So, transferable skills: skills that, upon improvement, increase your ability in other areas (and also improve other, higher-level skills).
A basic example would be reading/writing. Knowing how to read and write allows one to access a huge amount of other skills and resources which are otherwise unavailable. A less obvious example would be clear speech (enunciation). Ability to speak clearly improves one's prospects in a lot of different areas (e.g. professional advancement, dating, etc.).
I'm looking for additional examples. Which skills did you find to be most transferable? Did you become proficient in X, and then found this helped you in many other areas of your life? Please share.
(I tried to find whether this was discussed before, and failed; if it was, I would appreciate the link.)
There's the music appreciation algorithm: listen to the people the people you listen to listen to. More generally, bootstrap from your current algorithms to better ones. I likely wouldn't have been alerted to various academic subfields if SingInst folk hadn't pointed them out, and I wouldn't have been alerted to SingInst if I hadn't been alerted to LessWrong via RationalWiki, and I wouldn't have been alerted to RationalWiki if I hadn't been alerted to Carl Sagan by my high school friends, and I wouldn't have made those friends if I hadn't been a friend of their friends, et cetera. Nowadays I have a rather low opinion of Carl Sagan and RationalWiki, I'm very meh about LessWrong, and my opinion of SingInst isn't as sky-high as it once was, but I think the process tends to be self-correcting.
This sounds frighteningly similar to my usual procedure. I noticed a few months ago that I am in a habit of "using up" my information sources and LessWrong has hit that point that I am not learning that much more. Since I assume you consider yourself a cool person and do not like Sagan and LessWrong, what are some ressources you could point us to?