look like to you?
The microwave fire was pretty straightforward because the lithium grease vapor had migrated into the area where the electrical wiring and switches reside. When the fire started above the latching mech I just blew it out. I turned to do something else and the damned thing was on fire again! I blew it out again and unplugged the durned thing. Thinking that was over, I watched for a minute and yep, it caught fire AGAIN! Now i was starting to panic a bit and grabbed the Microwave and ran out the door holding it at arms length while it blazed merrily along. I still wasn’t sure what to do with the danged thing and spent a short amount of time dashing around the front yard with a blazing microwave. Finally dropped it on the front lawn and doused it with the water hose. The neighbor just shook his head and went into his house.
I do have 3 fire extinguishers located in my house but for some reason using one on the microwave never occurred to me at the time.
Another bit of advice. Do NOT put a hydraulic shock absorber from a old car in a camp fire. They tend to take off like a rocket and burn everything they come into contact with while skittering on the ground and chasing people and banging into things.
Just sayin’ :)
Best
Snake Plisken
My god, you need to write a book! Such good stories – you’re like a character in a cautionary tale! Haha
I appreciate the comment Elise, and yes, I have been contemplating writing more recently. I authored and published a cookbook of family favorites for Xmas a few years back and i included 5 funny ( and one ghost story ) to compliment the cookbook. Not only was the cook book a big hit with the family I had to do a second run for friends.
It’s been a great ride over the last 52 years. I am a truly blessed person and live my life to it’s fullest. My philosophy is that laughter is super ammunition for the tough times in life and you need to reload often!
BTW, if I did start to do more writing it might be in the form of script. I’m thinking something along the lines of mix between Red Green and Trailer Park Boys ( Julian is closest to my personality ).
Best,
Snake Plisken
Well you certainly have an entertaining way of writing, so I can see why that cookbook was a big hit :). Laughter is a great way to get people to remember things, too. Funny things stick out in my memory all the time. And if you’re going for a script I think it’d sound awesome when recited live or acted out, for sure. Super interesting :).
Thank you Elise!
Best.
Snake Plisken
Oh my! I made the mistake of trying to be “helpful” (twice actually) and knocked the power out on the boat while my honey was a way. That was not a very pleasant day for me.
Oh man that sucks! Is it easy to get the power back on?
I’m a terribly big klutz, especially on certain days, so I feel for you there! Once I spilled beer on my husband’s mousepad twice within the same hour! Not a good day for me, lol!
Hahaha! It is nice to see that I am not alone!
Hi Elise, a very good read. I guess i never really gave much thought about what a preppers level of success is but your post opened my eyes a bit.
I detest those crazy preppers who spend every bit of their cash on huge underground bunkers and thousands of dollars on food and water. However, if that’s their benchmark for prepping success then more power to them. I often think they their family is more of a danger to themselves ( being sheltered together for months/year ).
Patty and her family blows my mind ( in a good way ). Been to her blog a couple of times and am amused that they live so well on a yacht. It proves that it can be done with persistence and resilience.
As for myself, my successes have slowly but surely come along over the years. My goal is to be self sufficient as possible and survive for 6 to 12 months in a SHTF scenario. I figure that if I survive that long then most of the really super bad stuff will have transpired.
Success for me comes in steps and goals. My main goal 2 years ago was to get my raised bed gardens up and running. Got that one done. I canned for the first time in my 52 years this year and that went over very well and I learned a lot.
The next goal ( and prolly most important ) was the clean water. Check, got that done.
Fire wood for rocket stove. Well need to work on that as I have only 5 days worth of wood to cook hot healthy meals but i’m surrounded by woods and fields so harvesting the tree limbs for fuel is something I have spend more time on.
As you can see, I have a lot of small but important details to address to insure my prepper success.
But, what about prepping failures? I can think of some good one’s on my part! Success does’nt come with out a few failures that we learn from. Perhaps you could blog on stupid prepper moves that we experience? With all the people who visit here I bet that would be funny and instructive at the same time!
Best to you,
Snake Plisken
The preppers I don’t understand are the ones with excellent above-ground preps (livestock, gardens, etc.) who also have underground bunkers which they say they’ll spend time in immediately after the SHTF. I don’t get those because not only will you likely go insane inside that bunker, but you have excellent preps above ground that you seem to just be ignoring for the sake of being underground for some reason.
Having a way to replenish food and water is really important to me, so the raised garden beds up and running: to me that’s such an excellent prep. And canning I still haven’t dabbled in yet, though I swear I’ll get around to it one day. Firewood is extremely important, and something I think is pretty well forgotten a lot of times, though I do live in Canada so if heaven forbid something happens, we’ve enough in these parts to last all of us a long while.
You’ve got a really great start to your preps. What kinds of failures have you gone through, I’m curious now! Success definitely doesn’t come without failures, plenty of them, but I feel like I tune mine out as much as possible. My biggest ones have been with stockpiling fails.. like getting too many things that actually have a legitimate expiry date. Now I’m only bothering to stockpile food on this list. Otherwise, it’s just not worth it for me as I feel those funds have been wasted if the food expires before I even use it!
Hope to see you around more often ;).
Oh my gosh, where do i start with the dumbest things i’ve done trying to prep? One of the biggest and dumbest things is that I tried to preserve jalapeno peppers in a olive oil suspension without any kind of heating or canning technique. A few months later after my experiment with olive oil and peppers, I had a wonderful biological culture of some weird white colored fungus or perhaps bacteria. :) I STILL have that jar in my ‘ fridge after all these years. Just to keep me humble.
