Deep work.
Not a huge time investment, but an indispensable skill or revelation I wish I had before starting college. Think I've found the book here on HN: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25744928-deep-work
Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
11–20 of 579 posts
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#12- Learning x86 assembler back in school: knowing what everything comes down to in the end has no price.
- reading "Smashing the stack for fun and profit": I learned so many things from that article, that I felt like a god when I finally understood all the things. And all of those things are still relevant today when debugging stuff.
- learning ruby: when rails came out I jumped on the hype train and started learning ruby. I was mainly a java dev, so learning all the new ways of doing things made me grow a lot.
- javascript: I hated the language, but once I bit the bullet and overcome my hate for it and started learning it, I now love all the things I can do.
- learning git: it was an uphill battle at the beginning, but now I can't live without it.
I am sure there are a lot of other things I am forgetting, but these come to mind now.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#13Cooking. I am not a chef, but I have spent the time and effort to be able and willing to tackle nearly any recipe in the cuisines I'm familiar with. More importantly, I've made my wife, family, friends, strangers, and myself, happy at my table and via gifts of food. In terms of books, the biggest difference-makers have been 'The Way to Cook', Julia Child, 'The French Laundry Cookbook', Thomas Keller, et al, and 'The Flavor Bible', Page and Dornenburg.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#14Cooking. I can’t imagine how much less enjoyable (or more expensive) life would be without cooking skills.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#15Relationships; my wife, my child, my family, my friends, my employees, my peers and my bosses. I find all my real regrets and upsets stem from not doing these right, they all compete for time, but in the end they make the tapestry of your life.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#16Learning Linux/UNIX has by far yielded the most return in my life.
I started at 14. It turned into my career. It has been very lucrative and I still love it.
In contrast: I started learning how to draw digitally ~2 years ago and it’s mostly just painful and unrewarding. I feel like an emo teen again. I can’t quit though because I have strong feelings about the sunk costs :V
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#17Breathing.
So much can be accomplished with something seemingly so simple.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#18Programming (I feel like that might be cheating on HN...) I started programming about 16 years ago (I think), when my Dad bought a basic introduction to HTML for himself, which I ended up "borrowing". I super geeky teenage life followed where I learned various languages, including Python, Delphi and an obscure language called RapidEuphoria (honest, that is a programming language, with some interesting features actual…
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Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#19Directed meditation.
I read a weight loss book called "the Gabriel Method" and it changed my life. Besides all kinds of food related things, it teaches a sort of goal-oriented meditation/visualization technique that I found to work for many more things than changing eating habits.
I've felt more like good food and less like bad food so I eat healthier without needing to muster discipline. Lost 10 kilos so far without really trying all that hard.
I've been procrastinating less because I changed the way I feel about many of the tasks I'd keep postponing.
My relationship has never been better, despite our lives having become more, not less, busy during the same period. We fight way less because I'm less annoyed by things and I'm better at not letting things escalate when she's annoyed by things.
Frankly it's been pretty spectacular.
Re: Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?
#20I'm going to say something out of the blue - Building speakers.
Building speakers look complex from the outside, but are pretty rewarding once you know the basics (Thiele parameters, enclosure design and tuning). You can put together your own speaker with just a couple of parts from eBay or anywhere else on the internet really and sometimes can end up with really high quality boxes that can outperform much more expensive commercial ones available in the market.
Speaker design is one of those things that the more time you put into it, learning, studying, testing, the better rewarded you'd feel. To add to the mix there's also amplifiers - Class A, B, C, D and even tube amps and each combination of amplifier and crossover sounds totally different.
Each speaker box I design, I feel is like good food. Different flavors, different combinations, different possibilities. You will never feel bored and never feel you've hit an end. You're always discovering something new.