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

How to cook for yourself, really, really good food. I no longer crave restaurant food, and all of the really important things I learned about cooking take just the time to read it, hear about it and then try it. All without any special hardware.

A few examples:

1. Cooking jasmine rice: rinse it first, 1 c. water to 1 c. rice ratio. Bring to boil, turn down heat to lowest setting. Leave lid /the entire time/. Fluff the rice (look this up) when done. (about 12-15 min of cooking)

2. Baking a cake: (any square pan yellow cake) Read how baking powder actually works, then you realize you need to mix and bake quickly. Letting it sit before baking will make a flatter cake. Also, stick a butter knife in the middle to test when it's done, if it comes out with batter stuck on it, it needs a few more minutes.

3. Eggs: When frying, scrambling, put the eggs in warm water before cracking to make them room temperature first. They cook better this way.

4. Chocolate syrup: 1 c. water, 1 c. cocoa power, 1 c. sugar, 1/2 tsp vanilla, 1/2 tsp salt. Blend it in a blender. (sealed container works best, as it's messy) Better than store bought, super cheap, use organic if you like...

etc...

Why is this valuable? Because I am no longer tempted to waste money at restaurants any more, or buy unique expensive organic products (because I can make them now). I feel incredibly free and liberated that I get food at home that tastes better than what is at a restaurant now. (for about 90% of the stuff I like)

Also, I can teach my kids, and they start life with these skills. Great question, way too many things to write down...

How to properly wrap cables. A/V and cable techs are super anal about this and it takes just a few minutes to learn, it will change your life.

Cables should never be coiled in the same direction. It creates kinks when unwound and make it extremely likely for knots to form (ever leave your headphones in your pocket?).

If a cable isn't being installed permanently it should be "wrapped" using a technique called "over-under". Hard to describe in text, so here's a video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpuutP6Df84

Personally I disagree with his method, what I do is do the "over" loop by placing my palm over the cable, and on the under loop, put your palm under the loop. Then when you pull the loop to your fixed hand, you always keep your palm down when laying it. Very quick way, eventually becomes fast with practice. Also useful to unroll kinks from the cable when you wrap it, and always tie the bastard off because if one end falls through you'll get knots.

If you've been married for a while, learn who your spouse is now. (I mean in a good way, by taking an hour to rediscover what his/her hopes and dreams are, what interests they've gained / lost, etc.)

He/she is probably a pretty different person than the one you married. It's easy to overlook that.

CPR/Choking/First Aid course is probably close to an hour.

How to change your own oil - probably lots of other money-saving home and auto DIY things...

Speed reading and memory tricks can be a multiplier on learning other skills.

How to use automation tools like Zapier and IFTTT - again, a force multiplier.

You might be interested in this book https://www.amazon.com/First-20-Hours-Learn-Anything/dp/1591... - the author has a youtube video that covers it pretty well in 15 minutes - similar to 4-Hour chef, too

Setup and learn how to use Anki to practice spaced repetition. Going forward you can now decide what you would like to remember (so long as you are willing to spend 5-15 mins a day reviewing)! People's names, that command you always look up, your credit card number, interesting statistics (e.g number of passenger miles per death for bicycles vs cars vs planes) foundational facts in your field that will allow you to ponder and recognize them over and over (e.g multivariate Gaussian distribution).

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Understanding compound interest thoroughly.

Compound interest is probably the most powerful "force" governing out lives.

It is crucial when borrowing money, especially for longer terms.

It is crucial when saving and investing.

It is crucial in self-development, where a tiny 5% improvement in some area of your life per year can mean that you are twice as good at something in 15 years.

It is important when evaluating any kinds of improvements in personal life or in business.

The trick is that the percentage never sounds like much. The number of years always sounds like a lot. Nonetheless, the years WILL pass whether you want them to or not, and what tiny life choices you make throughout have a huge impact on where you will be in the future.

Being aware of that does not take much. An hour of intense concentration should be enough to get this insight. Of course, this depends on your age and math background. However, I feel confident saying the above as this to the Hacker News audience, as the above requires nothing more than an imagination and the ability to add and multiply by decimals.

How to do various knots comes to mind. Square knot, A sheet bend, clove and trucker's hitch, prusik, the alpine butterfly knot, and bowlines can all be learned rather quickly, then practiced so they can be remembered easily.

http://paracord550milspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/How...

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.

How, and why, to invest in a simple portfolio of index funds. Split between equity and fixed income based on your risk tolerance, and diversify equities globally. This will give you a low-cost, set-and-forget investment portfolio that you can add to over time without ever having to worry about what you should buy or what the market might do. Just add to it regularly over time, and end up with solid retirement savings. The market and your portfolio will certainly fluctuate, but there is no need to react to these fluctuations—simply rebalance based on your investment plan (say, annually).

Here's a good primer from the Bogleheads forum: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Bogleheads%C2%AE_investing_s...

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.

Regular expressions fall into this category. While they might take longer to master, you should know the basics after an hour.

I've been surprised at how often people convert long lists line-by-line. You can sometimes take what was a multiple-hour task and complete it with a handful of cryptic characters.

Skills are gained through practice. To get good at non-trivial skills requires more than an hour.

Knowledge is gained through insights. While a full understanding and implications of an insight can take a lifetime, an insight can be triggered in under an hour.

Now which insights are most valuable? That is always going to be personal and relative. But one of the insights that touches all people and is almost universally lacking or deeply misunderstood is the insight into money. What is it exactly, where does it come from, who controls it? ...

So that would be my choice. Spend an hour learning about money. Here is a decent and easy starter in under an hour.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bE8i-4HpKlM&list=PLyl80QTKi0...

Credibility of sources. I learned this in 40 minutes of a medieval history class. It is simply the constant habit of asking:

Who is speaking?

Why are they speaking?

What have they to gain or lose from speaking?

What have I to gain or lose from believing/disbelieving what is said?

I actually by instinct tend to believe people are mostly speaking in good faith so this is a great corrective for me. Also I have a habit of seeking reassurance instead of allowing bad news to register. So again a good corrective.

The Cyrillic script is fairly easy to learn and will let you phonetically read a bunch of languages (Ukrainian, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and Serbian to name a few.) Each language has a few unique letters and pronunciation can vary slightly, but for the most part they are the same.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

Learn how to ask a question.

Think of all the times you've seen poorly worded questions on Stack Overflow, in support tickets, etc. Think of the power that being able to get answers to your questions has.

Most of us are good at asking questions where we're working within our comfort zones, but struggle when we're on unfamiliar territory (e.g. I'll ask a better question if I have some issue with my code than I would if I were talking to a mechanic about a problem with my car, since I don't know the terminology / worry more about appearing ignorant in the latter scenario). However, by taking time to consider what's useful to the mechanic & what I can report as fact vs my opinion, I can ask a cleaner question.

