What skills have given you a 10x return?

1. Communication Skills - not just “how to do a presentation,” or “actively listen,” but how to suss out the communication style of others, and relate to them in a way that they’ll engage with. Some people are listeners. Some are readers. Some like data. Some want a summary. Some want to know what’s in it for them. Some want to know what’s in it for the team.

2. Defusing conflicts - a decent portion of conflicts come from (in my experience) lack of communication (see #1).

3. Building effective relationships - honestly - I have to work on this one constantly but it helps with #2.

4. Energy management - I also have to work on this one constantly - I used to be able to swing an overnighter and wrap up a project. That worked for a long time, until it didn’t, and I failed, and I questioned my effectiveness as an engineer. Now, having a bunch of projects (some big, some small, some urgent, some important, some necessary but unimportant, etc) being able to recognize signs that I’m in a feedback loop of going too hard, or focusing on the wrong things.

5. Organizational Theory - I’m actively studying this area now. In the last few years I’ve shifted from designing hardware and software systems to setting up or changing teams.

6. Being ruthless about focus and saying no - I could use some tips here. A while ago I wrote that I wanted to be the “go-to” person for a subject. Now that I am, sometimes I question how to balance sharing expertise while still getting what’s most important (to me) done. :-)

Writing.

Writing is the gym for the brain. It will give you a lot of clarity on your thoughts and also improve how you speak. Your mind will be enhanced and it will affect positively all the aspects of your life.

Everybody writes, but very few do it deliberately. Most of the people, just write. They rarely even think about what they wrote. You will sound smarter. Not because of choice of words, but because you will begin to think clearly.

In the first three decades of my life. My schooling was second-rate and I've started to learn english quite late. Both my reading and writing skills were absolutely inferior to kids with a privileged background. My literacy as a kid was close to zero. My main focus was math, code and video games.

Then, having progressed in life mostly because of my technical skills and hard work, at some point I've felt my career had stalled. All my peers came from a much richer background than I and have studied in much better schools and I've started to dig into what could take me to the next level and to compete side-by-side with them.

One thing I've noticed is that I've never had a writing class before. Never. Just a few activities that one could count in one of their hands during my whole school and university life.

I've started then to write down my thoughts, then think and write. Practicing different exercises. Reading more and paying attention to other writers, to their cadence and style.

Inevitably my writing started to improve. I haven't have focused much on grammar so far and will certainly do at a later stage, as I feel there is still progress to be made in organising my thoughts.

If it interests you, try it. Feel free to send me an email if you have trouble to find time or what to write about, I can try to help you out. Let's progress together.

Learning SQL early on in uni. I attended a course where you passed the course if you completed a certain percentage of the home exercises on a web platform. They were just tons and tons of different kinds of SQL pickles against a fake corporation Postgres database, probably more complex than you'd ever need in an average CRUD app project. This was very useful in my first job were I had to make sense of a weird legacy data platform built on top of MSSQL but also later on in basically any project ever involving a relational DB.

Git somes to mind too, where it changed the way I think about how to do the day-to-day writing of my code and that the knowledge is very transferable across all kinds of projects.

1. Stage Performance

I was made to perform on-stage since I was 3/3.5. I kept liking it, and keep doing it. It makes all kinds of public speaking a walk in the park. You face much smaller amounts of anxiety before giving a talk, writing a test. And it gave me a general practice to subdue anxiety in all anxiety inducing tasks.

2. Writing

I learnt writing in school from my humanities teachers. Literature, History, and Geography. Also from a Science teacher. They taught me how to write, how to present facts, how to make an airtight argument with everything I have. I have met many interesting people through my writings- both technical and non-technical. I write good documentations, good proposals and reports.

3. Discussing

This doesn't come in the list when one talks about skills. But being a better listener, and also being able to communicate your points well are good skills together. I often discuss stuff with people. Better ideas emerge from such discussions, and I gain newer knowledge and even newer perspectives. This is priceless. Being approachable, being able to admit my mistakes and wrong concepts also helps big time.

4. Reading

Is reading for a long time a skill? If yes, it had paid me well. It helped me escape reality, introduced me to new cultures, perspectives and gave me good times. I have met a bunch of interesting people through talking about and writing about books.

5. Open Mind

I have an open mind and not stringent, and not prone to quickly reach conclusions and live happily with more entropy in my brain. I am eager to learn newer things, challenge my own beliefs. This is what drives my growth.

