Ask HN: What skills have given you a 10x return?
Like many people I've learned a number of skillsets throughout my life but only a few have given me so much value that I wish I started earlier.
Specifically, it took me about a year of daily meditation practice before I started seeing significant results (more energy, focus, patience, willpower, less stress/anxiety, etc).
Another one is learning to bike safely in a dense urban environment. It's something I do multiple times a week that brings joy, exercise and fresh air (yes my per mile risk of an accident is higher than other modes of transportation but I'm also balancing that with better fitness).
Are there others that I should be learning?
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[ 17.3 ms ] story [ 5172 ms ] threadJust please please please use proper technique.
Obviously in society there's a lot with this: you're born with a face shape, height, you can lose your hair because genetics, etc. With enough money, surgery, etc you can change some of these things but IMO that's ridiculous vs working with what you have.
Weight training is great from a health and longevity standpoint but it's also the most straightforward way to be "better looking".
Cliche example of the 20 year high school reunion. The beautiful people at that age were mostly coasting on what they were born with and everything that comes with youth.
20 years later the "beautiful" people who put on 50 lbs of fat vs the "ugly" people who put the work in... Needless to say most will consider the roles reversed. Resistance training goes furthest in this.
It's harsh but it's true.
In my experience, it was the endurance athletes and people committed to dynamic bodyweight work like pilates, dance, or gymnastics that hit that “20 year reunion” mark best, but resistance training is good for sure!
It took me about 10 years to realise I didn't need to look at my hands. Magic moment.
My neck does not hurt anymore :)
[1] Reason 146 I'm a cynic: it was supposed to be a programming class. There was exactly 1 day that involved any kind of programming, it involved BASIC entered manually from a 1 page set of instructions, contained 10 lines of code, and the teacher, being the quintessential "school marm" of yesteryear, was not able to provide any debugging assistance. I was disappoint. To this day I can trace my undying belief that periods get two spaces after them to that class.
I spent about a half hour a day for a week trying, because I wanted to write an article on the learning process, and on Vim, from the perspective of someone with no background in muscle memory type skills or fast thinking..
But I got bored and busy with other stuff. I was up to a little under one letter per second with hone row only excercises, still counting fingers one by one to remember which was which for each letter..
But I did discover something pretty interesting, which is that I have no idea how people can learn from failure. Like, you hit the wrong keys, and then over time you hit them correctly, instead of just hitting the same exact wrong keys every time? Seems like we need new instruction methods for people to whom that process doesn't come naturally.
(just scroll past the pitch for the links)
Writing is the gym for the brain. It will give you a lot of clarity on your thoughts and also improve how you speak. Your mind will be enhanced and it will affect positively all the aspects of your life.
Everybody writes, but very few do it deliberately. Most of the people, just write. They rarely even think about what they wrote. You will sound smarter. Not because of choice of words, but because you will begin to think clearly.
In the first three decades of my life. My schooling was second-rate and I've started to learn english quite late. Both my reading and writing skills were absolutely inferior to kids with a privileged background. My literacy as a kid was close to zero. My main focus was math, code and video games.
Then, having progressed in life mostly because of my technical skills and hard work, at some point I've felt my career had stalled. All my peers came from a much richer background than I and have studied in much better schools and I've started to dig into what could take me to the next level and to compete side-by-side with them.
One thing I've noticed is that I've never had a writing class before. Never. Just a few activities that one could count in one of their hands during my whole school and university life.
I've started then to write down my thoughts, then think and write. Practicing different exercises. Reading more and paying attention to other writers, to their cadence and style.
Inevitably my writing started to improve. I haven't have focused much on grammar so far and will certainly do at a later stage, as I feel there is still progress to be made in organising my thoughts.
If it interests you, try it. Feel free to send me an email if you have trouble to find time or what to write about, I can try to help you out. Let's progress together.
