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

If you had to depend on a teacher to expose you to the books you should read, what about the rest of your career?

I'd never pick a book about B trees on my own (booooring, let's learn LatestFramework.js).

No, but if I needed to know about how to optimize MySQL, I would do research on - how to optimize MySQL.

My University professors were mostly a complete disaster but at least the materials we had were good enough. Who wanted to learn had access to knowledge, and for motivation -- at least the grades.

I doubt that there is a dirth of knowledge between the free information you can get and paid courses online.

I can't see myself on my own even finding a book about theory and then going through it for 4 months, getting into nitty gritty details just for the kick of it. There's no obvious benefit at the time of learning it. By the time you can see the benefit on your own, it could be too late.

There was no obvious benefit from me learning 65C02 assembly language and BASIC in the 6th grade. But I did it anyway. There was no benefit from me spending hours on the comp.lang Usenet groups in college. For any software developer though, there is an obvious benefit from having a deep understanding in marketable technologies - competitiveness in the job market.

But not for the reasons you expect. When you learn Judo you spend the first weeks learn how to fall, followed by people picking you up and slamming you into the ground alternating with you picking them up and slamming them into the ground. The amount of body control you learn is amazing - it's like doing gymnastics, but in a cement mixer. Turns out learning how to land safely in unexpected situations is amazingly useful and makes you a lot safer (I've never broken a bone), and things like falling off a 3 story building is unlikely to cause you too much damage. Unlike karate Judo is mostly harmless as there is no striking - it's best described as Japanese wrestling.

I've done a lot of other sports, some more enjoyable Judo, and sadly Judo is more of a young persons sport. All have something to teach you about teams, practice and persistence. Some like, swimming, teach you things a skill that is useful in the obvious places. But surprisingly to me, Judo was the one that always that unexpectedly saved me when I did something stupid, which in you younger days I did at least once a year.

I have social anxiety. I try and call family and friends on a regular basis, but its all from my side. I start to feel like I'm just hassasing people.

It's a kick start. You depend on the school to teach you other basic skills too: letters, numbers. You learn a lot of words from classes, but it doesn't mean you'll stop learning words once you're done with elementary school. You can go on your own after that.

My personal experience with school and university is exposure to a lot of different things. I wasn't forced to learn everything -- I spent more time on things I liked and less time on things I just wanted to get a good grade on.

The system is far from perfect and is flawed in many ways, especially where I live. But I don't think that the idea of formal education itself should suffer because of some flaws; I's rather improve it over ditching it.

Since the discussion was about the difference between learning in your bedroom vs a CS degree, I learned in my bedroom when I was in 6th grade, I already had the kickstart.

The rest of my career I got my kickstart from Usenet, podcasts, blogs, Hacker News, coworkers, and necessity.