Related, it's also good to learn how to think about things as a collection of dependencies, and how to debug/analyse issues by testing different parts of that dependency graph to isolate variables and narrow down where in that graph an issue must exist. This both helps to ask cleaner questions, provide more background information, and often to resolve issues for yourself.

Do nothing. Seriously. Allow yourself to become bored and you'll find your brain has suddenly got time to work on all the problems you mentally shelved. There's a good reason why a good number of ideas happen in the shower.

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 ($1B in losses quarter-over-quarter).

Has helped me (and friends) reduce losses and improve earnings by identifying good / poor investments.

People think touch typing takes a long time to learn, and getting good does take a while, but it only takes about an hour to memorize the alphanumerics and which finger types what well enough to break the hunt and peck looking at the keyboard cycle forever. Once the cycle is broken just typing casually is enough to eventually achieve mastery. It's only that one or two hours that really suck, and then that week or so of being kind of mediocre that keeps people stuck in the suboptimal local maxima of not touch typing.

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 now, I regard exponentiation as the one really fundamental thing you possibly won't discover or have intuition for on your own and first see it at school (in contrast to addition or multiplication maybe). And even then, you have to accept exponential growth before you start to "understand" it. Maybe if you are Gauss, it's different for you...

Binary search is also a nice way of explaining counting, specifically the combinatorics thereof. You can write down the numbers [0,...,2^n-1] in binary, and then show how when you halve each time with binary search, you actually are just checking the leading bit (and then discarding it). When you have discarded all the bits in that way, then you have found the position you are looking for.

Learn how to use Google Search effectively. It's a "language" we use every day. Mastering its few features can make any search so much more effective and precise:

https://support.google.com/websearch/answer/2466433

Basics of presentation skills like

- Using voice, body and mimics properly

- Not putting lots of text on slides and just reading them

- Using bullets instead of paragraphs

- Tell a story and use a less formal more friendly style (not always but applies to majority of technical presentations)

A nice video about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB2pl1QbY3I

There's a growing realization that you can completely side-step the need for Single-Page App frameworks like React using websockets and the morphdom library.

Projects like StimulusReflex (Rails) and LiveView (Phoenix) allow developers to build complex, reactive modern apps faster and easier by rejecting the need to even have client state.

https://github.com/hopsoft/stimulus_reflex

https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix_live_view

I haven't been this excited for a web technology since Rails came out.

Two suggestions.

1. Research a daily exercise routine that requires no equipment class, or gym, can be finished in 30 minutes and can be done while traveling. The goal should be to increase flexibility and strength, but not necessary build muscle. This stacks the deck in your favor against the main enemy of fitness - failure to do some kind of activity every day.

2. Understand the periodic table. It's one of the most successful mental models in science, and the basic principles can be grasped quickly. The most important division is the columns (groups). The column an element appears in tells you the ratio with which it will combine with other elements to form compounds. From table salt to amino acids, these rules predict elemental compositions of the things in this world you interact with all the time but may only rarely think about. From there, you can predict the products of reactions that you know nothing about. This macroscopic predictability can be explained rigorously through quantum mechanics or heuristically through Lewis theory, depending on how deep you want to go. For simplicity stick to the 8 main groups. The transition metals are a can of worms best opened after grasping the rest of the table.

Spend an hour learning whether you can safely attempt something.

There are two complimentary problems: some people don't realize that they can do something, and will never attempt it because they assume it requires training and skills and materials and time beyond their reach; other people don't realize that they shouldn't do something, because it is dangerous, because it is illegal, because it would require far more resources than they can reasonably devote to the project, because they just aren't good enough.

Regardless of which camp you tend to fall into, spend an hour every now and again determining whether something you're thinking about is feasible. Maybe you discover, "Huh, it's really easy to repair my running toilet, and very little can go wrong in this case". Maybe you discover, "Wow, if I screw up that electrical work I could electrocute myself or burn my house down, and I'd still have to get it inspected in my jurisdiction anyway so I might as well hire someone.". Maybe you discover that your startup idea would require an absurd amount of capital and would probably only ever have razor-thin profit margins at best, maybe you discover you could make a reasonable living self-employed.

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.

If you have even a small amount of math talent, you should be able to grasp the key ideas in Bayes's Rule that quickly iff you read https://arbital.com/p/bayes_rule_guide.

A lot of devtools and configuration oddities can be learnt in an hour or less. One can become a fairly proficient/well informed user of any of these. The $VALUE for any/all of these are huge !

  * keyboard shortcuts for your preferred UIs
  * vim (/ your preferred $EDITOR)
  * tmux
  * make
  * readline
  * strace
  * gdb
  * valrind
  * tcpdump
  * wireshark
  * basic bash
  * all sort of server configs:
     - nginx
     - apache
     - postfix
     - ldap
     -...
  * compiling the linux kernel
  * understanding the sysctl tunables
  * pick a binary file format and understand it
  * pick a protocol and understand it
  * man proc 
  * iptables
  ...
  ...

You get the general idea. Personally, I sometimes feel the only reason I am respected by my colleagues is simply because I know a little about a lot.

If you have an hour to spend, don't look for the biggest bang of the buck / the most valuable. Explore something small that you use all the time / wish to understand better but didn't take the time.

Holotropic breathing. Someone in my town offers workshops on Conscious Connected Breathing. I would have never thought that just breathing for an hour would fundamentally change my life, yet here I am. My relationship with deep seated trauma has been completely transformed. Technically the breathing was 2 hours, but it felt like 45 minutes. It feels like I now have access to a powerful drug, and an accessible way of asserting agency over my feelings and body.

This is one of those body upgrades that falls in the same category as Lasik. Tuning your core senses and ways of obtaining your needs tends to ripple throughout everything you experience and do. This breathing upgrade changed everything.

Memorize important phone numbers (eg, close friends and family). Memorize at least one of your credit card numbers.

It's not uncommon to find yourself in a situation without a phone or wallet. Can't tell you how many times a would-be tricky situation was easily resolved by having a particular number in memory.

Learning basic regex (regular expressions) will save literal days (maybe weeks) of time when editing code, text, or searching/organizing anything. I can't think of a single skill more useful on a computer.

While regex turns pretty hard fast, the basics can be picked up within an hour, or at least the ability to know what to reference when something needs to be done.

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 you're not aware that negotiation is possible/expected.

(This doesn't work in all situations, some employment markets are highly regulated and don't have market rates, negotiation is more likely to produce better results if you are in a stronger negotiating position...)

If you have an hour, read https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

If you have a few hours, read through the book "getting to yes"

Learn how to sharpen a knife or chisel or axe or other tool. Suddenly every piece of hard steel turns into a tool when you know how to get it sharp.

All you need is some abrasive (e.g. sandpaper at 600 and 2000 grit) and a piece of leather to strop it (optionally some chromium oxide or something for honing compound).

