Back in late October 2011, the hype about the dreaded “Mayan prophecy” surrounding 12/21/2012 was in full swing. Although I wasn’t worried about these dire predictions, I did see them as an opportunity to get more people actively involved with prepping. The Countdown to Preparedness was born in December 2011 on SurvivalWeekly.com. I posted one lesson, complete with assignments, every week for the next year. I had it timed so the final lesson would post just before the predicted end of the world in December 2012.
While I’d hoped the project would garner a bit of interest, I was astounded at how popular it became. I fielded many e-mails and messages from readers who were loving the weekly lesson format. I got to hear how some folks had used these lessons to ease into prepping, making things much easier with their less-interested spouses. As time went on, more and more people seemed to be following the project. When we finally reached the end, I can’t say who was more disappointed, the readers or me. The whole project was truly a lot of fun.
Even before the final lesson was posted, I had people asking me if I was going to turn the online project into a book. I’d been thinking the same thing but was, at the time, eyeball-deep into final edits on my first book, Prepper’s Home Defense, and starting my second book, The Prepper’s Complete Book of Disaster Readiness. So, while the idea interested me, I had to push it aside to work on other commitments.
As I tackled my various book projects and other endeavors, I noticed a few books coming out, mostly self-published but some from traditional publishers, that had a similar theme, that of getting prepared within a certain time frame. Often, it was thirty days, or four weeks, or some other ridiculously short length of time. Unless you’ve already done most of the work ahead of time, there’s no way you could reach any real degree of preparedness in a month. That’s sort of like saying you could take a couch potato and have him or her win the Boston Marathon after a few weeks of training. I suppose if one has an unlimited budget and twelve free hours every day, one might be disaster-ready in a month . . . maybe.
Being better prepared isn’t, or at least shouldn’t be, just about buying stuff. Skills trump stuff every single time. The skills one needs to learn are vast and varied, from first aid to starting campfires, from weapon use and maintenance to food preservation. These aren’t things that can be learned overnight. It takes time, it takes energy, and yes, it does take some money.
Finally, early in 2013, my awesome editor at Ulysses Press, Keith Riegert, and I talked about the Countdown project. At the time, I was working my way through my third book with Ulysses, Prepper’s Long-Term Survival Guide. I told Keith that I wanted to do Countdown as a book and that if we were going to do it, we should do it sooner rather than later.
The basic idea behind the project hasn’t changed. If you follow each lesson and complete all the assignments, by the time you’re done you’ll be about as prepared as you can possibly be for any reasonably expected disaster scenario. With that in mind, don’t expect this to be all fun and games. There’s going to be a lot of hard work ahead, as well as some expense. Many of us preppers and survivalists have been at this for a long time now. If you’re brand-new to this whole thing, you have some catching up to do. But if you take it week by week, you’ll do just fine.
Now, quiet down. Class is about to begin.