6. Meditation

I just got started with "The Mind Illuminated" by Yates from an HN comment. It has given me much more than I ever expected. Much more focus and longer periods of focus. And everything I do for pleasure gives me more pleasure. I am much more calm and take decisions better. I am also able to decide much more quickly because I know myself better, and can predict myself better.

7. Journaling

I just write my heart out, no barrier between me and my diary. I take snapshots of some parts that turns into blog posts or topics of discussion or future actions in general. I destroy my journal periodically because it is too bare, and nothing is held back from it.

Weight-training. The world is a lot nicer place to people who are in shape. I know from experience its worth it.

Non-financial payoff:

I learned to watch the room and listen to side conversations in meetings. I pick up on nuances and team dynamics that I can utilize sometime in the future.

I learned when to keep my mouth shut. Never underestimate the value of remaining silent and letting someone else prove how stupid they are.

I learned to trust very, very few people. Not very many people make it into Ring 0. Some people I trust with some things. Other people I trust with other things. But never anyone with everything (except family or outside of work friends). Most everyone at work is out for themselves. Most won’t hesitate to use you for their personal gain.

Financial payoff:

I learned to sell stock options.

Learning to tie my shoelaces at the exact length where you can easily slip the feet in and out but the shoes won't fall off. Buy shoes, tie once, 1000x return.

Procrastination and lack of focus and organization...which has translated into an ability to cut thru a lot of bs , identify key value, always deliver on tight deadlines while juggling multiple projects. Yeah I could have gotten here differently but everyone always told me it would screw me in the long run and it has most definitely done the exact opposite.

Screen multiplexer like tmux or screen if you work on shell a lot, specially remote. Being able to start almost as it is the next working day or not having to wait before disconnecting from network.

Pivot tables in Excel. People who don't know what a pivot table is, but use Excel regularly, naturally gravitate to re-creating pivot table functionality using formulas.

I will also add tables in Excel, and learning to format them properly, which enables all the table-based and pivot-table-based functionality in Excel.

MS Access and "advanced" Excel. My non-development career has been based in bureaucratic organizations with systems that are very locked down. In many of my positions I have been able to automate the majority of my work and spend time saved on going 'above and beyond.'

Touch typing (almost) -can take awesome notes online, without having to hunt-and-peck

I know several people have already mentioned it, but SQL.

Over the past nearly three decades I've learned and used many programming languages, frameworks, tools and development methodologies, most of which have turned out to be here-today, gone-tomorrow. But the 6 month SQL course I took when I was 18 is still paying my bills to this day, and probably will continue to do so until I retire.

Version control - not GIT, which is a tool, but the discipline to version control whatever you can. When I was in the uni I was writing software for my end of studies project on a computer whose hard drive died. Of course, I had backups, etc. but I was able to keep working in less than 2 days because of good old CVS. Years later, I put an obscure Netcool event manipulation under version control - and added tags for version - and discovered (months later) some events were kept forever in memory before a certain version - I don't know how many $$$ it saved, but at least we needed double the RAM (in 2008-2010) and that meant switching from Sun to Fujitsu servers...

Physical discipline. For me it was (American) football, but it could be karate, track, pretty much anything. Learning how to get in shape. Learning how to stay in shape. Keeping in shape even after hitting 40.

Huge payoff in terms of what I'm willing and able to do physically - not just exercise, but just living life.

Finance. At the very least, understand your tax situation and the way to make the best of it - it's basically free money. Over time, proper budgeting, investment, and tax planning will easily return you 10x. Now I'm not saying it's about making the most money - but really more making the most of your money. Being rich means having more than you need, and it's easier to have more than you need if you keep your needs simple and frugal where it wouldn't otherwise impact your life.

SQL

I am not dependent on an analyst to define the logic. I can also understand the correctness of data if I know what the logic does.

Its very easy to fool someone if they don't get the data processing.

Three skills:

1. “If you want to be effective or influential you must communicate yourself completely.”

Getting comfortable writing a document, proposal or vision which summarizes and organizes the entirety of your reasoning and fully describes the problem and what needs to get done.

If you have something complex to communicate this matters. I have personally seen entire startups raise funding and get started based on having a well documented thinking like this.

If you plan to go into any complex endeavor I think this is a critical skill.