Another super stupid thing I did is pretty comical. I set up two seperate water cans to catch water for my first garden ( which was an utter failure ) and once it got below zero I thought it would be a good idea to empty the 35 gallon cans so they didn’t split from the ice. I turned over one and noticed that the ice was about 5 inches thick so i moved on to the other and turned it over. That one got the better of me and I slipped and cracked the back of my head on the concrete. The next thing I remember is my neighbor kicking my feet and asking if I was OK. Lesson to self: empty water cans before the freeze.
Oh Yeah, I recently purchased a bunch of N 95 facial masks and was so excited to open them up when I realized that they were for children. That in of itself is not bad. They’ll get used by friends and family eventually but lesson learned: pay more danged attention when ordering off of Amazon!
Most of these issues are minor but we learn from silly stuff now so we can meet future problems.
Best.
Snake Plisken
Thomas tried to make his own hot sauce with a friend of ours, inside the house and they pretty much got maced while also temporarily turning the majority of our top floor into a toxic waste dump. If I weren’t coughing so much I would’ve been laughing.
I would actually love to see a picture of that jar you have in the fridge. To me, failures like that aren’t really failures, just really entertaining learning experiences. ;)
The second story – owtch! That’s a painful lesson to have learned! The third – I really don’t think I’ve ever seen children’s facial masks before. The heck!? Yes, definitely should pay attention to what you order on Amazon, but really, who could’ve expected that??
Great stories :). Makes me wish I had a few more of my own under my belt!
The hot sauce experience speaks to me. Before I began to use the internet and ask lots of questions from knowledgable people about how to can food I made a very similar mistake. I wanted to can up some of the jalapeno peppers and carrots that I proudly grew so I looked on the internet and found a recipe to can the food which called for apple cider vinegar. Epic fail! I didn’t do something right and the whole house filled with eye watering spices. The neighbors called the fire department because they thought I was making pepper spray.
When the FD showed up there were a dozen angry neighbors camped on the lawn and the fire fighters had a great laugh at my expense. Didn’t try that recipe again!
I have a couple dozen of these learning experiences because sometimes I just don’t think things thru. Like the time I started the microwave on fire. A bit of advice, DO NOT try and lubricate the Microwave latch with lithium grease while you have a pot of soup cooking on your gas range. You end up running around in the yard with a microwave on fire and not sure what to do with it. And once again, the neighbors were not amused.
Sometimes I feel like I live in a Red Green rerun!
Best
Snake Plisken
I’m going to reread these whenever I need a smile. So funny! Especially love that first story: I can picture the firemen’s faces as they listen to you explain you were just trying out a new recipe.
How’d you end up getting that microwave fire out? Always wonder how people do it if they don’t have a fire extinguisher.
And yes, you sure do sound like a Red Green rerun! A good episode, too ;). They should’ve borrowed experiences from your life while scripting!
I really love your blog. I have been watching prepping videos for a few years now so the concept is not new to me. I am living as self sufficiently as possible looking forward to the day that I am MORE self reliant than what we are now. We live on an old Tjalk with our cat and I love it because you have to live in a way that people in houses don’t. Thank you for inviting me to come to your blog. I will definitely be a visitor! You are right, what success means to one person will not be the same for another. For me being debt free producing our own electricity and water is what true success is to me right now.
Thanks for stopping by, Patty. Glad you took the time to comment as well!
That sounds like a wonderful life. I’ve poked around a little on your blog before, but I’m going to do some more reading on it very soon, as that kind of life sounds very fascinating to me. I’m especially curious about how the cat does being on an old Tjalk – we have a cat, too, and he’s been very adaptable, adjusting very quickly each time we’ve moved houses.
Debt free living + self sustainable electricity and water is definitely an excellent goal. Being on a boat means it’s easier to relocate if you have to as well. Awesome stuff! :)
Awwe thanks hon. I have a long way to go with the blog but I am getting there. I need to upload more photos and talk a bit more about our life on the boat. I am nervous about that though as we live a pretty private life. I do feel passionately about understanding the basics of things like generators, wind and solar and electronics. That way you really don’t have to depend on any outside source for your energy needs. If something happens to it you can repair it.
I find it easier to write about more personal topics long after more sensitive events have taken place. Not sure if that would help you in this situation, but if you’ve been living on the boat for a long while, maybe try remembering back to when you first got on the boat and what it felt like to go from living on land to living on water. Since it happened so long ago, you can talk about it in a much more “matter of fact” way, and describe the “growing pains” that surely happen when anyone changes from one lifestyle to another. It’d still be fascinating for others to read, but it’s less sensitive of a topic for you to write about, as the frustrating events that took place will have already been resolved, and thus hopefully will feel ok to discuss (at least for me that’s true – it may be different for you of course).
Certainly boats are excellent plans for preppers/survivalists, especially if they know how to combine their boat with hunting/trapping/gathering skills so that in case the SHTF, they can get what they need and then get off the land. Pretty easy to defend, too, especially in comparison to houses: if there’s a threat, just off and sail away.
Thanks for the tip! You have just made it simpler for me. Hahaha! There are so many tales to tell. You are absolutely right about boats being great for survivalist. There are some old boats as big as houses.