Adulthood can be difficult to navigate. Every day brings new challenges and nearly everyone you meet expects something different from you. Regardless of where you find yourself in the world, there are a few basic skills that every adult should have under their belt. Some are surprisingly overlooked, but all are incredibly important. Here are ten examples of skills every adult should make sure they master.

1. Cook Simple Meals

An alarming amount of young adults make it out of their teens without ever learning how to make some kitchen staples. While ordering in is great once in a while, if you’re going to be eating healthily and affordably, you’re going to need at least rudimentary cooking skills beyond pouring cereal or slapping a ham and cheese together.

This doesn’t mean you have to be the next Martha Stewart, but knowing a couple of methods for cooking eggs, boiling pasta, pan-frying some veggies, and how to properly cook at least one protein such as chicken can go an awfully long way and save you from a steady diet of pizza and Chinese takeout.

2. Household Maintenance

Not many people are introduced to the concept of taking care of a home until they’re living on their own and something goes wrong. From simple matters such as how to keep your space tidy, to more challenging things such as what to do when the hot water heater is on the fritz, knowing how to handle the snags that homes run into is really important.

Having a standard toolkit plays into this too. It may not be the first thing on your new apartment or house list, but you’re going to come across a need for a hammer, screwdrivers, and even hand drills more often than you might think.

3. How to Change a Tire

If you have roadside assistance, you may consider yourself completely covered in this regard. Roadside assistance is great, but not everyone has it, and even if you do there are times where you’re in the middle of nowhere and you really want to get going without waiting hours for help to arrive.

There are tons of guides and walkthroughs to help you learn the basics of changing your own tire, and to say it can be a time and money saver is an understatement.

4. How to Jumpstart a Car

Right along the same lines of knowing how to change a tire, knowing how to jumpstart a car is something that can really help you out in a pinch. Not only is it super useful for yourself, but being a friendly citizen who can help out someone else in need when their car is acting up is a great way to be someone’s personal hero.

5. First Aid

A lot of people don’t think about this one until they’re needing it, and that’s not really the best time to be learning. Knowing how to dress cuts, scrapes, and wounds correctly is a simple but useful skill, as is knowing the proper way to deal with minor burns and sprains. The ability to recognize when something is serious enough to warrant visiting an actual doctor is another underutilized side of this skillset.

6. CPR

This skill is geared towards others in your life, be it your friends, family, or even your pets. CPR is a genuinely lifesaving tool and is often taught in free classes if you need a more hands-on learning experience.

7. Effective Communication

With how many problems ineffective communication can cause in a person’s life, it really is surprising that learning how to communicate effectively isn’t something prioritized more when we’re growing up.

Learning how to properly express yourself, politely speak your mind, not bottle up things inside, or ask for help are all things that many don’t work on as much as they ought to. Being able to do these things effectively can cut through a lot of unnecessary drama and miscommunications in your life.

8. Empathy

While learning to express yourself is important, having the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others can save everyone a lot of potential hurts. If you go through life with the narrow mindset of only looking inward, you’ll wind up misinterpreting a lot of your everyday interactions with others.

It’s vital to learn to contemplate where others are coming from, what factors in their life might be affecting them and causing them to act out in certain ways, and how to lend them the same benefits of the doubt that you would yourself. You’ll often find that people you thought were out to get you are just going through some hard times themselves.

9. Setting and Respecting Boundaries

Learning when and how to say “no” is important even as children, but as you enter adulthood and responsibilities start piling on, it can be necessary to make sure you don’t run yourself completely ragged.

You can’t take on every single work project, every social event, and every meetup with your friends. Sooner or later that amount of stress will reach unhealthy levels and you can find yourself on the edge of a breakdown. Learn what you can handle and then enforce those boundaries instead of spreading yourself too thin.

10. Self-Defense

While it’s not something many of us want to think about, the reality is that a large number of people are going to encounter situations where self-defense could be a literally life-saving skill. Whether it’s an attempted robbery, a domestic dispute gone wrong, or any number of possible scenarios, it’s always useful to know how to protect yourself.

There are a lot of different schools of self-defense, such as ones that rely more on brute strength and others that rely on using your enemy’s own force against them. Taking even a couple classes here and there can supply you with some skills that seriously come in handy when you need them most.