Then you can level it up from there and learn how to heat treat steel (you'll need a blowtorch) and you can make sharp and pointy things in all shapes and sizes.

For example I once needed a very small chisel, so I made one out of a two inch nail. It wasn't great (not hard steel, didn't retain an edge for long), but it got the job done.

You can learn the basics of DJ-ing on digital decks in an hour. However, it can take years of practicing to reach a level of a mediocre DJ who can lead a party with a lot of people you don't know. DJ-ing is a surprisingly difficult underappreciated skill, which can also be very rewarding when you learn it. The decks become your musical instrument on which you can modify the original music as much as you want and glue together pieces in a myriad of possible ways to build one long running non-stop musical track.

Learn NATO phonetic alphabet while in traffic. Keep a reference card in your car's visor and then read out loud every license plate you see.

Go through your expenses and identify waste. Even if you’d don’t keep a budget check your credit card statements etc. cancel unrequited subscriptions, haggle utility bills, refinance loans, etc.

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.

Funninly I just went for the Wim Hoff fundamentals course yesterday and it fits the description very accurately.

You can learn it online by watching the video or downloading the app and shouldn't take more than an hour. But preferable do the cold exposure part of it with somone around.

The breathing technique by itself is still great though

Keyboard shortcuts for Excel + what exactly a Pivot Table is

Learn how to use deals site to save a ton of money: https://slickdeals.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=9

I can't overstate how much money you will save by simply setting up alerts on sites like SlickDeals and learning the basic lingo like YMMV, B&M, PM etc...

At the very least learn about the TofuVic's purchase point for toilet paper so you don't waste money wiping your ass.

Basic social skills. How to make small talk, especially with non-technical people. It's easy to learn, but if you're a hacker then it probably doesn't come naturally and so it must be learned. But you will get enormous leverage out of learning it.

Read Schopenhauer „The Art of Being Right: 38 Ways to Win an Argument”. It’s a short read, but mind opening if you’re new to the subject. If it seems too long then just read some shortened version. If you still have some time after that then go to “list of cognitive biases” Wikipedia entry and continue there.

I believe it is crucial to understand what tricks others are using in arguments. And also what’s our cognitive limits and logical fallacies when trying to understand the world.

Learn how to juggle 3 balls.

Not only is this a lot of fun, it will also train your reflexes. It's like having a hidden superpower. The next time you are about to drop something, you'll be amazed how quickly you'll be able to reach and catch (don't try this with sharp objects, obviously).

Lots of resources available on how to start. Here's one: https://youtu.be/x2_j6kMg1co

CSS Grid is very useful, and it's fun:

https://tobireif.com/posts/layout_fun_with_css_grid/

The spec is great for learning Grid:

https://www.w3.org/TR/css-grid-1/

One minute: what a dechoker is and how to use it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkqgexP_NNE

One hour (because as easy as it looks you're gonna have to do it at least 4 times): deboning a chicken: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfY0lrdXar8

Reading a syntax overview to the Wolfram Programming Language: https://reference.wolfram.com/language/guide/Syntax.html

This will allow you to program in the (in my opinion: extremely underrated) language that WolframAlpha is built over. WPL is more concise than any other LISP, and has extremely powerful visualization capabilities built in. In fact everything is built in. You almost never need to import a library to get something done.

Keyboard shortcuts.

Entirely changed my computing experience once I stopped using a mouse for everything except graphic design-related tasks. You can learn most of the big ones for your most used apps in an hour, keep a cheat sheet nearby yr PC in case you forget some. Like cooking its an easy skill to build quickly if you're a knowledge worker since you're always in front of a computer anyway.

How to ask better questions.

Before asking any question, I now ask myself:

* Is this the right person to ask? How likely are they to know the answer? Should I trust their answer?

* Would knowing the answer change my next step?

* Have I spent a reasonable amount of time trying to answer the question myself? Am I depriving myself of an opportunity to learn?

I would suggest learning juggling a basic 3 ball cascade. It’s great for training concentration and coordination, and also quite addictive.

I have to say, I was skeptical of this whole thread based on the title—what could you really learn in an hour of any true value? Well, it turns out a lot of things. I even added one to the list. Now I know how to properly wrap cables and tie my shoes. Thank you for posting this.

Learn very basic weightlifting, like how to design sets (12 or so light reps to warm up, aim to run out of energy around 8 reps for "production" sets, do about 3 production sets a couple minutes of rest in between). With only an hour, limit to relatively safe machines (LOL at learning olympic squats correctly and safely in only an hour of coaching).

If you need motivation for why human bodies need to lift, "The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After Forty"

How to frame your photos, as in where to point the camera at. Most family members could skip a level or five of they had the patience to internalise a 15 minutes YouTube video.

How to fight and take a punch.

People are capable of taking much more punishment then they think. With an hour of practice, you can overcome the initial fear and act much more rational when push comes to shove.

I understand that this is not just "intense concentration" while sitting behind your desk, but that is exactly the point of learning, get out of your bubble.

I'm not exactly sure how to word it, but my suggestion is privacy related: the implications of publicly sharing information. Why? Because these days, once the cat is out of the bag, oh boy, is it out. I believe this is important for young and old.

Young, because statistically they still have a big life ahead, and realizing this will save them harm, and potentially make them more private about sensitive subjects. I'll hold my breath when my daughter gets in her teenage years. I doubt they'll teach her this at school (it absolutely should be taught though).

Elder, because society has changed so much, and once you're older it is more difficult to keep up (and part of you doesn't want to anymore). Getting on the bandwagon is difficult, and once they do, this part should be an integral part of say "how to use the Internet" (or "how to use your first smartphone"). It could also lead to higher participation of those who are afraid of new technology, thereby leading to more inclusion.

The lesson could have some good examples, could be a workshop, or an open dialogue. Perhaps even a game.

A more advanced lesson two could have a more advanced level of how sharing information privately can become public (by government, blackhats, "freindz", broken cryptography, etc).

I don't know if an adult can do it in an hour, but learning to ride a bike is very useful/freeing.

Boxing / self-defence.

While you'll have to do a lot of practice to have the moves come fluidly and naturally, you can learn the basic principles of boxing or self defence very quickly if you do a 1-on-1 session with a pro.

Even for myself - someone that does 4-6 hours of boxing a week, it was incredibly valuable getting a couple of 1-on-1 sessions and having my technique scrutinised.

Learn how to make good coffee - Here is for example how to make a great cup of coffee using an Aeropress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmjPjZZRhNQ&t=252s

Learn the basics of economics - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Learn how to journal.

Learn the basics of meditation.

Learn how to learn stuff using flash cards - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzCEJVtED0U - I used this method to learn Finnish (https://mansour.blog/how-to-learn-any-human-language-the-sto...)

