What skill takes less than 10 hours to learn but pays off forever? – 17 worthwhile bits of expertise you can pick up today

Learning can often seem intimidating and expensive. But it doesn’t always involve studying for years and going into debt.

In fact, some skills can be picked up extremely quickly and dramatically improve your quality of life. To find out which expertise you can start mastering right now, michaelis999 put this question to the learned folk over at r/AskReddit:

‘What skill takes 10 hours to learn but pays off forever?’

Here are the top answers from the university of the comments section …

1.

‘Learning the shortcuts for software you use daily. I basically force the juniors to start using shortcuts. It always pays off in the end (software engineer). But this goes for everyone, designers in Photoshop, people using spreadsheets, if you use it daily, put in a bit of time to learn how to be efficient.’
-HansonWK

2.

‘Microsoft Excel. If you know basic math and calculating then you can do amazing things.’
-PickleJuiceMartini

3.

‘CPR and Stop The Bleed

https://www.stopthebleed.org/’
-SloCalLocal

4.

Learning where your water main shutoff valve is for your house.
-ryuranzou

5.

‘I’d say spending 10 hours learning how your computer works will pay off forever. So many people are unaware how their machines work.’
-AmigoDelDiabla

6.

‘Learn how to swim. It can save your life.

It shocks me how many people accidentally fall into water and die because they don’t know how to swim. You can easily learn the basics and enough to keep yourself alive in 10 hours.’
-Dark_Believer

7.

‘Basic finance literacy stuff such as budgeting, mortgages, negotiations, taxes, investing etc. I’d argue that just by knowing and understanding these, one can improve his/her quality of life significantly.’
-swoosh32

8.

‘Some basic civics. Understanding how your government actually works and is structured will save you a lot of frustration and anger. It might even save you from going down dangerous roads with your ideas.

There are usually pretty good reasons why things work the way they do, even though things might seem slow and inefficient at times.’
-Quecks_

9.

‘Tying proper knots depending on the application.’
-fummelfichte42