On a more serious note, look for anything you are interested at and start to write it. You don't need to be a professional, you can write about it as an amateur and share your journey with others in a blog post or Twitter. Hell, even facebook.
Let's say you want to learn a new programming language. You'll have many thoughts like: hey, this function is pretty neat. This and that. I like this, I don't like that.
Find a clever way of writing those thoughts that is concise and that people would like to read.
If you are too shy and don't feel like sharing your thoughts with anyone, write it for yourself. Imagine if you could open a box with your texts from 1 year ago, with how are you feeling and what you are worried and excited about. I'd bet you would be interested at it. But you don't have it now. So start stacking those texts now for the next year.
As for exercises, there are so many and they will improve your writing in different ways, it's up to you to decide what is important. Find anybody that is inspiring to you and see how they write and communicate.
Also, like any art or subjective matters, writing is all about observing. Our brain has too many things to care about. If you don't make the conscious decision of looking at a text with a observer POV, it will just be yet another text and your brain will only focus on its content, not so much with style.
(Shamelessly stolen from a Leslie Lamport talk)
It is astonishing to think about how few people have really learned to write a longer organized text.
I think this is something that severely limits organizations and companies, especially in software development. Because software is increasingly complex, and if you are not able to describe it, it is hopeless to keep a sane structure. It is also difficult to on-board new specialist people because they would need to learn from oral history, and this makes learning and committing things into long-term memory much more difficult, which is easy if you have actually readable docs, because you just can look into them again and again.
Of course, you can do tricks to limit unnecessary complexity, methods like, say, abstractinos, or micro-services, or automatic memory management, or defining stable APIs - and you should use them of course!
However, a percentage of problems objectively require complex solutions to solve them. Without writing, it will be difficult to address them, and that puts the organization at a disadvantage against those which do.
We deal with very complex abstractions everyday and being able to explain them in simple terms is golden. Very rare among us tech workers.
I am not dependent on an analyst to define the logic. I can also understand the correctness of data if I know what the logic does.
Its very easy to fool someone if they don't get the data processing.
Git somes to mind too, where it changed the way I think about how to do the day-to-day writing of my code and that the knowledge is very transferable across all kinds of projects.
[1] https://www.w3resource.com/sql-exercises/employee-database-e...
Even though I work with Rails, I think in SQL when it comes to data relationships. Being able to just join together tables in SQL, get metrics, dive into data issues, etc. without some ORM or layer in between you and the data is a 10x skill since it will likely carry through your entire career as web frameworks, libraries, etc. come into and out of fashion.
I would extrapolate this further into knowing the base languages used in whatever you work on. If its web, a fundamental understanding of HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS without frameworks, code generators, etc. will give a solid base to then easily pick up how various languages and frameworks layer on top of the fundamentals.
If you are hit by a car, your body is subject to extreme accelerations, many many times more than the normal gravity. You can observe that when you watch videos from crash tests. And these G forces slip off the shoes.
I was made to perform on-stage since I was 3/3.5. I kept liking it, and keep doing it. It makes all kinds of public speaking a walk in the park. You face much smaller amounts of anxiety before giving a talk, writing a test. And it gave me a general practice to subdue anxiety in all anxiety inducing tasks.
2. Writing
I learnt writing in school from my humanities teachers. Literature, History, and Geography. Also from a Science teacher. They taught me how to write, how to present facts, how to make an airtight argument with everything I have. I have met many interesting people through my writings- both technical and non-technical. I write good documentations, good proposals and reports.
3. Discussing
This doesn't come in the list when one talks about skills. But being a better listener, and also being able to communicate your points well are good skills together. I often discuss stuff with people. Better ideas emerge from such discussions, and I gain newer knowledge and even newer perspectives. This is priceless. Being approachable, being able to admit my mistakes and wrong concepts also helps big time.
4. Reading
Is reading for a long time a skill? If yes, it had paid me well. It helped me escape reality, introduced me to new cultures, perspectives and gave me good times. I have met a bunch of interesting people through talking about and writing about books.