2. Sending great Summary Reports

There is incredible power in being able to write, organize and send a complete report which captures the total state of your job and thoughts about it.

Very intelligent management are dying for a tool to help them manage a complex landscape. If you are the only one capable of preparing these reports it is super useful.

3. You have to tell people how to work with you, self disclosure

I went my entire career carrying resentment around with me and frustration rather than try to provide others with guidance on what I am like and how to work with me.

Finally, this year, I joined a new company and had enough. A good friend of mine told me to tell people what I am like up front at the start of the relationship so they understand.

I have aspects of add and Aspergers and am very introverted. It effects almost everything but it can be managed but I think disclosing myself to others helps Me to reduce the conflicts and blow ups that happen to me all too often

Ability to code in python and javascript. Also, fluent english- I live in a country where almost all of the IT sector is outsourcing for customers from western EU and US. I believe a few times I landed a job just because I could communicate freely with my future team members. I do test automation for a living.

Blogging, both on my own website and social media. It's been unreasonably effective as a way to meet people and source career opportunities.

Writing well, and for a broad audience;

Public speaking, again targeted to appealing to a broad audience;

And, most critically, learning how certificates work, which has almost on its own gotten me more job offers than the remaining balance of cloud and automation experience I have.

Being a mercenary in every little thing. “What’s in it for me?”

Perl for one-off tasks, especially ones involving text. It has a bad reputation from the uses it got put to outside of its original problem domain of text processing, unix scripting, and improving on sed, awk, and shell, so that (figuratively) no one understands its core strengths. It doesn't help that you can technically do the exact same things in Python...but you won't, just like you won't write purely functional Java code. You do not get like results by using a tool with impedance mismatch to the problem.

Computer fundamentals+writing+willing to take risks was worth in the two digit millions for me. Was willing to risk starting new businesses, but knew enough about programming to hire well.

Learning to write with style, which takes not less than 10 years of practice. It gives you amazing satisfaction. You feel the power of your words. All sorts of people at work and outside respect you for it. Not sure it is for everyone, I started learning from a prized author in my family, not sure everyone can find a way into it, either.

There are several good responses already. Here are a couple more things to add to the list.

Risk management. In general, optimize for survival, and then once you've got that down it's safe to chase the 10x or better gains.

Persuasion. This one is pretty self-explanatory. The benefits of being able to persuade people are practically immeasurable.

1. Regular expressions. By far the most useful thing to 10x (or 100x) my productivity in just about everything data related.

2. Standard Windows/MS Office keyboard navigation. Couldn't tell you how many hours I've seen others waste by inefficiently trying to select and/or modify Excel cells or portions of text, especially if they need to scroll.

3. On the same note, "advanced" Word and Excel capabilities - formatting, templating, named regions, etc.

4. Cooking my own food, and rolling my own cigarettes. Thousands and thousands of dollars saved every year, and both healthier than premade (yeah, yeah, smoking is bad no matter what, I know).

5. Speed reading and touch typing. Nuff said.

6. Public speaking, and the associated ability to present information that I'm not familiar with on the fly without fumbling about.

7. General technology - being able to plug in a projector or program a VCR or troubleshoot a printer, etc.

Get good at quickly finding and reading technical documentation in your field. Many problems can be avoided or fixed by reading documentation efficiently.

Cooking is a pretty great hobby. It saves money, improves your health, and can help improve motivation by providing immediate reward for effort.

Simple:

Read, Write, Speak.

These are the foundational skills to any other skills talked about on this thread. They are easily practiced each day as well.

You don't get "better" at interpersonal communication or high level strategy. You get better at articulating your thoughts through reading, writing, and speaking.

Linux, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, TCP/IP, Wireshark, Strace, grep, awk.

Learning how to setup and maintain VR was probably at least a 10x return on fun.

My current undertaking is unreal engine which I anticipate having even higher returns than some of the above.

Basically anything DIY will cost you 10x less than hiring someone. Cooking, car maintenance, home projects, gardening, etc. Many of these are functional skills that are useful throughout life, like basic mechanical/tools knowledge.

Martial Arts. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Muay Thai are popular enough that they allow me to snap into a community wherever I go and interact with people outside of my work circle.

Regular Expressions.

10x for any text-based work

Speed reading - tips on how to process letters and words, skim paragraphs for the key points, etc. Stuff I learned in an extra curricular class in high school that has served me my entire life.