Learn how to make good food - making good (amazing) food is surprisingly easy

This is not really a tech skill, but it can help you save some time a couple of times a day which you can then spend on other things ;) Relearn how to tie your shoelaces: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WgSwvDkJVxE

If you are on a unix system with vim installed, fire up "vimtutor" and learn basic vim usage. At worst you become at least more productive on the de-facto editor installed on most unix systems. Personally I find myself incredibly more productive using vim over most other text editors.

Learning to use a fire extinguisher. It's not hard, but not obvious either. And you don't want to have to figure it out on your own when you actually need it.

I personally had a training course at work, but I guess you can also find videos on the internet.

If you have to work with the linux or mac command line at all as part of your job, 'sed' and 'awk' are 2 commands that will boost your productivity hugely.

Learning how to solve a Rubik's Cube using the "beginner's method." Maybe not as valuable as you were hoping, but getting the methods down feels good and gives you a new hobby of competing against your own best times.

How to shuffle cards, especially without needing a surface to do it.

This video did it for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdCia_d1u5c

Pick up any GNU/BSD tool you use but don't fully understand and read the man page. There is often something valuable that you'll learn in an hour.

Learn to tie the basic knots. 3 to 5 knots will cover 95% of the situations you'll ever encounter. They're easy to learn. When someone tosses you a rope, you have no excuse for not knowing what to do with it.

Download Vimium and install it in the chrome browser and then learn the shortcuts. It should take less than 30 mins to learn and practice.

https://github.com/philc/vimium/blob/master/README.md

Understand the emotional intelligence matrix. It is almost trivial to learn but since it's not taught in computer science schools, I had to spend a decade learning its' lessons the hard way.

https://positivepsychology.com/emotional-intelligence-framew...

Your performance on all its' disciplines can scientifically be assessed with an emotional intelligence test and given that all organizations consist of people it is very important to get good at it.

For people building websites, learning what the experience is like for your users with old hardware or limited bandwidth. Buy an old used Chromebook (< $100 shipped), and use the bandwidth throttling feature in Chrome's dev tools to ratchet down to low end DSL speeds. See if your site is still usable.

Maybe the basics of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." https://fs.blog/2012/07/how-to-win-friends-and-influence-peo...

Then applying it will take longer though.

Soldering is a useful skill that's easy to learn the basics of, and can be done in an hour. You'll need to have bought a basic soldering kit before you get to it though. :)

SQL is a good fit for one hour I think.

Not « valuable » for work but interesting for stimulating other parts of your brain, which can have interesting side effects:

- juggling (3 balls). Great for arms and hand coordination and trusting your left hand.

- drumming (common patterns). Good gateway to music production.

> Are there any quick wins that 30 ~ 60 minutes of intense concentration can generate?

Well, the _most_ valuable ones were probably taught to you in kindergarten, eg tying ones shoes, writing your name, etc. ;)

I feel like in my profession (AI/Devops/SRE), a lot of knowledge is high risk (you never end up using it) high reward (if you do need it, it's super valuable). Look at those 'things every programmer should know about X' pdfs. They're like 100 pages long and full of obscure stuff programmers don't actually need to know. Similarly, the LDAP for Rocket Scientists book most folks don't need to know, until you're trying to debug and authentication issue, adding a new schema, or trying to speed the system up.

If there is anything truly simple yet valuable, it's probably pretty basic, like 'know your IDE, know your VCS'. And probably kinda meta -- learning about learning. Random ideas:

- An hour running through chapter 10 of the git book can help users understand what git is actually doing

- an hour running through a debugger tutorial on your IDE of choice can make up for a lifetime of printfs

- learn a note taking system like Stanford Notetaking system

I suspect what people really want from this question is more "whats the most valuable thing people haven't yet learned in an hour?" Which kinda depends on the person, no? But I do plenty of interviews, and here's a small idea set:

1. Learn statistics. Virtually nobody knows anything about them. Even AI engineers can't discuss the central limit theorem. I'm still re-learning this stuff but it seems dang useful for discussing how to tune alerts.

2. Learn spreadsheets. With the advent of google docs and shared storage, spreadsheets you make are basically for life. That dramatically changes the cost benefit analysis of planning documents. Learning how to build and reuse them can help in a variety of contexts.

3. Use git for settings and configs, even personal and minor stuff. I have my homedir in git, and that forms a framework for studying settings. Learn a new timesaving vim setting, add it to git and it's mine for life. Add a new shell alias, and it's available on every system I use regularly -- I have a Chef cookbook for setting up my user that includes checking this repo out.

I think one great and simple skill would be use Google more efficiently. This will give you better access to global knowledge so better generic problem solving abilities. See a complete list of google operator https://ahrefs.com/blog/google-advanced-search-operators/

Learn blind typing with 10 fingers, if you were not doing that yet.

Not only will it be a timesaver for the rest of your life, but it allows you to get into flow much easier, where your thoughts stream effortlessly to the screen.

Two hind-sights for an hour :

- Learn how to fall.

In skateboarding : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hundbrub8iQ

In a more general way, it can be enlightening because it is a fundamental learning principle. When confronted to something new, you will make mistakes, what you need to learn is not how to avoid mistakes but how to avoid catastrophic failures (i.e. how to reduce the cost of mistakes).

It's learning how to fail safely so that you can do more cycles and let exponential growth due to iterated processes settle.

- Learn to spot cycles.

A cycle is a sequence of actions that can be repeated. Ideally cycles would repeat indefinitely but usually they have side effects. Characterize the cycles : timescale, resources created and consumed, compare the value relatively to the values at the same instant of the previous cycles. Is it good or bad ? How frequently can it be repeated ? Can I do every part of the cycle on my own ? How can it be optimized ? And for almost cycles : How to close the loop.

Many people think that if they just become successful they will be more happy, but it's actually the other way around. First comes happiness, then comes success. A happy life will be a successful life.

Learn how to give and receive feedback, both privately and at work

Too many times do we give feedback to people we both care of (and don't) in a way that hurts the individual rather than help them.

If the aim is to create better relationships with those you care for, then study feedback techniques, so you can deliver it in a constructive, radical candor way.

Useful in personal situations as well as at work.

Read a few chapters in 'a mind for numbers' to understand how learning works in the brain. It will give you an idea about how much effort it takes for your brain to actually learn something, and so will help you plan anything you'll want to learn in the future. In my opinion, they should teach this knowledge in schools everywhere.

CPR. Basic first aid. When your child or spouse is choking, bleeding, or unconscious, you will not care about anything else.

How to cook eggs.

Pick two or three styles of egg and spend an hour (and a few dozen eggs) preparing them over and over keeping notes on the conditions and outcomes of each generation.

Basic (office) exercise and stretches. I've gotten old(er) and really wish I'd done those for my neck and shoulders.

