Ask HN: What things have richly rewarded the time invested in mastering them?

From my experience:

After my startup got acquired, i ended up with lots of money (10s of millions, small start-up) and time. This created a vacuum in my life. I was very sad having finally made it.

I had no purpose in life.

Since then,

Self Acutualization - walking the path devised by yogic culture of spritualism.

Cannabis - The king of herbs, it helps me in self Acutualization and achieving state of trance aka ultimate ignorance.

Knowledge is only born out of something you don't know. If i accept my ignorance, suddenly it's no longer ignornance but something 'unknown'

If you already know something, then you won't gain any knowledge from there.

What did i gain? Finally, i am happy and content. My all questions about life have been answered. I've no need of traveling afar and exploring new places, I've no desire to travel back in past or future or to some distant planet.

Learning to control impulsive eating, and starting to exercise. Weight control never seemed difficult afterwards.

Learning Japanese. Although this can apply for any language different to your own, it opened my eyes to a new way of thinking and lots of literature, ideas and culture.

Being good at reading and writing.

The ability to quickly and efficiently understand and mentally absorb large amounts of the written word, and the ability to write clearly, simply and coherently about subjects both simple and complicated.

Being good at reading is a force multiplier in everything academic I have ever done, and continues to be a huge advantage in both learning and simply doing my job, and in so much of life in general. So much information about how everything works, physical devices and procedures and interacting with governments and organisations, is provided as the written word. If you can do it quickly and correctly, you're ahead of the game.

Being good at writing helps me transmit knowledge and instructions across time and space to other people, helping them understand faster and better. It also saves me time; I work with people who genuinely struggle to express precise technical information through the written word, spending large amounts of time producing text that really isn't adequate. Often they write as if they're speaking, which just doesn't work.

A lot of people go through life with just functional literacy; being good at reading and writing is a force multiplier across so many activities in life, right from early education all the way through such a huge range of jobs and careers. The return on investment spent on being good at reading and writing is huge.

so you don't seek for happiness anymore?