ABOUT SKILLCULT

My name is Steven Edholm,  and I'm on a mission.  I've been studying, practicing,experimenting with, dreaming about, writing about and teaching self reliance skills for all of my adult life and then some.  I've rarely held a normal job or led a "normal" life, preferring instead to be growing food, making things, experimenting, running around in the woods and amassing knowledge.

For about the past 10 years, these activities happen here at Turkeysong, a 40 acre homestead base camp, laboratory, artists canvas/palette and beloved home in the coast ranges of Northern California.  Turkeysong and SkillCult are intimately interwoven and together constitute the project of a life time- to encourage resistance against the social current that pulls us toward helplessness and dependency, by fostering skills and thoughts that lean toward self reliance.

I love gathering this knowledge, experimenting and figuring stuff out, but it is all in vain if I don't pass what I know and learn onward.  Fortunately I am absolutely compelled by my nature to do so, and that is the heart and soul of this project.

I am just coming out (knock on wood) of a very long illness precipitated by contracting lyme diseases in 1999.  Though I was extremely ill at times and have never been the same since that tick bite, my priorities have remained steadfast and I have continued to do what I feel like I'm "meant" to do.  I don't want to be the guy that wakes up with cancer one morning not having done what I should have done, which in my case, downloading as much of that knowledge as possible into a form that will serve others.  My mission is to re-skill, inspire, edify and foster greater physical and intellectual independence in as many people as possible before I become worm food!  I plan to dump a TON of useful information onto the web which has already been underway on my blogs Turkeysong and Paleotechnics, and on my youtube channel SkillCult... but now I'm scaling it up.

That's the project, plain and simple; To help people like you, keep pushing experimental boundaries and to make enough money at it to keep experimenting, learning and disseminating knowledge here in my mountain hideaway. For a little bit more about me and my background and geeked out personality, you can click here.

I have never been very motivated by money, in fact, hardly at all.  I will almost always chose to work on stuff that is helpful to someone else, or which bolsters my knowledge and skills rather than something that pays.  If something is important and needs doing, I'll do it whether I'm paid or not, but give me something to do that is pointless, and I probably won't do it whether you pay me or not ;)  

I still feel awkward when anyone hands me money for anything, especially for labor.  It sort of scrambles my brain.  In my world, work is not something you do for money, but for love or out of necessity.  But, alas, if I want to stay here at Turkeysong where I am heavily invested emotionally and in numerous long term experiments, I need to generate a whole bunch of the stuff.  In many ways, what I do is try to operate somewhat outside of the modern money driven mindset, where every activity is weighed as to how much currency it could be worth, or how much money could be made doing something else instead.  Ironically, for me, here and now,doing so requires money.  Land is expensive, especially here in the land of weed and wine.  I am also now realizing the potential contained within money to make more experiments happen here, which has definitely gotten my attention, because I have plenty of them on the back burner and seem to dream up more endlessly!

In this age of the internet, the individual holds a great deal of power.  You can use that power to help me in this effort by purchasing the long list of books I plan to write as they are released (and believe it or not, even more so by leaving reviews for them after you read them.), promoting my content to like minded friends and on social media when you think it is worthy, and clicking through my Amazon affiliate links to buy stuff on amazon.

That will get me a small commission on anything you buy at Amazon without costing you anything extra at all.  I always do this for other bloggers and friends to help support their efforts.  If you don't do it for me, do it for someone you know personally, or a blog that you appreciate that uses amazon affiliate links.  It costs you nothing and can help us get our messages out and at least pay for website hosting and such.

...Oh, and there is no cult here, really :)  It's usually just me, a few chickens, right now a pig named penelope, squirrels, birds, deer and turkeys of course.  You will probably encounter pretty relentless encouragement toward free thinking here, the name skillcult is kind of a joke.  I like that dichotomy or seemingly oxymoronic slant that forces people to think.  The idea of a cult about something that requires active, free, critical thinking to excel at should ultimately stimulate contemplation and cognitive dissonance, which I think is a good thing.  But, in a more colloquial sense, it also evokes the sort of intensity I generally bring to whatever I do and hints at the idea of a powerful movement toward re-skilling, which there certainly is, and thank goodness for that!

 Now lets get off these stupid computers and go do something cool!