4 Things To Learn If You Skip House of Cards S4
I’m super excited to find out what’ll happen to Frank & Claire Underwood this season, so please take this advice with a grain of salt.
But watching a season of a TV series occupies around 10 hours of your life.
While ten hours doesn’t sound much, it’s still 0.1 percent on the way to becoming world class in a subject, according to Malcom McGladwell’s 10 000 hours rule.
I believe that — if executed well — 0.1 percent can be enough to land you a consulting gig, make you excel ahead of an application pool in a job search or enable you to take on new tasks at work.
You won’t become good at something by doing it for 10 hours, but you’ll raise yourself from completely useless to barely usable.
And once you’re barely usable at something, you just need to a little bit of googling and hustling to be able to use your new skill to solve problems.
You see, at this point you actually know more about this subject than the majority of other people — given that you’ve chosen something narrow and spent your 10 hours effectively.
Here are a few things you can learn in such a short period of time.
1. HTML & CSS
Every web page you visit contains HTML and CSS.
The former is the structure of the page (title, paragraph, list etc.), and the latter dictates how it looks (colors, shadows, positioning etc.).
Learning its basics is super easy — though becoming a master in CSS is hard.
How to: The introductory HTML&CSS course on Codecademy will take you seven hours. Spend the remaining three hours on building your own web page, or do the Codecademy track where you build an Airbnb clone.
2. Photoshop
Remember the very first episode of Girls? When Hannah’s boss tells her they can’t turn her unpaid internship into a job — like they did with Joy Lin — and gives her the following reason:
— Joy Lin knows photoshop.
In other words: knowing Photoshop is valuable. It’s probably the most used design tool in the world and can open a ton of doors for you.
In ten hours, you’ll should be able to learn how to crop photos, make simple graphical layouts, adjust colors and few other neat techniques that the rest of the world only knows how to do on Instagram.
How to: Go through this tutorial. It’s only 46 minutes, but it’ll probably take you around 10 hours if you follow along by doing the exactly what he tells you.
3. Excel
Often called the worlds most used programming language.
The founder of InsightSquared Fred Shilmover actually built their MVP in Excel, and earned revenue before writing a line of code. Now, he has over 100 employees. Listen to more about that in the Traction Podcast.
You can do powerful stuff with Excel. I’ve used it to create a liquidity budgets, do sales forecasting and just keeping track of a lot of info in a systematic way.
How to: Start with this tutorial. Follow that series as long as you get in 10 hours.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics enables you to understand how people use your website, which can be critical for any business.
E.g. you can figure out which sources that give your business the most valuable customers, which might greatly affect your company’s marketing tactics. My experience is that very few small to mediums size businesses don’t even use GA at all, even though they have it implemented on their site.
How to: follow this tutorial.
So before you sit down to watch a new season of some random TV series on Netflix, ask yourself:
Is it really so good that you’d sacrifice one of the skills above to see it?
I’d claim that the first two seasons of House of Cards was that good. Plus Making a Murderer and Game of Thrones.
But House of Cards S4? I doubt it.
Thanks for reading! My name is Per, I’m a co-founder of Scrimba — a better way to teach and learn code.
If you’ve read this far, I’d recommend you to check out this demo!