It is probably a bit out of context but my car's battery died yesterday. Apparently I left the headlight open and for some reason it did not beep while I was leaving the car.

I learned how to jumpstart a car. Definitely a valuable skill.

How to Solve a Rubik's Cube:

https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-solve-a-rubiks-cube-step-...

The concept of diminishing returns, perhaps, together with the corollary, by which I mean the fact that you can often get easier profits or make progress a lot more easily by switching to some less explored avenue.

I've seen it in a subcomment, but here it goes anyway: to tie your shoes properly. At least avoiding the granny knot [0], and I would suggest using Ian's secure knot [1], too. It's been a life changer for me not to stop all thr time to re-tie my shoes.

[0] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/grannyknot.htm

[1] https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/secureknot.htm

How to cut vegetables.

There's a lot of people with a fear of cooking, but it really is not a magic skill.

There are just a few techniques that need to be learned to get started and those don't need hours and hours to be understood.

Taking value literally, spend an hour learning how salary negotiations for new jobs work and how to ask for & get more. patio11 has written an excellent intro to the topic, and if you're an entry-level Silicon Valley engineer, this is easily worth a cool million ($25k/yr * 40 years) in lifetime earnings.

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/

Meditating. You can learn in 5 minutes.

One of the easiest ways is using an app like Calm or HeadSpace.

Alternatively, just sit down wherever you fee comfortable and won't get interrupted for a few minutes, close your eyes, then count your breaths from 1 to 10, then repeat, start from one of you get lost (very common).

Regular meditation practice can help you in many ways, the most valuable to me is the improved ability of staying present, which seems to improve a lot of different aspects of my life.

Git. It has few commands and can be rapidly learned in one hour, mastering commands such as

Git fetch

Git pull

Git commit

Git push

Git merge

Git log

Learn to sit "zazen" (seated meditation). Even 30 minutes is enough to convey the basics of posture, breathing technique, and context; actually practice a first meditation for 10 minutes; and briefly discuss afterwards. I received such instruction following my cancer diagnosis about 7 years ago, and have made meditation part of my daily ritual ever since. It's been transformative.

I think the most valuable thing you can learn depends on what you already know.

If person A knows differential equations but not regressions or Python, and person B knows Python but not the other two and Person C knows regressions but not the other two then the most valuable thing they can learn in an hour will be different.

It might also depend on their goals (does person B want to learn data science of websites)

How and why to eat a low carb, high protein/fat diet. Most people are obese because of 20-30 years of marketing around high carb low fat diets.

How to make and follow a budget to save money. Including all of the yearly or even every 10 year expenses that you might have.

How to invest your savings in index funds to become financially independent

How to handle and shoot a firearm to protect yourself and your family

You can grok elementary analysis of algorithms (‘Big-O’) in an hour, and have a thinking tool that is useful once in a while.

I learned docker-compose in roughly one hour. It changed my mind on Docker as adding extra complexity to: docker-ize all the things and update with docker-compose up -d!

I guess this does depend on some prior experience with docker and perhaps on me avoiding docker-compse because I thought it was docker for pros. Instead, it's docker for dummies.

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.

Basic docker commands

  docker ps
  docker inspect
  docker exec
  docker run
  docker build
  docker rm
  ...

Basic understanding of accounting concepts. A successful hacker will presumably find themselves one day staring at a balancesheet of sorts for his/her startup.

e.g. That credit will sometimes increase a balance, sometimes decrease it depending on nature of the account. i.e. it's reversed for say asset versus equity.

Off-topic:

Since you left 'valuable' intentionally vague, I asked myself what the value of a piece of knowledge would be.

So I quickly came up with a simple model. Just take the integral of the value you get from this piece of knowledge over time, I thought. This helps you measure if a one-time payoff of knowledge A is better than the repeated payoff of knowledge B. Then I realized gauging value is more nuanced. How to model the value of things that are less tangible like insurance? The Heimlich maneuver may have a really high value in the case that my friend chokes, but very low value otherwise.

But this kind of knowledge is harder to focus on when we measure our knowledge by some simple value model. Surely you didn't expect an answer to "the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour" to be about what the best kind of insurance you should get?

"Oh, God. I've lost him. And I never told him anything. I just wasn't ready, Marcus. Five minutes would have been enough." --Henry Jones, Sr.

(five minutes, not 30-60!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np4OojYGixI @1:00

Take the meeting with the free financial advisor your credit union provides. Meet with them once a year for an hour.

I just found out that managed money accounts aren't just for people with more than one million dollars anymore, and moving my money this year will likely make me thousands of dollars over the next 30.

Understand what "cost" means to an economist.

To understand cost in economics you'll learn topics like externalities (positive and negative) as well as internalities and their meaning. You'll dive into concepts like opportunity cost as well as fixed vs sunk costs.

Once you get at truly what cost means to an economist you will be so much better informed in making business and personal decisions. In my line of work (software development) so many products and daily decisions hit the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to hang onto projects we are in love with. Other ideas like negative externalities really are the underpinning of understanding why climate change is out of control.

Cost is always oversimplified. Spending some time to understand it deeply and learn the concepts and common language is incredibly valuable.

I'd say basic CPR, you never know

Regular expressions (regexp) can be understood at a pretty impactful level within a solid hour of focus. For all the developers or even just heavy computer users, the ability to find and replace exactly what you're looking for is a game-changer.

You can learn the method of loci (also known as "art of memory"), a very efficient memory technique that unlocks the potential to remember things you never dreamt of remembering, like a long list of digits. The steps of memorizing are: - choose a journey of specific locations to look at that you already know (like going around the place you live, look at your bed, then your desk, then at the door of your room, etc) - at every location you visualize a mental picture, whose components code for the information you want to remember

When you want to retrieve the info, go through the journey, find the pictures, and decode them into the info you want.

Obviously, the thing that requires some work is the code. A simple code for numbers would be to assign to every digit to a consonant sound, and make words with those consonants, filling gaps with free/non coding vowels. For example (I'm French and adapted my French code here, so this code might be unadapted for the frequency of English consonants, but you may change it as you see fit): - 0 to Z/soft S (zero starts with z) - 1 to L (they look like) - 2 to N (2 vertical bars in 'n') - 3 to M (3 vertical bars in 'm') - 4 to R (four ends with r) - 5 to V (five ends with v) - 6 to S (six ends with a S sound) - 7 to T (7 looks like a reversed t) - 8 to Sh/Ch (eight contains an H, which is pronounced with a sh) - 9 to B (b looks like a reversed 9)

Now, you can use this consonants (actually, consonants sounds rather than the letters) to form words that are easy to visualize. 94 could be a BeeR, 30 a MaZe, 18 a LeaSH, and so on. You can also combine the words in some ways to remember more info per location.

