A few weekends ago, my friend and I sat down to smoke a cigarette. The lighter I had was one of those free ones you get with a pack of cigarettes, and the flame was very low. So my friend took it apart, did something, and the fire was great. I asked him to show me how he did it. So he took the lighter apart, showed me what to adjust inside, then attempted to put the lighter back together. But as he attempted to put it back together, the lighter pretty much fell apart in his hands, and he was unable to fix it. This past weekend, I used a very small lighter that was sitting in my car. This lighter ran out of butane very quickly (since a couple of people used it).
So I've tried and tried and tried again to make a spark with the lighter my friend broke, but the spark wheel wouldn't turn. And I tried and tried and tried again to get the small lighter to make a flame, but it simply threw out sparks.
Then I thought about things. I depressed the lever on the broken lighter and sniffed it to see if I could smell any butane, and I could. So I held the lever down for a few seconds to let more butane come out. Then I threw on it some sparks from the small lighter, and like a dream come true, there was fire! Fire appeared on the heads of both lighters!
The point of this is that I've been going about things all the wrong way. I've tried too hard to make fire out of broken things thinking that they would work as they should if I just kept trying the same pointless shit over and over. But neither lighter worked as they should - even if I tried the same thing a thousand times. And if I had used my intelligence in the matter from the beginning, understanding that a broken lighter is a broken lighter, rather than try and try and try to simply make a broken lighter work, I probably could have had an effective fire long ago.