5. Open Mind
I have an open mind and not stringent, and not prone to quickly reach conclusions and live happily with more entropy in my brain. I am eager to learn newer things, challenge my own beliefs. This is what drives my growth.
6. Meditation
I just got started with "The Mind Illuminated" by Yates from an HN comment. It has given me much more than I ever expected. Much more focus and longer periods of focus. And everything I do for pleasure gives me more pleasure. I am much more calm and take decisions better. I am also able to decide much more quickly because I know myself better, and can predict myself better.
7. Journaling
I just write my heart out, no barrier between me and my diary. I take snapshots of some parts that turns into blog posts or topics of discussion or future actions in general. I destroy my journal periodically because it is too bare, and nothing is held back from it.
Not that I actively use it. It's just not a month goes by that I don't have to interact with it.
Oh! And Cheerio is based on it, and is great for web crawling.
Public speaking, again targeted to appealing to a broad audience;
And, most critically, learning how certificates work, which has almost on its own gotten me more job offers than the remaining balance of cloud and automation experience I have.
2. Defusing conflicts - a decent portion of conflicts come from (in my experience) lack of communication (see #1).
3. Building effective relationships - honestly - I have to work on this one constantly but it helps with #2.
4. Energy management - I also have to work on this one constantly - I used to be able to swing an overnighter and wrap up a project. That worked for a long time, until it didn’t, and I failed, and I questioned my effectiveness as an engineer. Now, having a bunch of projects (some big, some small, some urgent, some important, some necessary but unimportant, etc) being able to recognize signs that I’m in a feedback loop of going too hard, or focusing on the wrong things.
5. Organizational Theory - I’m actively studying this area now. In the last few years I’ve shifted from designing hardware and software systems to setting up or changing teams.
6. Being ruthless about focus and saying no - I could use some tips here. A while ago I wrote that I wanted to be the “go-to” person for a subject. Now that I am, sometimes I question how to balance sharing expertise while still getting what’s most important (to me) done. :-)
Thanks. I really love the prompt / question. I jokingly call the above "superpowers," but I'll be blunt: By paying attention to the above you'll be a little bit better than those that don't. And with such a low bar, you'll be a force multiplier for good. Even a little bit is better than doing nothing (a waste), or causing drama (actively bad). When combined with an understanding of systems and engineering practice, it's a really, really good combination.
Absolutely.
First, start with Manager Tools [1]. This is my go-to for stuff a couple of times a week. Start with their "getting started" page and they map out how effective relationships work within an effective organization.
Second, have a look at Peter Drucker. Depending on where you want to go, he's probably literally written a book on the topic. The Effective Executive [2] might be useful, depending on your job. I haven't read his others.
Third, tangentially, is Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, by Richard Rumelt [3]. It's not organizational theory, but its adjacent, in that it pretty ruthlessly dissects good and bad strategies for various organizations and entities, and tries to summarize what a "good" strategy looks like if you have to form one, or what a "bad" strategy looks like if you're subject to one. I link to a video here because the guy's a great speaker, and for us here, he looks (in 2011) at why NVIDIA was dominating the market at the time. :-) Skip to 47m 06 seconds for the NVIDIA bit. As an aside, the way he explains the 3D marketplace, and -gets it right- makes me trust everything else he wrote. He explains how 3DFX was crushed. Along with everyone else. He explains how NVIDIA's simulators, and driver expertise helped them to fundamentally disrupt the market. And then continue to stay ahead of it, and eventually become multiples bigger than Intel, who at the time was the behemoth in the space.
[1] https://manager-tools.com/get-started
[2] https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-effective-executi...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZrTl16hZdk <-- 90 minute video, but he narrates a lot of the points from the book.
I think we all have qualities that are perceived as "negative" in the larger context of jobs, but if you come to terms to it and focus on the positive aspects of those qualities things might work out for the better.
