One of the coolest things about learning to do something yourself, in my opinion, is that you won't ever look at similar things to whatever you've just learned to do the same way in the future. And really, I'm talking about learning how to do anything at all; not just mechanical stuff, though that's certainly in there, too.
Back in culinary school, I had a pastry instructor who had us laminate croissant dough by hand, even though we could have used the perfectly good sheeters we had in the classroom at any time. Why did she do that? Not just to help develop our upper body strength, though it might have felt that way at the time. The process of working that cold, hard butter into the dough so that we could achieve all those flaky, beautiful layers in the finished croissants when they baked taught us more about how it worked simply because we had to be so hands-on.
