“Literally made my entire career kick off as a consultant and am still riding off that to this day.”

Look up the rule of 72 — can tell you % return based on doubling times or vice versa. Takes 5 mins to learn, will blow minds for the rest of your life.

Also converting fractions to decimals. Knowing what 1/6 is in decimal format or how many times 7 goes into 100 is insanely useful.

If you can do these things, people will assume you’re smart in general. Literally made my entire career kick off as a consultant and am still riding off that to this day.”

"Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliett, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa, Quebec, Romeo, Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.”

"Turns out revealing you can ‘read’ languages out of the blue by just picking out key words like ‘politsia’ or ‘gospital’ (knowing g means h — unless it’s Ukrainian, then it’s pronounced h anyway) and inferring from context makes you seem like a genius. I just wrote the alphabet down as a list with the Latin equivalents and kept reciting it, restarting whenever I made a mistake. That was 20 years ago, and it’s stuck with me.”

“Same with Korean! It’s a simple alphabet, just organised into syllables. You can figure it out in an hour and look very impressive to your friends.”

Additional thumbnail credits: Universal Pictures (through United International Pictures), TriStar Pictures, Rede Globo