13 Skills You Can Master In 10 Minutes Or Less

By Emmie Martin

A simple Photoshop hack lets you remove tourists from your vacation photos.

Most useful skills, such as learning a new language or mastering the art of cooking, can't be conquered in a day.

However, there are several important life skills you can pick up almost instantly, and a recent Quora thread polled users on their favorite ones. 

Here are some of the best responses, with a few of our own thrown in.

After all, you never know when you'll need to turn your watch into a compass or Photoshop your vacation pictures. 

Learn to change a tire: "It's very straightforward, but it's worth thinking about before you need it. Here's a video." —Ben Mordecai 

Identify the freshest strawberries : "Smell them. If they smell like strawberries, buy them; they will taste divine. If they look gorgeous but have no smell, they will have no taste. Simple and foolproof." — Cyndi Perlman Fink  
...and oranges : "Pick up the orange or grapefruit. If it feels light, it's not juicy and will taste rather woody. Go through the bin picking the ones that feel heaviest compared to oranges or grapefruits of a similar size. They'll be the tastiest ones." —Karen Opas 

Remove tourists from vacation photos :  "Set your camera on a tripod.  Take a picture about every 10 seconds until you have about 15 shots.  Open all the images in Photoshop by going to File > Scripts > Statistics. Choose: 'median' and select the files you took. Photoshop finds what's different in the photos and simply removes it." — Vishal Gala

Learn how to speed read: "The first thing you need to do is eliminate the voice inside your head. Read with your eyes. ONLY. Whatever you do don't use the voice inside your head. As you learn to do this part go ahead and read word by word and go over the lines with your finger. Just work on eliminating the voice. Why? You cannot say words nearly as fast as you can comprehend them ... Since you're reading with your eyes, try reading two or three words at a time, and then move up once you get comfortable." —Raj Rai 

Comfortably fit everything in your suitcase: "You can learn the art of packing. Watch the demo." —Carlos Amezquita

...and pack a suit in your carry-on without wrinkling it : "Learn John Chow's clever technique to 'roll the suit' into a cabin-sized suitcase." —Abhiroop Medhekar

Calm nervousness : "Chew gum when you're approaching a situation that would make you nervous, like public speaking or bungee jumping. If we are eating, something in our brain reasons, 'I would not be eating if I were [in] danger. So I'm not in danger.'" — Abhishek A. Singh

Turn your watch into a compass : "Hold your watch horizontally and point it so that the hour hand is facing into the sun. At the center point between the 12 and the hour hand is your north/south line, with north facing away from the sun. So if the hour hand is pointing at 4, for example, the 2 would point towards the south, and the 8 would point towards the north.  Just remember, this only works in the Northern Hemisphere; and during Daylight Savings Time you would use the 1 instead of the 12 to determine the center line." — Amarnath Ganesh

Easily insert mathematical symbols and special characters into Word documents : "Insert all your required symbols just on an arbitrary line in the document, for easy access.  Open up the configuration for your word processor, and find the auto-correction/auto-replacement settings.  Add auto-correction rules for each of your symbols, assigning them a kind of 'command word' that can be easily typed. An example is "/pi" (no quotes), that would auto-correct to the actual Greek character." — Trey Brisbane  

Save time with computer shortcuts: When using Chrome on a Mac, ⌘+a selects all; ⌘+c copies; ⌘+x cuts; and ⌘+v pastes. You can also use ⌘+n to open a new window and ⌘+t to open a new tab. See a more comprehensive list of shortcuts here. 

Recover when you forget someone's name immediately after meeting them: Ask them to put their number in your phone. It's the best way to get their name without even asking for it. Typically, they will enter both their first and last names, along with their number. It's a great way to stay in touch with them in the future and also to assure you won't forget their name again. Find more techniques to remember names here. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I'm an accountant, I hate my job, but seriously, I wouldn’t know what else to do

I was born to be a lot of things, but being an accountant isn't one of them. In my heart of hearts I have always known this, but for some stupid subconscious reason, I have always ignored it. Why? Well...um...err...I didn’t know what else to do. How many people faced with the same predicament of deciding on a profession upon graduating used “not really knowing what to do” as their guiding compass? Blink. Ten years have passed and you’re left wondering, how did I get here? In this cubicle? Doing something I cannot stand (and I’m not even honestly good at), with people I quite frankly don’t really care about? For me that was accounting, a profession that conjures numerous clichés, such as boring, bean counting, personality not needed, number crunching etc etc. These have now evolved and have been replaced by repetition, reconciliations, long hours, fudging figures, high turnover, Enron and even more reconciliations. R-E-S-P-E-C-T But please don’t get me wrong, I have the utmost respe...
Read more

Three money managers who lived through the 1987 stock-market crash warn of danger today

Image
By  Philip van Doorn Published: Oct 31, 2017 1:49 p.m. ET SHARE   ‘I would take some money off now because ... there are clear signs of deranged valuations,’ says Gabelli fund manager Lawrence Haverty Getty Images A trader on the New York Stock Exchange on Oct. 19, 1987 — Black Monday. When the stock market crashed on Oct. 19, 1987, investors panicked. It was an unfamiliar event — the previous decline of a similar magnitude occurred 58 years earlier, in 1929. Now, 30 years after Black Monday in 1987, there are professional investors still at work who lived through that fateful day. In interviews, three of them talked about their experiences, offered insights into warning signs and gave advice on how to handle major downturns. They are: •  Lewis Altfest , president of Altfest Personal Wealth Management, which manages about $1.3 billion for private clients. Altfest founded the firm in 1983 after working as a general partner and director of research at Lord, A...
Read more

Have We Reached a Top?

By James Kostohryz It's never been my position that the flow of fundamental news would turn from positive to negative overnight and in a total fashion. The world simply doesn't work that way. When I terminated my core long position a couple of weeks ago for reasons explained in�Ten Reasons the Countertrend Rally May Be Over,�I outlined a series of factors I believe may manifest in the later half of 2009 and the first half of 2010. Indeed, most of these factors will be more back-end loaded, as negative factors tend to build on one another and gain momentum in time through the medium of psychology and social mood. It's my view that the flow of economically relevant events�-- and perceptions of these events --are in the early stages of a transition. In this case, a transition means the flow of relatively good news will tend to wane somewhat while there's an uptick in relatively bad news. This is what one would expect at a top. However, it's to be expected that during t...
Read more