Take things apart. Fix things, while observing how they break. There are amazing online videos on how to repair virtually anything that goes wrong with a home a

Take things apart. Fix things, while observing how they break. There are amazing online videos on how to repair virtually anything that goes wrong with a home appliance. Make things that improve your life at home. These are things that a lot of hardware people did as kids, including myself. Get your hands involved. Look inside older stuff that predates 3d printing and cheap mold tooling, just to avoid the trap of everything being made the same way. In my case, since I'm interested in music, I've looked inside things like guitar pedals and amps, which often solve the problem of making something that's robust, but that can be made profitably in short runs and small shops. Get a hold of the McMaster-Carr catalog, in paper form, and leave it in the bathroom. An old Digi-Key catalog if someone still has one.