Memory athletes spend a lot of time training their journeys and codes and stuff to achieve some amazing/unbelivable performances (http://world-memory-statistics.com/disciplines.php), but it's an extremely gratifying skill that develops really fast. If you have aphantasia or a hard time orienting yourself though, it's probably not for you, but I would estimate that at least 95% of people can develop a seemingly amazing memory with this method.

One of the most valuable things that I have learned, which you can learn the basics of in 30-60 mins or less, is how to meditate (Vipassana). Basically you sit and close your eyes and focus on the feeling of your breath below the nostrils. When another thought comes into your mind, bring your attention back to the sensation of the breath coming in and out of your nostrils. That's pretty much it. And it is the only thing that was able to treat my panic disorder, and I tried many other things before meditation.

It's also helped me in many other aspects of my life, but mostly because it has help my peace of mind.

Learn the basic techniques and the rationale behind non-violent communication. It is a tool that can make the most difficult, risky discussions in your personal life a lot more constructive and beneficial.

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

Lisp: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/common-lisp/

Spending a little time to learn the tools you're going to use often.

A few examples come to mind. Learn how to type on a keyboard. I feel sorry for my family doctor, slowly typing prescriptions using its two indexes. He could spend an hour to learn the right typing method, and within a few days, he would save time (and money).

An example is using Excel. I'm guilty of this. I always struggle whenever I have to use it (not often, but often enough). I should really spend some time once for all.

Learning that learning takes more than an hour, no matter the domain. You said it yourself: "A lot of what hackers do takes years of building knowledge upon knowledge". Understanding a skill takes time, energy, and discipline to improve is all you can do.

Everything else is simply spending an hour "doing something". If you keep the "something" to a smaller set of "things", then maybe you can learn something over several one hour sessions.

I don't think it's been said which surprises me, but basic programming of course. Programming properly requires a mindset where you are thinking about 'what will happen if this happens?'. A lot of people don't seem to naturally think like that. It can be helpful.

For a more practical example, you can easily start a blog and learn the basics of Wordpress in an hour. A lot of small business owners in particular can really benefit from this.

The NATO spelling alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie, delta ... yankee, zulu). I learned it through my background in amateur radio, but I've found it to be very useful, even outside my IT career, where I had to convey some precise series of letters over a voice link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_phonetic_alphabet

In five or ten minutes you can learn make.py[1], a dead-simple alternative to Makefiles.

Those are both examples of "automated build tools". If you do data science, and have even a moderately complex graph of dependencies (i.e. some files need to be built before others can be built), such a tool is an absolute lifesaver.

[1] https://github.com/zwegner/make.py

Read through Farnam Street's list of mental models: https://fs.blog/mental-models/

They won't change your life overnight, but as you read one or more will likely click with some tricky problem you're in the middle of. For me, that was inversion. Flipping things works for digital artists, and it works for thinking about problems.

Learn how to get out of debt!!! https://www.daveramsey.com/blog/how-the-debt-snowball-method...

Step 1: List your debts from smallest to largest regardless of interest rate.

Step 2: Make minimum payments on all your debts except the smallest.

Step 3: Pay as much as possible on your smallest debt.

Step 4: Repeat until each debt is paid in full.

Honestly, Ansible. I spent a week on Puppet a couple years ago, and was barely making progress. (Disclosure: I'm not a Ruby developer and only have basic understanding of that language).

I picked up Ansible in about one hour and already had a server's setup automated by the end of that hour. Now I automate 99% of everything using Ansible... and it's not much more complicated today than it was when I started.

I think some decades ago I read the manual of gnu make in about an hour. After that is not great at it but can write a Makefile for a simple project.

Algorithms are used in nearly every aspect of computing. If you could learn the basic flow of how an algorithm works, that would be very beneficial.

Use Upwork or a similar service to outsource some of your drudge work. Suddenly you'll find that you can accelerate yourself so much more.

Any DIY skills, may it be plastering a wall, hanging a mirror, painting a wall, unclogging a waste pipe. Youtube is filled of videos from people that gets your inspiration going, and many things that seemed like a drag are actually both relaxing and enjoyable as you broaden your skill-set, and it will save you tons of money as you become more independent as a human being.

Simple physical penetration testing tactics are easy to learn and apply widely. These skills can be a quick way to have better security awareness, and can be a fun party trick.

For example, many of the techniques listed in this (<1hr) video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rnmcRTnTNC8

One of the most valuable things which I learnt was how to tie shoe laces using Ian Knot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgSwvDkJVxE

Saved me incredible amount of mental harrassment which I used to get when shoe laces used to get unwound which I used to brisk walk.

Life is good after learning it.

The truth is that you can't learn anything useful in an hour unless you don't know really, really basic things about life.

Well... um... if someone wants to love me you could definitely maybe get me to fall in love with you in an hour of conversation.

First aid skills, e.g. Heimlich maneuver. You might end up saving someone's life by being able to act calmly and correctly.

Learn how to regulate your sympathetic nervous system with diaphragmatic breathing. I know that meditation has been mentioned various times, but breathing as a subset of meditation is useful whilst sat in a meeting or conference, as it's approaching your turn to speak. It has worked wonders for my state of mind before public speaking.

Some years ago, I learned how to tie my shoes from this video https://www.ted.com/talks/terry_moore_how_to_tie_your_shoes. I believe those 3 minutes were among the best time investments I've ever made.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to use it in a fruit salad.

Learning facts are great if you’ve got an hour but really understanding should take time.

I’d say if you have an hour that is free try to be completely independent of thought. No music no podcasts no interacting with(or influenced by) other peopl. Try to be present

Learn how to meditate.

You cannot master meditation within one hour, but you can learn the skills you need to begin your practice.

With six guided sessions of ten minutes each you can be well on your way to a more focused, less anxious, and happier life.

My recommendation would be to find a practitioner near you, or use one of the guided practice apps like Headspace or Calm.

Good luck on your journey.

Fasting... in fact, if you simply stick to just one simple rule which is, eat ONLY when you become hungry, you will reap rewards. Hint: Not everyone needs 3 meals a day.

In order to this, you need to become aware of your body and mind. And for this, you need to learn Meditation which is simply a practice of mindfulness for a set period of time.

I learned morse code in about an hour using: https://morse.withgoogle.com/learn/

It’s a surprisingly good trainer that includes good mnemonics and follows the advice of spaced repetition research. It also covers digits and punctuation too.

Here are a couple that have changed my life:

- Learn the basics of how to meditate. Any of the top guided meditation mobile apps is enough to get started, as is an hour with a teacher.

- Learn to create a WordPress blog. Doing this was the first step on my path to becoming a developer, learning about online marketing and even meeting some of my best friends!

The hour when I learn a lot is when I talk with my grandfather or elder people. They have a lot of knowledge to share.

