Top 10 Skills You MUST Have To Survive

What if you woke up one morning and the world as you knew it was gone?

Would you be ready to sustain yourself and your loved ones? How would you know? Serious preppers understand that “knowledge is power” and that “practice makes perfect.” These two elements of wisdom should guide your prepping activities.

Here are the top 10 skills I teach my students when first discussing their plans for disaster preparation:

1. First Aid. As a medic, I know first-hand the importance of taking fast action in the event of a medical emergency. Take a First Aid/CPR class while you can and learn how to use a tourniquet, administer stitches, and care for broken bones and gunshot wounds. Buy a couple of field manuals and keep one at home and one in the car, along with your first aid kits.
2. Self-defense. I don’t have to tell you how dangerous desperate people are. Hopefully, you and the people you come across in a survival situation can lend a helping hand to each other and share/trade in a civilized fashion. If not, prepare to protect yourself, your family, and your supplies.
3. Fire-starting. A fire will keep you warm, make your water safe to drink, and make your food edible. With its critical survival applications, fire is one of your best friends and fire-starting should be one of your most-practiced skills.
4. Fishing. “If you teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for the rest of his life.” Although there is science to fishing, it’s best learned by experience. A fishing pole may become one of your key survival supplies. Purchase a high-quality one, along with a fishing guide for your region. Remember, in most states, you will need a fishing license.
5. Hunting. If a disaster of catastrophic proportions strikes, things may never go back to normal. If you cannot buy food at a grocery store, you will have to find your own. Knowing how to hunt will put fresh, protein-rich meat on the table. Learn to use a hunting rifle as well as a bow-and-arrow, and how to set traps for small game that you can capture without the need for ammunition, which may be scarce in a crisis.
6. Gardening. Being able to grow your own food is a valuable skill, not only in a survival situation but in everyday life. With all of the pesticides and herbicides that our produce is bombarded with, I’m not a big fan of grocery store produce. Knowing how to grow medicinal herbs can also come in handy and give you some bargaining power, too.
7. Firearms. Firearms have many potential survival applications, from hunting to self-defense. Hopefully, you won’t ever have to shoot someone to protect your family or property, but you never know. Go to the shooting range often to keep in practice, and stay up-to-date on the latest regulations in your area regarding concealed carry permits.
8. Navigating. If you don’t know how to hold a compass, you better figure it out now. If you have to bug out, especially if you are meeting someone in a pre-determined location, you better know how to get there. Buy laminated maps of your region and keep them in your bug-out bag and get-home bag.
9. Construction. If the crisis persists and the world as we know it no longer exists, we may be back to living in colonial times. You will be way ahead of the competition if you have basic construction skills and a set of hand tools.
10. Food preservation. If refrigeration is not available, preserving food will become the norm. From salt preservation to smoking, canning and dehydration, extending the life of your foods is a valuable skill.

It’s also imperative that you start stocking the supplies you’ll need to use each given skill effectively. Your hunting rifle is useless without ammunition, and you’ll wish you had some tinder in your bug-out bag when nighttime rolls around.

In the coming weeks I’ll be going into more detail on each of the skills above, so look out for my emails and read each one carefully to learn exactly what you need to do to survive.

To your survival,
Richard Marshall