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Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

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Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#21

Post by roel_v »

brc wrote: post #5

Sales. Learn to sell something. If you're taking time off, why not consider doing phone cold calling for a charity. This is particularly brutal but probably a sharp, free course in improving your sales and cold calling skills. Everyone needs sales skills, whether it is to understand why people buy, or just to 'sell' ideas, whether pitching to investors or convincing a partner/superior or team to implement your idea.

But only after doing a few day course in how to cold call, so that you can write/tweak your own scripts, and/or know why the ones they give you are the way they are.

Also, doing various sorts of hard selling (phone, on the street, for charity or selling products) would probably teach more than doing charity sales for 2 months. I'm too chicken to do something like this myself though...

Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#22

Post by mtrn »

Asset allocation - so to speak - over one's personal time is usually a very personal thing. Six month is a long time, but it is not enough to get reasonable good in piano playing. Or to acquire a black belt.

If you have a bit of talent and help, you could get fluent in a foreign language in 24 weeks.

But then, there are some talents, that you wanted to foster during the last years, but just did not have the time. Maybe it's easier to start from there.

Anyway, some suggestions into the blue:

- read books and travel

- learn excellent writing skills by writing a short book about what you learned so far in math/finance

- move to a foreign country where you do not speak the language and try to survive (two of my friends did this, and they did well)

Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#25

Post by Raphmedia »

Drones.

Not buying one and flying it.

Building one.

There are a lot of guides online. People online will help you. They are exciting. They teach you about a lot of skills from soldering to robotics to design to flying to rigging cameras.

They are exiting and you will end up with a nice product you can keep forever or give as a gift.

Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#26

Post by agentultra »

Try building a computer from first principles[0]. You'll learn logic, circuits, systems programming, etc. Everything that runs our lives.

If you have a solid background in maths perhaps look into picking up a semester in some theoretical maths. You might develop a few hunches that could turn into innovative ideas when you return to your job.

Work on an open problem in maths with a small prize. See if you can crack it[1]. You could end up with a proof, some pocket change, and your name in the history books. At the least you'll learn what it takes to get there.

Pick up a few online courses or books on machine learning and dig through the Kepler data archive[2]. You'll learn statistics and modelling and perhaps confirm valuable research results! Space!

Go plant some trees. It's a small favor for the environment. It's hard work and you'll get really dirty. This is its own reward.

Volunteer in a foreign country. You'll meet new people and introduce yourself to problems you would never have considered in your lifetime.

[0] http://www.projectoberon.com/ [1] http://www.numberphile.com/videos/happy_ending.html [2] http://kepler.nasa.gov/Science/ForScientists/dataarchive/

Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#27

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

m52go wrote: post #15

Sales, marketing, and JavaScript. In that order. Then you'll be unstoppable in anything you decide to do.

O tempora o mores. :)

If I had six months I'd deep dive into ML and AI. They're about where the Internet was in the late 70s/early 80s. A lot of people have a sense they're going to be very important in the future, but most of that future hasn't been invented yet.

Re: Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

#28

Post by patio11 »

When I look around me at conspicuously happy people I see a) cooking, b) exercise (less of a skill than a lifestyle but there you go), and c) a wide, wide variety of X plus Y such that you're better at Y than anyone who can do better at X and vice versa, for X and Y which are chosen to be commercially valuable.

Professionally, if you want a skill with a stupid amount of leverage, public speaking is pretty high up there for white collar workers.

If you're technical there are many, many options for adding one more arrow to the quiver. My specific recommendations would depend on your career goals, but for generic HNers, mastering the deployment story for your stack of choice (DevOps is more than a bit buzzwordy but some of the tools available now are just fantastic -- Ansible, Consul, Docker, the AWS stack, etc) would be up there. For people who are more comfortable on backends, learn React, which will take you through a nice swathe of modern front-end tools and practices. For folks who work more on the frontend, maybe Rails if you see CRUD/apps in your future or Go if you enjoy systems programming more.

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