Learn to apologise. Learn to get over yourself if you have had a fight or an argument, and be the first one to apologise.
Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
151–160 of 277 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is by far the most important thing I can think of, followed shortly by being able to maintain a regular, high-quality exercise regimen. Meal prep is the key to keeping the discipline in terms of cooking cheap, high-quality meals for yourself. If you understand some fundamentals about how to store food and scaling recipes up, you can leverage your time very well. In a given week, I spend ~2 hours in the kitchen t…
Do you have details of your process and recipes put online? Maybe some other useful links? I didn't know spending this little time on cooking was possible, would love to learn it myself.
One trick these days is to take advantage of semi-prepared food (sliced mushrooms, chopped onions, etc.) in the supermarket. It probably won't be quite as fresh and will end up costing you a bit more--so I don't usually do it--but it's a way to do stir fries, pasta, etc. pretty quickly and easily.
Even before the pandemic, I was mostly working at home when I wasn't traveling. But when I was going into an office regularly I tended to have a list of recipes that I knew I could throw together in 20 minutes or so.
The other way to optimize time is to make stews and casseroles that will often take a bit longer but which you might get 3 or 4 meals out of. (You can freeze some so it doesn't get too monotonous.)
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is by far the most important thing I can think of, followed shortly by being able to maintain a regular, high-quality exercise regimen. Meal prep is the key to keeping the discipline in terms of cooking cheap, high-quality meals for yourself. If you understand some fundamentals about how to store food and scaling recipes up, you can leverage your time very well. In a given week, I spend ~2 hours in the kitchen t…
Cooking is essential. Jumping into meal prepping for there, is another thing. Meal prepping saves you some time, but if you actually like cooking and enjoy fresh meals, this is not necessarily a good thing. Meal prepping falls into the productivity porn category for me.
Sort of depends what's meant by it I suppose (unless it's a well-defined term I haven't come across before) - I enjoy cooking, and that includes pickling, canning, other things that aren't meals but might result in a future meal being pretty quick and easy. That's not why I do it, but it is a result.
Best example I can think of is my current addiction (almost every weekday lunch) to chopped courgettes, onions, and whole cherry tomatoes pickled in distilled vinegar & olive oil with (home-grown ;)) rosemary & thyme, on top of thick slices of (home-baked ;)) bread, few spoonfulls of the vinegar & oil for good measure, then topped with slices of decent (but not too expensive, and sadly not home-made!) cheddar and then put under the grill (aka AmE broiler). Served with pickled chillies.
Takes maybe five minutes to make that lunch, given I've already made the bread and pickled the vegetables. But I don't view it as 'productivity porn'. (But then, not 'meal prepping' either.)
Also, if I make say lasagne, there's one of me, so the other 5-7 slices go in the freezer; presumably that's 'meal prepping' too. But I do 'actually like cooking and enjoy fresh meals', so typically what happens is I have to stop cooking and eat the stuff I've frozen because the freezer's full so there's no room for new leftovers!
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#154Language. I've learnt several physical stuffs (e.g. bodybuilding, music), several emotional stuffs (e.g. meditating, music) and other intellectual skills (e.g. game theory, the humanities and programming of course...) and if I had to choose one to recommend to the HN community, it's language. Unfortunately, it's high reward [0] also comes with high effort. Even with the best resources, it will take time and patience.…
I agree with language, but I wasn't thinking about any neurological benefits. Just speaking a few languages can unlock so many opportunities in life.
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#155In the modern era the single most important skill is to manage distractions. There are so many things, this site included, that can prevent you from accomplishing your goals via distraction. Obviously a little distraction and fun is good. But these days it easier than ever to waste an entire day or two watching Netflix and staring at your phone.
> But these days it easier than ever to waste an entire day or two watching Netflix and staring at your phone.
It is also worth looking at all these distractions (which turn to addictions sometimes - addictions playing the same role) as means to avoiding emotions which arise when we look at real problems and start to solve them. Somehow our emotions pull us back into this lake of low level, auto-pilot functioning where status quo is maintained and nothing new happens. Emotions trick us here.
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#156Lie!!! How to properly lie is the most important skill you need to learn in life. Nobody ever said 100% of their life truth only, everybody lied. How you lie is the most important skill. Most of them are so called "white lies" which sometime are actually required by social norms. But when you do a "white lie" without proper body language and proper voice inflections you are hurting a lot. Imagine saying "my condolences" to a fresh widow while laughing or with a bored voice. It's an insult.
So yeah, how to lie is number one skill.
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#157Sing (alone and in a band), dance, cook. A bit of litterature, mathematics, physics, geography, history, psychology.
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#1581. How to spend less than you earn. Lots of people desire “financial freedom”, meaning they can spend what they want when they want it. Solving this via revenue leads to the hedonic treadmill, and you’ll never out earn your growing wants. Instead solve this by controlling your wants, and you’ve achieved financial freedom immediately. 2. How to take risks. Finding the balance between recklessness and absolute risk avo…
1, I see clearly as skill.
2, risk management skills can be learned. Risk taking though, I've always regarded as a question of temperament. I'm personally close to zero risk affinity and don't feel an emotion (yes not reason) to take any financial risk, at all (other risk, too, really). To the contrary, mind and body squirm at the thought.
3, this seems unnecessarily tied to "winning". What if I really don't care about winning? Also, if this is really a skill, what is it called? How does progression look like?
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am envious of your food budget. A mere pound of chicken breast at my local grocery store costs ~$10/lb, though they range from about ~$5-10lb. However, at the cheaper end, the meat is a demonstrably lower quality, with odd texture issues due to chickens growing so fast (the condition is called 'woody chicken'). Your budget would get me 15 lbs of protein. That's just not enough food for 2 people (my household size).…
My grocery expenses are similar to yours for two people, and we do most of our cooking at home as well. I have the same problem with meat that you do. It's hard to buy good meat cheaply.
Vegetarian meals don't have to be sad. Indian cuisine is often veggie and exceptionally good. Meera Sodha's book Fresh India [0] is a goldmine for cheap veggie recipies that you wouldn't miss meat from (I say this as someone who likes meat!)
[0] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fresh-India-Delicious-Vegetarian-Re...
Re: Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?
#160If you're in an environment where cycling's viable, I'd rank that alongside or even above driving (it can be cheaper, healthier, more sustainable, consumes less parking space at home and in the community, produces less pollution, and generally provides easier self-maintenance options)
I think it's hard as an adult. I never learned as a child (grew up on a very narrow and winding country road) and I did kinda/sorta teach myself as an adult but I never gained the confidence to ride on roads with traffic. >even above driving And I have trouble agreeing for most people. Many need cars on a day-to-day basis and even if owning a car doesn't make sense for some people even in the US, being able to rent o…
There are adult cycling classes out there, with instructors who have (I am told, I learnt as a kid so I've never taken one) some pretty well-polished programs for getting folks from "never sat on a bike" to "reasonably stable and aware of the rules of the road, both official and unspoken".
Once you start cycling around town regularly, you build a new layer on your city map: what's the shade like on this street? how bad are the potholes on this back street? how dense is the car traffic? can I find effective detours that trade off a few minutes for not having to cross six lanes of traffic coming straight off the end of a highway?
Cycling's pretty useless if you live in a suburban sprawl though. Great for an actual city.