Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty. Listening to people you disagree with. Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis). Meditation.
Starting conversations with strangers. But how? I have anxiety and it's really difficult to talk to strangers. Edit:I would also like to mention. I talk very less reason being whenever I tell people honestly about my feelings. Later or sooner they use it against me.
Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
391–400 of 876 posts
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#392Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny thing about those people is they constantly complain about how expensive everything is, yet they spend frivolous amounts of money on what's probably the highest marked up item: food. Meal prep for a week for ~$75 and you're set. It would cost probably 4 times that (at least, depending on where you eat) to eat out, not to mention you don't know how it was prepared, and it's probably wildly unhealthy compared to…
$75 is even an exaggeration. It might be more bland, but eggs, chicken breasts, some veggies should get you through a week for < $30.
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fully support the value system here in that we both want people cooking for themselves more, but I have to say that sous vide cooked steaks taste like boiled meat to me, aka terrible. People around me are swear by it until I slap a ribeye onto the pan for them, high heat, making sure to render the fat. To each their own but imo a sous vide is a big, expensive, plastic waste of counter space.
Quick sanity check - are they not finishing the sous vide steaks in the pan/grill?
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#394Earlier quoted context omitted.
What blows my mind is how much I took my ability to cook for granted. So many people my age (millennial) can barely cook anything. I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. People give me weird looks when every single workday I have the same answer to “you wanna go out and get some lunch?” “Nope. I have leftovers!”
I guess I understand how many people dislike cooking, I guess. For me, it's a very creative, relaxing, rewarding, (and necessary) process in my life. For me, it's like coding, but with ingredients. Take a bunch of relatively trivial components, and combine them creatively into something complex, useful, even beautiful--inspiring. You generally follow "industry best practices", but there's plenty of room for interpret…
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
>- Listen to classical music. This one didn't come to me until my 40s but I finally realized: there's a reason that this music has been popular for 300 years. Opera is great, too. Listen to Mozart's "The Marriage of Figaro". Download the KUSC app and listen to the amazing Metropolitan Opera broadcast every Saturday morning at 10 AM Pacific. How is this a skill?
Agree with the sentiment, the answer is just soapboxing life advise, not really answering. But being able to focus on/appreciate classical music is a skill, hearing the different instruments and such.
I think most people fall into a Passive Listening model when getting into symphonic or chamber music. The book suggested above would certainly push an average listener closer to an 'active' model.
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#396Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been trying the same and each time I failed miserably. I just don't get it and certainly can't enjoy it. Can someone recomend good poetry sutable for highly analytical mind or a book about apreciating poetry?
I would recommend 'Understanding Poetry' by Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, as a good introduction, it also includes a reasonable collection of poems from various poets to appreciate. I would also suggest getting an anthology like 'The Golden Treasury' or Anthony Quiller-Couch or Robert Penn Warren (Six Centuries of British Poetry) or G B Harrison. They are available often in small pocket editions, which one c…
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#397Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#398Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have the money (and it sounds like you have), there are quite a few recipe box companies which send you boxes of ingredients and recipes every few days. It's a nice stepping stone towards fully cooking for yourself as it cuts out the shopping/deciding part.
Anyone have suggestions for these?
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have friends who eat out every single meal of every single day. I have friends who do too but it's not because they don't know how to cook, it's because they don't like to and don't wanna bother and can afford the luxury of having someone else to do it for them.
I have a suspicion this kind of living, in part, explains why so many people are miserable. I feel like removing every inconvenient thing from your life, and "having someone else do it for you" must make your ability to handle discomfort atrophy to the point where the tiniest unpleasantness feels like a catastrophe. Like muscles, your brain, your immune system, etc., we need a little discomfort / struggle once in a w…
Re: Ask HN: What Skills to Acquire in 2020?
#400Starting conversations with strangers. Squat and deadlift. Eating healthier. Doing something kind for someone else every day. Honesty. Listening to people you disagree with. Driving safer (this is the most dangerous thing we do on a regular basis). Meditation.
Starting conversations with strangers. But how? I have anxiety and it's really difficult to talk to strangers. Edit:I would also like to mention. I talk very less reason being whenever I tell people honestly about my feelings. Later or sooner they use it against me.