You can see this a lot with people who have stayed as ICs their whole life because they simply couldn't deal with organizational BS or they didn't have the communication and social style to charm a room of business people. If you are one of these people you can make yourself miserable about how you don't have the personality for BS and everybody else is an idiot, or you can say that while your career was limited vertically, you did what you wanted to and made decent money doing it.
0. Mathematical thinking: John von Neumann said, "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." While this can be interpreted in multiple ways, I believe he was trying to say that life involves lot more complex mathematics than the mathematics we study at college and which some people already find complex. Economy, biology, ecology, are all big fat mathematical optimization problems, like in AI. And in fact, the notion of 'embeddings' in AI that is able to efficiently represent anything as a set of numbers has allowed seeing more mathematics in the day-to-day work. (PS: A recording of my talk related to this will be available soon.)
1. Ability to think holistically about the topic at hand: More or less, I am able to maintain the full picture in mind, ranging from the finest detail or smallest action to the big picture spanning not only a human lifespan but bio-evolutionary history and mathematical underpinnings of anything. Doing this well includes having to let go of beliefs held, questioning falsehoods, challenging the status quo. Facing traumatic situations has led me to rethink myself a few times in my life.
2. Selflessness, having and retaining clarity of the final goal: Problems happen, conflicts happen. Focussing selflessly on the goal helps letting go of smaller things and aligning people. Relentlessly work to help others; the rest comes by itself. (See also: Hanlon's Razor).
3. Authenticity and honesty: Being truthful, talking freely about ones weaknesses, experiences, readily admitting mistakes, goes a long way in engaging people and gaining their trust.
4. Curiosity and continuous learning, across diverse subjects: When I was a college student, I used to park myself before randomly selected bookshelves at the library, reading whatever books were in front of me. I barely used to be able to take any to the finish line which used to invoke a sense of guilt. In hindsight however, even reading first one or two chapters of books across a range of topics is very helpful. Needless to say Hacker News has helped a lot.
5. Having good verbal communication skills (which other commenters have already called out), and delivering presentations to large audiences: The first time I signed up, I was very scared, wanted to withdraw, but missed the deadline to do so. Do that -- sign up and miss the deadline to withdraw. The rest will happen by itself.
6. Writing: Other commenters here have already written about writing. Writing is a tool to think. It leverages the paper as a memory to bypass the limits of our working memory. It is useful for self-introspection as well.
7. Holding yourself to a high quality bar: Do not like yourself making mistakes. (#3 covers acknowledging them when you make.)
Note: Of course, the points above haven't given me 10^8x returns. :-) '10x' is to be taken figuratively only, and the returns from the above are not independent.
1. “If you want to be effective or influential you must communicate yourself completely.”
Getting comfortable writing a document, proposal or vision which summarizes and organizes the entirety of your reasoning and fully describes the problem and what needs to get done.
If you have something complex to communicate this matters. I have personally seen entire startups raise funding and get started based on having a well documented thinking like this.
If you plan to go into any complex endeavor I think this is a critical skill.
2. Sending great Summary Reports
There is incredible power in being able to write, organize and send a complete report which captures the total state of your job and thoughts about it.
Very intelligent management are dying for a tool to help them manage a complex landscape. If you are the only one capable of preparing these reports it is super useful.
3. You have to tell people how to work with you, self disclosure
I went my entire career carrying resentment around with me and frustration rather than try to provide others with guidance on what I am like and how to work with me.
Finally, this year, I joined a new company and had enough. A good friend of mine told me to tell people what I am like up front at the start of the relationship so they understand.
I have aspects of add and Aspergers and am very introverted. It effects almost everything but it can be managed but I think disclosing myself to others helps Me to reduce the conflicts and blow ups that happen to me all too often
I will also add tables in Excel, and learning to format them properly, which enables all the table-based and pivot-table-based functionality in Excel.
10x for any text-based work