Ask HN: What's something you wished you started doing earlier?

Taking care of my health.

Lifting

Public speaking.

Leave school.

Public speaking (toastmasters). I waited five yrs. Social skills, management skills, and learning to tell. It’s being ready for the “hey, do you have time to speak with the vice president of the company”

Also better quality cooking. Healthy, save money.

More physical fitness.

My current projects, and everything else I've thought about doing next.

Microcontrollers. I never quite got what electrical engineering was all about.

Then I picked up my first esp32, and - boom - sucked into the maker space, staying up all night reading up on the intracies of using i2c over UART

Building things for myself, not just clients and thinking about who it's for from the start.

20+ years as a freelancer. I got good at solving other people's problems. Along the way I started 4 or 5 side projects with others. We'd build something solid, then wonder why nobody showed up. The pattern was always the same: build first, figure out marketing later.

Wish I'd understood earlier that reaching people isn't a phase after the product, it shapes the product.

Not recent but in general:

martial arts

serious running

non-web programming

cigar smoking

shaving my head

growing my beard

carnivore / keto / nutrition education

using soap for showering instead of gels

dressing for comfort(now i wear only sportswear)

buying larger shoes

grounding my own coffee instead of buying grounded coffee due to much lower variety compared to whole bean coffees

getting rid of google and all its services(i have YT account but i have no "channel")

not wasting time commenting on YT videos or tweeting as it's a fool's errand

investing

Releasing the songs I've been reworking for a decade or two at this point. I have out out only only a tiny fraction of my vault because if its not perfect it's not releasable.