I see a bunch of vague and non answers to this question. Here is mine: Git rebase + squash

Actually sitting down and understanding what it's about, trying it out and implementing it should be possible within 1 hour without ever having touched it before, and has at least a huge potential to make you way better at Git.

Valuable? Giving a proper blowjob. You can learn it in an hour and make insane amounts of money doing just that.

To be wrong.

Don't identify with your point of view, you are not your opinion and your worth is not defined by its validity.

Negotiation.

Very basic rules you can learn, that will increase your earning potential by over 7 figures throughout your life.

Compound interest is a great call. I'll add: "Never spend your principal."

In fact, people should all read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Richest_Man_in_Babylon

Obviously, it depends on what you already know. Otherwise I would say spend an hour learning addition.

> What's the most valuable thing you can learn in an hour?

All the answers to this thread, once they've built up.

Given enough time there would be about an hour of reading and contemplation to be had, and in that time a good deal of advice would be received that can later be acted upon.

> A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.

Not true, there are many 4 chord songs. [1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_Smt1VsoqQ

How to use a library. The organization of the books, how to look them up by subject or title, the different media available, how to request inter-library loan, and how to ask a librarian for help finding what you are looking for when you aren't sure.

How to use a password manager (and then spending the next 45 minutes changing your passwords).

Learn how people manipulate one another in various contexts (online, in-person, social settings, sales settings etc.). Just being able to pick up on the red flags will help you go along way in terms of making sure you don't get frauded or scammed.

The killer app for education would be a system that can predict this for each person, over and over again.

Given your current knowledge and life experience, what lesson are you best primed to receive, that will result in the highest information transfer, in one hour.

Learn Wim Hof's breathing technique. https://blog.spire.io/2018/05/20/wim-hof-breathing/

As a programmer, learn to use a version control system if you don't already know how.

How to revive someone with narcan

Basic reverse engineering. Download hopper and hack away. Nothing more hacker than that.

Here is what I suggest — Just loose yourself in a dense forest in the early morning for an hour. Walk and reflect on your journey so far. The alone time will help you loosen yourself and know where you stand for real.

Go to featured articles at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page.

Learn something interesting within few minutes everyday.

Meditation. It's a skill that can be learned quickly and teach you to notice not just your constant firehose of thoughts, but the emotions that come with them and which often steer you towards poor decisions.

>A person can also learn a few guitar chords and possibly play a carefully-chosen song in that time.

He can't. He'll know how to play it, but it will require many hours of repetitions to reach enough speed.

Basic options trading.

Most people should learn how to use a covered calls strategy to build income outside of owning stock outright.

With a covered call, the idea is to sell/write out of the money call options with a strike price higher than what it is today. You collect this premium while still owning the underlying stock, and if at expiration the shares are lower than the strike price you wrote the option for it expires worthless and you keep the premium. If it expires in the money, then you are "assigned" and you will sell the shares you have at the agreed upon strike price while still keeping the premium.

It's the least risky options strategy, safer than owning stock outright, and can create steady income for you in the form of the options premiums.

"For example an average person, if focused, can learn to read (but not understand) Korean decently in under an hour."

Correct. I also recommend reading 3 books a day to change your life for the better.

* Filing taxes if in the US.

* CPR

* Cooking a couple of meals

History is a pretty much endless well in this regard. Pick some era or focus, and read the major wikipedia articles on it. For example the Franco-Prussian War or the reign of Augustus or the early history of vaccinations.

In 60 minutes, you can pretty much become more educated on about a specific historical event than 95% of people you'll meet.

Your true hourly income (something like days worked * average hours - costs of your job) and then automate/outsource anything worth less than that so you can focus on increasing your income/salary.

Hypothetical -- 240 days / year , 10hr days ("gotta hustle!") , + 2 hours of commuting, +30 mins of preparation you wouldnt do if it werent for your job ==> 3k hours per year.

say you make 90k per year => $30 an hour.

   * Automate healthy meals for $15 per saved hour? Do it.
   * Automate maid services for $25 per saved hour? Do it. 
   * Fix your care in 8 hours when the shop quotes you 3*125 an hour? => Do it.
   * Clip coupons for an hour to save $12? Skip it.

Double entry bookkeeping.

Reading scientific articles/papers is something I think has to be learned, but probably possible within an hour. That's a skill I've found use for over and over.

Take 10 minutes and think deeply about the fact that you’re probably wrong about most things. If your immediate instinct is to tell me that I’m wrong, take 20 minutes instead.

If it is the last hour of your life, learning music is the certainly wise choice given by Socrates. I don't see how it can be different for any other spare hour.

There's a book called Mathemagics with chapters which take about an hour to read which will teach you how to remember numbers and do mental arithmetic

Sales. If you only have 1 hour to learn anything, learn sales. That's a skill that can come handy in many areas of life, not only in business.

How to play poker. It's the advice I'd give my younger self if I could go back in time.

An hour is more than enough to learn the rules and basic strategy.

Sand blasting, esp. soda blasting. You can start with cheap equipment and work up from there. If I had to start from scratch, this would be it.

Pomodoro technique - Takes a few minutes to learn and setup an app. It has helped me be super productive with tasks requiring concentration.

Play frisbee or table tennis for an hour straight. It's surprising how quickly you can go from complete noob to ok with both of those.

How to calm yourself.

Whatever it takes be that meditation, progressive muscle relaxation, yoga...

Learn how to quickly calm yourself when you feel you are becoming upset.

The basics of evolutionary psychology. It is a less bullshit version of psychology. It will help you understand yourself and society.

You can learn the principles of good city design / urbanism in about an hour, which could inform your next housing selection.

AWK.

The hour I spent learning AWK way back when must have saved me a few days, cumulatively, on mundane data munging tasks over the years.

The value in doing nothing, just observing with a clear and patient mind.

I believe that has been lost and it's also very important.

learning basic electrician skills for use in power outage/natural disasters. Everything in our world is powered by electricity, nobody knows how to help themselves in creating their own when the power goes off. Use of generator to power their house, basic setup and ops of batteries and solar panels, etc.

Learn how to do rear naked chokehold. You’ll probably use it once in your lifetime, but learning it is worth it.

Self-hypnosis. You can learn the basics in less than an hour and it can be an amplifier for most other things.

That as you age an hour is extremely valuable. You only have so many. Don't waste them on bullshit.

Personal Finance concepts. There are several books you can read the most essentials chapters in an hour

implementing min max in every language you know. it surprisingly encourages you to both use a ton of language features as well as allowing you to see patterns across all programming languages. this is probably more fun if you build tic tac toe on top of each implementation

Nutrition. An essential life skill.

In the area of the U.S. I currently live in - a few common phrases of conversational Spanish.

Any shorthand Roman alphabet. Saves time and offers not insignificant amount of encryption.

Learn to relax, take an hour off.

How to not talk and just listen.

Meditation.

