Ask HN: What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

That's simply not true. I've dealt with hard stuff in my life (ie very long term relationship went into tough sudden breakup) with weed. It gave me a good perspective on it that holds to this day, it made me close the whole topic completely very quickly (1-2 weeks at max) in a rather pleasant way.

I've set my life priorities with help of weed. They still hold to this day. I've done some of the best decisions on direction of my life with weed. Looking back +-10 years ago, damn those were some fine decisions. Weed gives me, when alone, often semi-constant stream of very creative ideas just popping out of sub-consciousness. I've come up with ideas for startups at least 50x, often to find later somebody is already well into executing it (often in areas I normally don't touch, ie self-belaying machines for climbing, or self-shaping moving wall for climbing - I never ever saw/heard about any of those, but it seems they are quite popular in US).

The rate, amount and depth of those ideas just isn't there when sober. The rate is so high that I sometimes don't manage to record them all.

All this was done alone, just me and my emotions. YMMV, but for my introvertish personality type, it works wonders. There are drawbacks of course, like with everything else. But postponing dealing with issues is more of an alcohol style effect.

I had a year of French at school, and my teacher kept saying all year that no matter how much or little we learn from his classes and exercises, as long as we are able to say "I don't speak language X, do you speak language Y?", everything would be so much easier when dealing with strangers in foreign countries. It also helps a lot to add a "please" and "thank you".

This piece of advice helped a lot in both Germany, Ukraine, and Russia.

Two quick things from back when TED talks were actually interesting/useful:

1. How to tie your shoes the right way (so the knot doesn't come undone): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAFcV7zuUDA

2. How to dry your hands with a single paper towel (so that you prevent unnecessary waste): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc

> Here is a decent and easy starter in under an hour. > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8i-4HpKlM

It should be mentioned that the video presents a fringe theory (MMT) that is highly controversial among economists. I would recommend the Khan Academy series on banking and money as an alternative, even though it is longer than an hour: https://www.khanacademy.org/economics-finance-domain/core-fi...

Meditation.

Seriously.

Take time to focus on your focus. For me, it's a really hard exercise, and before I really started to practice it daily, I always had this a priori that spending time on "doing nothing" was just a waste of time. I couldn't have been more wrong, of course.

I still feel like I have much progress to do, but now I understand how practicing the art of focusing on focus (aka "concentrate on here and now", "mindfulness" and so on) helps to focus on a selected task in general.

Also if you have indeed a [30-60] minutes vacancy window, having a nap is a good option. Especially if you have to solve some mind blowing issue. Trust the power of you unconscious force. I can't put my hand on it right now, but there is an excellent essay by Pointcarré on this topic.