Ask HN: what was the best life/programming choice you ever made?

This is a great comment and I can echo much of its sentiment.

Another commenter wrote something very similar to mine.

There are three things that I consider to have had the largest impact on my life:

1. Learning to Learn - sounds obvious and simple but it truly isn't. There's a lot of un-learning that generally happens first before you can truly become someone that loves to learn on their own or with a partenaire dans le crime.

2. Crossfit - which introduced me to powerlifting and olympic lifting - the combination of diet (keto, paleo, zone), metabolic conditioning, and strength is basically hacking your body. My quality of life in a very physical existence has improved tremendously by becoming more athletic and much stronger.

3. Co-founding a technology company. This one most people here should relate to the most.

To elaborate a teensy bit on these points; none of these convictions/events/understandings happened at once, it was a gradual aggregation of different experiences and micro-choices along the way that ultimately culminated in these distinct three "pieces".

I also find it mildly interesting that I've after the fact identified these "three". What happens to be the most stable configuration in our physical environment? THREE! The tripod, three perceivable dimensions, blablabla; I might write about this now.

Life: {I'll put the family stuff aside, since its my wife saying Yes and the arrival of our kids is just beyond best, but probably not the intent of the question} Working abroad with an IT consultancy. After school I intentionally sought out a consulting gig in Germany. This produced 2 great changes that profoundly affected the rest of my life. (1) Working/living in another culture changes you forever in so many ways ... politics, patience, view of humanity. Big changes. (2) I encourage young programmers to get consulting jobs early on. Exposure to problems. Exposure to mentors. Exposure to systems. Exposure to corp politics. Exposure to business. Exposure. All these will make you less dogmatic and more of a problem solver. When it's time to leave (go contract, start a business, join a company/startup full time) your abilities and, importantly, confidence will be high.

Programming: Get meta. Whether it be programming languages or frameworks or methodologies, at some meta level they are all 90% the same. They desire to the same result. That 10% is for ninjas and specialists ... which is great. But the world needs more of the meta folks. Once you "get" it, all fear of taking on something new changes, and you feel totally cool with trying it out. Immerse in anything for a while and you start to get the other 10%.

Diet does not build muscle.

Maybe you're talking about losing body fat. I'm not sure why you're preaching about that, though, since the parent/GP didn't mention weight loss being a goal.

Life: Doing my MBA - hear me out before you guys go all nuts. I have a BA in Computer Science and I wanted to learn more about business, so I chose to do an MBA in Finance.

Best. Decision. Ever.

The reason being is that I now see the world through a different lens. For instance, when everybody blames bond markets for trashing the bonds of Greece or Argentina - I understand why it is the fault of the government and the markets are just speaking truth to power.

I also understand why populism is so dangerous.

Understanding economics & finance has liberated me. It is easy to be conspiratorial about the world and the things you see happening on the news - but once you have a solid Econ & Finance foundation it is interesting how different you look at everything.

So even though I am a hacker, I am glad I now have the glasses of 'objectivity' for world affairs - that I don't think I would have had without my MBA.

Programming: Deciding to learn to Ruby & Rails (it is the first time that I can say that I can 'program', despite having a BA in Comp Sci and learning C, C++, Java, etc.).

I hated those languages in school and while I did good in my classes, because I was always a geek and it didn't come particularly hard for me, I hated working in them. So after I graduated I gave them up, for a few years as I worked as a project manager.

The best decision I ever made was to learn it all on my own. It has been the hardest 2 years of my life, but easily some of the most rewarding.

Now I can build anything I want - that is the 2nd most liberating feel ever!

Where did you get your MBA? I have heard that getting an MBA is more about the connections you make than what you learn. Which school would you recommend if someone wanted to learn all of those things and didn't care about the connections? Preferably somewhere without a 200k price tag.