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

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

#81
post #12

Mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts and emotions, experiencing them, and understanding them, rather than avoiding them or distracting yourself from them can have a dramatic effect on your life. And 10 minutes a day for a week can get you far enough to see some real benefits, like reduced stress and increased awareness of unhelpful thought patterns.

I don't want to sound ridiculous, but I've gotten the same benefits that you seem to describe (I have never tried mindfulness) since I started to smoke weed.

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

#82
post #12

Mindfulness meditation. Sitting with your thoughts and emotions, experiencing them, and understanding them, rather than avoiding them or distracting yourself from them can have a dramatic effect on your life. And 10 minutes a day for a week can get you far enough to see some real benefits, like reduced stress and increased awareness of unhelpful thought patterns.

I find Sam Harris' Waking Up guided meditation lessons the most useful (can find it on mobile app stores, the 30+ lessons are free and start off short and simple).

Until those, I thought meditation was inherently coupled with eastern mystic bullshit with zero benefits for anyone who didn't want to buy into a bunch of other baggage.

He has a book by the same name as the mobile app. The first chapter (read out loud here) is what first started convincing me that mindfulness was something I should seek out and develop: https://samharris.org/podcasts/chapter-one/

I started doing it while laying in bed before falling asleep. Ended up with a daily morning practice sitting up on my bench.

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

#83
post #46

Learn how to read quarterly earnings (and other financial documents). It's amazing how simply it is to see if a company is making money / losing money and how that'll impact your view of the world. For instance, Uber as it is today, is going out of or dramatically changing its business. Might not see that from all the hype, might not see it from all the user, but the terms sheet doesn't quarterly earnings doesn't lie…

And how to learn it?

I think when I self-taught how to read public corporation financials, I did it just by looking up various definitions over time. There are not very many that matter. I did that when I was quite young, so I'm confident most any adult with even very basic financial literacy can do it in an hour to get started.

So for example, Uber, on Yahoo Finance (fairly simple data presentation):

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/UBER/financials?p=UBER

Columns displaying full fiscal years (you can change that to quarters optionally). And rows showing specific financial information, such as "total revenue" or "gross profit."

There are ~22 rows in a column year in the Yahoo data sets, each displaying different financial data. Of those, maybe a dozen are particularly important for an amateur to know.

So you'd look up the definitions for eg: revenue (sales), cost of revenue, gross profit, operating expenses, SG&A (selling, general and administrative expenses), operating income, income before tax, income tax expense, interest expense, net income. Another that can be useful as a new or amateur investor, is EPS, or earnings per share.

Investopedia is a reasonable option for learning the definitions, although there are numerous sites that will work fine.

Shouldn't take more than an hour to look those up and learn them at a basic level. After a bit of practice, you can scan a multi-year profit & loss (P&L) statement in a minute and have a great idea of how a company is fairing.

A balance sheet can be more complex, although it can similarly be boiled down to a dozen or so things that by far matter the most. You can get the definitions for those things and learn them in under an hour, then practice reading balance sheets.

Then last but not least for an amateur interested in such, would be to acquire practice at scanning through annual and quarterly reports filed by companies with the SEC. They're often obnoxiously long and overflowing with low-value bullshit, however only a small amount of the content tends to matter. I think the best way to keep that under an hour, would be to have someone mark off the segments worth always looking for / looking at in the filings, such that you can learn to jump to those sections to pick out important information. Beyond that, getting good at digesting company SEC filings will take a lot longer than an hour.

I wouldn't attempt to take on all of these things in under an hour, it'd be unreasonable. An hour each to get started however is doable. Starting with the P&L statement.

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

#84
post #69

For the lame definition of valuable: if you are not in the practise of negotiating, try to negotiate in more situations and see what happens! Attempting to negotiate will not harm your situation when dealing with another party making you a genuine offer. Even if you are a very mediocre negotiator, you might be able to easily eg obtain a somewhat higher salary when starting a job versus just accepting a given offer if…

I think "Never split the difference" by Chris Voss is the better book if you can tolerate a bit of bragging.

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

#85
post #26

If you're going overseas, learn a little bit of the local language. 1. Hello 2. Goodbye 3. Please 4. Thank you 5. Me 6. You 7. Him/her 8. This 9. That 10. Here 11. There 12. Do you have this? 13. Where is this? 14. How much money is that? 15. Where is the toilet? 16. Digits (0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9) You'll be surprised how much of the language you pick up naturally just by memorising some basic words and using them.

I always try to learn how to say, "I'm sorry, I don't speak X" in language X. When I was in Japan I got an unbelievable amount of leverage out of being able to say, "Sumi masen, Nihon-go hanasei masen" which, of course, means "I don't speak Japanese" in Japanese. The local's faces would light up and often they would respond in Japanese despite the fact that I had just told them that I don't speak Japanese.

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

#87
Learn an aphorism by heart and think of situations it applies to. Pick something important that you believe in. Then, over time, you'll remember the aphorism in various situations and slowly adopt it as a life value.

Examples:

- Getting what you want will not make you happy.

- It's hard to get what you want. But it's easy to want what you get.

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

#88
post #49

Binary Search. (And its antithesis, exponential growth.) In my opinion it is the single most important piece of computer science insight with the constraint that you only have less than an hour. I often use binary search as a sort of thought experiment into whether something is "obvious" or not. As a child, I would say exponential growth is the one thing that I developed no intuition for between the age of 1–11. Even…

This is the first thing I talk about when someone asks me what computer science teaches a person and how it relates to real world. It covers a practical example and lets you touch on topics like algorithmic complexity. And it takes 5 minutes to explain. So I fill the rest of the time by demonstrating a simple sorting algorithm on paper and I finish off by drawing a simple maze and solving it with breadth first search by marking squares with numbers.

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

#89
Logical fallacies - how not to think.

Kelly criterion - what can you afford to invest.

Polya's problem solving method.

Salary negotiation skills.

Rich Hickey's Hammock driven development (for non programmers too).

No Limit Holdem Poker flop and turn odds calculation.

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