Top 10 Highly-Desired Skills You Can Teach Yourself
Posted: Monday, April 30, 2012 by Tyler Durden in Labels: exercise , games , useful
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Top 10 Highly-Desired Skills You Can Teach Yourself
On countless occasions, you've likely said to yourself "I wish I knew how to do ______." Then, of course, life got in the way and you put it off until you could find the time. Maybe you wanted to become fluent in a language, learn a new instrument, start performing your house repairs, or a master a myriad of other skills. With the vast amount of knowledge online, you're now your only excuse. Here are the top ten most highly desired skills that you can teach yourself—and should.
10. Repair Just About Anything
9. Pick Up an Artistic Skill Like Illustration, Painting, or Photography
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Whatever you're looking to learn, just set aside 15-30 minutes every day to practice a very small part of that skill. It'll take awhile to teach yourself how to draw, paint, take better photos, make hamburger sculptures out of clay, or whatever it is you want to do, but breaking the daunting task into pieces and practicing each part slowly will do the trick. Plus, it's a really nice way to unwind at the end of the day.
8. Learn to Defend Yourself
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7. Improve Your Design Skills (or At Least Acquire a Sense of Style)
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6. Pick Up Just About Any Subject You Missed In College
5. Build and Hack Electronic Hardware
We love technology, and we love it more when we can make it do pretty much whatever we want. There is almost no end towhat you can hack, but getting started does require teaching yourself a few skills.Learning to build a computer is a good place to start. Soldering is especially helpful, andunderstanding the basics of arduino can help you build some really neat stuff. One of the best ways to get started is to pick a project and learn by doing. If you're not sure where to start,our DIY tag page can offer a few ideas.
4. Play a (New) Instrument
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In addition to the instrument, you're also going to want to learn a little music theory. Ricci Adams' musictheory.net offers a bunch of free lessons to get you started. When you're starting to get good, you can put together a home recording studio on the cheap to start capturing your talent and sharing it with others.
3. Cook Like a Pro
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2. Become Fluent in a New Language
1. Make a Web Site, Create an App, or Just Learn to Code
Both sets include further resources, but there are plenty of others that we've learned about or have cropped up since. For starters, commenter mistermocha suggests using the "learn ___ the hard way" series. For example, if you wanted to learn Python, you could visitlearnpythonthehardway.org. If you just fill in the blank with the language you want to learn and put that into a web search, you'll likely find what you're looking for. (You can also find most of the series here.) If you prefer more interactive lessons, you'll want to check out one of our favorites: Codecademy. I learned by subscribing to online learning site Lynda.com (and through a few basic classes back in college), which is still excellent, but I'd probably have gone with Code Academy at this point since it's in the free category. Regardless of how you decide to learn, programming skills are becoming more and more useful as time goes on. Code is not as complicated as you think, so go get started!
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Sat 28 Apr 2012 6:24 PM
Don't expect to make money in photography, it's saturated badly by all the people that buy a DSLR and then think they are a pro. They will do a wedding for $300.00, Portraits for $25.00 and generally make it impossible for anyone that really wants to make money to be successful.
A wedding is about 100 hours of work, no I'm not working for $3.00 an hour. Photography if you LOVE doing it? yes. if you think it is a "valuable skill" or you will "make money" stop and try something else instead that has a lot lower cost than photography.
Amen. Living in the 'third world', the same thing happens here. Fortunately, the market for high quality photography isn't saturated, but not everyone is willing to pay for it.
I think I would love doing it, but it's just so damn expensive. Being the gadget guy I am, I know once I start, that's pretty much it for my savings account :(
and a lot of people don't understand how expensive. I have owned 2 lenses that cost more than most people's cars, I used them for a specific task and sold them right away, lately I only rent the Glass. And the Lens is what matters, not the DSLR body. The guys that buy the Canon 5d MKIII or the 1Ds are wasting money. The glass in front of it matters much much more than the camera.
and yes even a crop frame with a L series lens will kick the crud out of a full frame 1Ds with a non L lens.
Do photography because you love it and that it is your art form. because it will spiral down to a point that nobody makes any money at all unless you are the next Ansel Adams.
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