I am an engineer and used to struggle pretty hard with mechanic things because my instincts say that if something isn’t doing what I want that means I’m doing it wrong and forcing it will break it.

The thing that broke that block was a coworker at a startup who was both an engineer and our aircraft mechanic. He told me, “in my experience the best aircraft mechanics are basically just big dumb apes that wail on airplanes with hammers until they do what they want.” Sometimes I would help him do aircraft maintenance and would balk at a task worrying that I’d break a $2M airplane. We had another tech that would say, “who cares? I promise you can’t break it bad enough that we can’t fix it after”

Those things have stuck with me for years and I am no longer afraid of pulling out the big boy breaker bar when I need it.