Of course being curious about the world and willing to read just about anything goes a long way too - if you aren't motivated to keep learning there isn't much of a reason to be reading stuff :)

1. Writing. Other comments already cover this.

2. Tree models.

Search will never execute faster tree model navigation. Never. The performance difference can be either exponential or logarithmic. It’s the difference between a sprint and speed of light.

There are also barriers and limitations to search that do not exist when walking a tree.

Learning from your own mistakes, but also from other people's mistakes

Reading widely

Reading narrowly

Writing well

Figuring out when and where I'm most effective

Setting up a second brain - Keeping a journal

Learning how to touchtype

Using the keyboard for everything e.g. vimium

Unix shell chops. I mean using things like for, grep, xargs, cut, sed, awk, uniq, etc in pipelines

Programming got me a pile of money to roll in and a work life balance of someone unemployed with a hobby.

Automation(especially on web browsers and mobile) and scraping, from applying to jobs, to getting dates, I think having an army of robots doing menial tasks for you at all time can be revolutionary to your life.

It can also make you really lazy, but it's still really useful

Giving a good presentation and quality documents for a design review, proposal, etc.

A good idea with a bad presentation is doomed immediately. A bad idea with a good presentation is doomed eventually but at least buts you time to come up with a better idea.

Patience and consistency in making investments into my 401k when I was young.

Find mentors. Life is so much easier just knowing someone else has been there/done that versus treating climbing that mountain as if you are the first person to ever climb it.

Learning to slow down.

The following things have introduced '10x' returns for me (which is a slightly different thing than asked, but should relate):

0. Mathematical thinking: John von Neumann said, "If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is." While this can be interpreted in multiple ways, I believe he was trying to say that life involves lot more complex mathematics than the mathematics we study at college and which some people already find complex. Economy, biology, ecology, are all big fat mathematical optimization problems, like in AI. And in fact, the notion of 'embeddings' in AI that is able to efficiently represent anything as a set of numbers has allowed seeing more mathematics in the day-to-day work. (PS: A recording of my talk related to this will be available soon.)

1. Ability to think holistically about the topic at hand: More or less, I am able to maintain the full picture in mind, ranging from the finest detail or smallest action to the big picture spanning not only a human lifespan but bio-evolutionary history and mathematical underpinnings of anything. Doing this well includes having to let go of beliefs held, questioning falsehoods, challenging the status quo. Facing traumatic situations has led me to rethink myself a few times in my life.

2. Selflessness, having and retaining clarity of the final goal: Problems happen, conflicts happen. Focussing selflessly on the goal helps letting go of smaller things and aligning people. Relentlessly work to help others; the rest comes by itself. (See also: Hanlon's Razor).

3. Authenticity and honesty: Being truthful, talking freely about ones weaknesses, experiences, readily admitting mistakes, goes a long way in engaging people and gaining their trust.

4. Curiosity and continuous learning, across diverse subjects: When I was a college student, I used to park myself before randomly selected bookshelves at the library, reading whatever books were in front of me. I barely used to be able to take any to the finish line which used to invoke a sense of guilt. In hindsight however, even reading first one or two chapters of books across a range of topics is very helpful. Needless to say Hacker News has helped a lot.

5. Having good verbal communication skills (which other commenters have already called out), and delivering presentations to large audiences: The first time I signed up, I was very scared, wanted to withdraw, but missed the deadline to do so. Do that -- sign up and miss the deadline to withdraw. The rest will happen by itself.

6. Writing: Other commenters here have already written about writing. Writing is a tool to think. It leverages the paper as a memory to bypass the limits of our working memory. It is useful for self-introspection as well.

7. Holding yourself to a high quality bar: Do not like yourself making mistakes. (#3 covers acknowledging them when you make.)

Note: Of course, the points above haven't given me 10^8x returns. :-) '10x' is to be taken figuratively only, and the returns from the above are not independent.

understanding how tcp/ip works well enough to diagnose problems.

nothing has paid off for me more than this; not even my own birth.

jQuery.

Not that I actively use it. It's just not a month goes by that I don't have to interact with it.

Oh! And Cheerio is based on it, and is great for web crawling.

What approach to meditation did you use?

Know thyself.

Regexp, xslt

Tiling Window Managers like i3

Leetcode