Ask HN: What practical skills do you recommend?
I have in mind not things that take years to master and that you develop over a lifetime, like programming or playing the piano. But there are some practical skills that can be learned in a couple of hours and refreshed with an hour of practice every month or so, but that have a disproportionate return on investment.
Two examples of skills that I regularly find useful are classical lockpicking and knowing how to tie a variety of knots. The first has gotten me and friends out of jams when someone lost a key and got locked out, etc.; and if you don’t know knots you will never be able to tie a load tightly to the roof of your car.
What skills do you recommend that I add to my repertoire?
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadThat is, how much to tighten bolts without breaking stuff, knowing which tools are for what.
This can be learned by working on fragile things like bicycles, but it will help with everything from changing out a waterpump in a car or a dishwasher, to plumbing and electrical work.
Its something that does take more time than a few hours, but being inquisitive about mechanical things is helped by knowing how much force is appropriate when repairing them.
Cooking
Fishing
Camping
Marksmenship: archery or firearms
Exercise more. Be agile in the original sense.
Learn to listen. Learn how not to interrupt and when to interrupt.
1. Basic mechanical drawing and perspective drawing 2. Jogging a mile without stopping 3. Using abdominal muscles when lifting heavy things 4. Stomach breathing 5. Waking a half hour early to journal, meditate, take a walk, enjoy the morning, etc. 6. Being mindful of the moment 7. Basic kinematics 8. Basic electrical concepts and skills 9. Basic plumbing skills 10. Basic photography and composition 11. How to graciously receive a gift 12. How to start a conversation with a stranger
2. Make a positive remark on how you'll use or enjoy the gift.
3. Say "thank you".
As for the muscles involved, a deadlift isn’t just back or legs or core, it’s all of those. Your Glutes and hamstrings are the “prime movers” that perform the actual movement, while you back and “core” musculature are bracing and stabilizing, allowing the movement to be translated into Bar movement.
Soldering, using a multimeter, basic electrical repair;
Basic first aid;
Solvents;
Sailing small boats;
Basic cocktails (make a good martini or margarita from scratch);
Growing your own outdoor crops. This will give you a stronger intuition for weather, the timing of the seasons, mindfulness around humidity (or lack thereof) etc.
Financial literacy is also huge.. and I’m not talking about crypto. I’m talking about classic get rich slow investing, understanding how taxes work, bonds vs stocks and asset allocations. Researching John Boggle/Bogleheads wiki is a great place to start with this.
It's relatively easy to be great at it: To make something taste great, you only need to learn sporadically over months (because restaurants cook in batches and are time/cost-sensitive). It's substantially easier to make something taste on par with professionals, compared to other skills like drawing.
You can do a lot of modifications and trade-offs to your liking - easily adjust things to your taste, lower the cost, be more healthy, or make the cooking process faster.
You can share with people you love. Invite friends to cook with you. And show off on social media though I rather not.
With that being said, just start simple, don't stockpile gadgets. It's more about skill and less about hardware. In Chinese cooking, a professional chef can cook hundreds of dishes with no more than five dirt-cheap cookwares.
Pretty simple to learn how to use a sewing machine in an afternoon or so, and will pay dividends for the rest of your life.
I've been able to repair or alter my clothes in a pinch when needed.
Plant lettuce, figure out why it died. Learn from mistakes, and improve. Plant again. Harvest.
Repeat.
I only started learning hands on stuff in my late 30's when I moved rural. I'm getting better but still useless compared to my more capable neighbours and will hire people, occasionally to fix something I made worse, but still recommend.
My next project is to install a septic system during my Christmas holidays but I'll labour for a guy who knows what he is doing as dont want to get this one wrong first time around.
If you want to have a garden or grow blueberry bushes, it is super helpful to have these basic skills.
How a differential works: https://youtu.be/yYAw79386WI
There are a number of videos of transparent engines: https://youtu.be/nvMcFQqhbpM But if that doesn’t work, searching YouTube for “how an engine works” should give lots of content. Once you’ve figured out how the engine turns the flywheel, you can investigate how the flywheel applies different speeds to the wheels via a transmission. Manual transmissions are simpler, so I would start there: https://youtu.be/wCu9W9xNwtI then figure out how the clutch fits in. After that, you can move on to torque converters (coolest component imo, basically a fluid coupling) and automatic transmissions, which can be a mind-bender.
Feel free to reach out to me at pc.peterso at Mail of g dot common TLD, happy to share what I learned and save you some time.
Lastly, there is a wealth of tidbits on Engineering Explained and howacarworks.com, although the latter goes into far more detail than you probably need.
Listening skills help not only in your professional life, but also in raising kids and having a good relationship with friends and family.
- regular expressions (PCRE even)
- git
- bash and posix sh + basic Linux building blocks (find/xargs, sed, grep, awk, …)
Lots of people don’t ever take the time to learn these formally instead of struggling to use them sporadically. Take the time to learn your tools properly, it makes a huge difference.
3 more that are extremely useful:
- SQL
- CSS
- Makefiles
I believe this website can also help you: https://www.artofmanliness.com/skills/
"Contractions 3-5 min apart, 40 -90 secs; support head and body at birth; dry off and keep warm; clear fluid from mouth; tie cord a few inches from mother with string e.g. shoelace; don't cut unless hours from hospital, but if needed tie again closer to mother"
https://breadpunk.club/docs/manifesto/
— Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man
Sorry for not providing concrete instructions for each...
I'm a jack of all trades and new people I meet tend to be surprised by the various activities that I can perform. Yet I'm a near useless, underpaid (for the position, not performance), mid-level dev with no professional future.
Yeah, not necessarily that specific list. The list could really be anything. If the items on it are not mainstream, then there's really no reward to them. People aren't expected to be self sufficient, rather they are expected to buy things and hire people, or otherwise participate in the consumerist economy.
If not, this is an unhelpful response to this question.