I'm convinced the gist of any given unix command can be nailed in an hour.

How do sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves effects cardiovascular system. Spent less than hour or so to understand them 3 years ago now I think because of that my life is so much different than what could have been.

Consequently, I learned that our breath is so much important than what I really thought. Because of this knowledge, breathing exercises, meditation, Wim Hof breathing method and Cold Therapy made a lot of sense and started using them since then.

Just one question and less than hour research lead to many changes.

It's definitely something to learn, we're learning so things why not little bit more about this sophisticated machinery called body.

PS: Again it's super subjective question so there's also generally what fascinates me most is this variation how different the answer it is to this question.

If we ask this question to the bacterias or viruses the answer wouldn't be so much different I guess or let's make it even fish, dog. Another reason to be a humanist.

I spent the last hour reading this thread, and I learned to tie my shoelaces differently, that Sam Harris has a somewhat pleasant voice in spite of his unpleasant world view, and that beyond juggling, CPR and personal finance, there's really nothing I'd like to learn in just an hour.

Writing a functional component in React, and some uses of it.

- How to exercise - How to eat (or better, when to not eat).

Advanced Google Search syntax + the Ngram Viewer.

What's the deal with "an hour"? You have more than "an hour" you have many hours.

Why the extreme time restriction? Not everything is hackathon.

Ray tracing will always get my vote.

You can learn tailoring in an hour.

30~60 minutes is really a vague amount to time to learn something new. Maybe you could learn the basics of trading in that time.

If you’re a freelancer: invoicing

learn how to tie a good knot. Just one. Practice.

I recommend the alpine loop or shoreline hitch.

Redux gave me superpowers.

Salary Negotiation Basics.

Obligatory XKCD:

https://xkcd.com/519/

Read 640 comments on HN

Folding a shirt in 2 seconds. Knowing this method will save you hours of time later.

How to take criticism

the man pages for git

Tactical Breathing :)

Compound interest

How to negotiate.

How to stretch.

Learn to type.

Whether or not Bitcoin should be worth anything.

- SQL

- Quaternion operations

Encryption!

asking open ended questions.

CPR.

Python

I can't be sure that my path to relative success will work for everyone, so take my tips with a pinch of salt. I find though that the steps I've taken below have made me a valuable team member that continues to be sought after for years at a time with teams I have and continue to work with...

1. Learn to drop your ego. This is one of the single biggest things that change the dynamic of your interactions with those around you. It will change the quality of every relationship you have for the better. It will make you more approachable. It will make people want to include you, confide in you and will help them trust you.

2. Meaningful interaction with your peers. Learn to understand things from the point of view of others, and I don't mean just those that think and believe the same as you. I mean those that in some cases think and believe the exact opposite. Become someone valuable to others. Someone they can rely on. Someone they will not go to battle without, and someone they will not leave behind in a firefight. This takes time and effort. Do what you say you're going to do. Be there when you say you're going to be there. Say you're going to be there. Show up. Like Othello, this one you can learn the principles in 10 minutes, but it takes a lifetime to master and takes conscious discipline every day. But like compound interest, it adds up exponentially.

3. Learn to be seen in a way that people respect. People tend to respect those that grant them respect. Don't let their respect or any resulting admiration give you a big head. Your greatest value is being there to serve others.

These were the most difficult ones but are the ones that will catapult your relationships forward. Relationships are the key to your success. I believe they're the key to all of our successes. They're the difference between making it because of sheer dumb luck, and making it because you made a difference to those that have the power to drag you forward and effect positive change in your life. The fun thing about these points is they're all free and you can do them whether you're homeless living on the streets with no money or already earning millions of dollars a year.

... next up, some tangible skills that are valuable... these are likely to cost some money, so unfortunately, they're pretty inaccessible to those that don't have access to resources that will allow them to learn.

4. Right now the market is making a steady and urgent march towards AI and machine learning. If you're not already aware of it, get on board. Maintain discipline enough to learn something every day capitalizing on what you learned yesterday, even if it's the tiniest steps. The few people you can't automate out of a job are the ones that are building the automation and work in areas that benefit the march towards automating all the things. You don't need to learn AI specifically, this is but one niche. Take a look at market trends more than specific things. Especially in our industry tools go in and out of vogue overnight. But trends stick around for the longer haul. The trend towards cloud computing, the trend towards machine learning, the trend towards what will come after which will be related to the problems we cause today developing things we're not capable of fully comprehending until it's too late - which is a trend humanity has proven we fail at since the dawn of time.

5. Learn to apply your skills with massive growth and scalability. Learn how to execute, predictably and reliably. This is what will earn you a great reputation that you can build on for your entire career.

6. Now you've built all that up, if you've done everything right along the way, you're now in the perfect spot to do it all for yourself and earn a billion dollars.

I presently sit between 5 and 6 and hope that my journey into building my own company will allow me to use what I have learned in my career to help drive those behind me forward.

I know Kevin Spacey may not be the greatest role model, all things considered, but he did say one thing that stuck with me.

"If you're lucky enough to do well, it is your responsibility to send the elevator back down."

Regex

vim

Meditation

Hirigana

Or

Hangul

Humility

inductive combinatorics

Basics of a knowledge area!

Winning lottery numbers.

fishing knots

reactjs

to swim

meditation

This post occasioned me to coin "dunning-krugerbait".

If you think you have cooking sussed in an hour, you're doing it very wrong

Depends what you know.

Learn to Torrent, steal from media companies.

Learn to cook another meal, steal from food/delivery businesses.

Learn about DOI's and Sci-Hub and steal from Academia.

Learn how to log into your financial management plan and make a change, steal from the banking sector.

Learn CPR, steal from death.

I would say learn your partner’s erogenous zone.

https://www.quora.com/Can-you-sum-up-all-of-your-investing-m...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-dumbest-psychology-trick...

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-cool-computer-hacks

https://www.quora.com/What-words-of-wisdom-can-really-make-a...

https://www.quora.com/How-did-China-eradicate-a-large-amount...

Estate planning

Having assets fully owned before a marriage basically exempts you from all socioeconomic gotchas in a divorce, even in “community property” states.

This misconception has occurred primarily because nobody owns anything and instead go into marriages with nothing or a 30-year mortgage. So they are subject to the full whims of the state.

I'd suggest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Me...

Probably meditation, pranayama, basic stretching, basic posture, basic self awareness.

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Double unders.

On the contrary, it has taken me years to unlearn compound interest.

When you start with relatively little, compound interest is relatively very unhelpful - it compounds wealth and benefits people who have started with something more than you.

Twice as good at nothing is still nothing.

How a blockchain works.

How to interpret your dreams accurately from this paper: https://psyarxiv.com/k6trz. Interpreting dreams accurately = clear directions for personal development / ability to do the work of a therapist for yourself = personal growth.