What skill or talent took you longer than it should have to learn?

I still suck at guitar after 26 years. It's just 12 damn notes.

28

You really only need 3 chords played fast for punk. Keep it up, I believe in you!

8
11 notes really. 🤷‍♂️😅

5
Same here! It’s fun to make noise though

3
Just learn to play the 4 chords so you can make a pop hit.

3
Same. 30 years.

2
Took me a decade before strum patterns clicked. I still suck though.

2

Programming took a lot of goes before it clicked. Having a real goal instead of just doing tutorials really helped.

24

Yeah I agree. I learned the most when I just set my mind to accomplish something. This will actually get you to do real troubleshooting as well and not just checking where you failed the tutorial.

6
That's probably why I don't feel good at programming. I just don't have "that project" I want to do yet so I'm stuck in tutorial hell where I can finish the tasks but tell me to go build a website and I'm lost on where to start. Odin Project at least forced me to start from scratch after a while, but it really shows just how bad my planning is to build something from the ground up.

3
- The things that got me through it were Learn Python The Hard Way and having a project I was aiming to build. I was working at a jazz bar at the time and I wanted to build a membership and seating plan system for them. Needless to say it was terrible and we never got to using it but it gave me a really good goal with real-life problems to solve.
  
  2

This post rather got me questioning what skills or talents I have. None.

So I guess all of them are taking me way longer. When I want to learn something, I usually end up spiralling into thoughts that it's too late for me and I should have known that much sooner, like others did.

18

Permanently Deleted

3

Interacting with people. As teen i sucked at social interaction but as an adult I started getting the hang of it. Now I look at other people and I think I can do it better than most. A smile and tidy clothes go a long way.

16

Running. I don't think I ran a consecutive mile until at least age 28, but now i love to run.

16

why?

i can run like 15 but i fucking hate every second of it. it's so BORING.

2
- A good playlist and somewhere interesting to explore make it great, but I also just love running. I bring running shoes when I travel: there's nothing like running through a new city as a tourist.
  
  3

Smalltalk.

15

Smalltalk or small talk?

12
- TIL!
  
  4

Drawing. I tried so hard in school, practiced regularly, and never got better. I'm in my 30s now and my DND group still makes fun of me when I draw anything other than walls on the wet erase mat.

12

You might try different media if you haven't already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I'm sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I'm just spitballing, but also if you're trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn't a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It's a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I'm not some proficient artist personally), but it's just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there's so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

5
I'm in my 30s, and I'm planning on taking up drawing for the first time ever. I don't even doodle, but I think it would be cool to be able to do simple concept/placeholder art for my projects. I'm very much expecting to suck at it, but I'm entirely okay with that.

5
- I started making whacky artistic progress after I started sketching shitty little project plans. Weird improvements too, like now I can imagne taking something apart and picture all the individual bits fitting together. Learning by doing rather than practicing just to practice is like night and day for me.
  
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I'm also just spit balling but many skills are needing an account if muscle memory.

So with that I'm mine i wonder if you spent 10-20 minutes a day just tracing styles or things you want to be able to draw to develop that muscle memory would be helpful

1

Learning a new language. I normally pick things up pretty quickly, but learning a new language has been a slow slow process, but worth every second :)

10

Social interactions.

8

I'm a sideshow performer, have trained a variety of bizarre skills, but still can't whistle.

So whistling

8

One day a couple years ago I decided to just learn it. I then tried to whistle for three months whenever I was alone and suddenly one day, it was whistling and not just wind-sounds.

2
Wait, you can learn whistling? I only can do a high pitched gym-teacher sounding whistle, which was very entertaining in gym class, but has since fallen off hard

2

Life. Still trying to grasp the concept.

7

It's a pay to play opt-out sandbox.

4
- Oof. True. At least it's open world.
  
  Edit: also pay-to-win.
  
  2
It's an insane commitment to the bit

2

Chewing in a proper manner

Mom used to blend food for me most of my childhood. Thanks mom

Still learning

7

there are feeding therapists.

7
- There are feeding therapists?
  
  2
Why did she blend food? Never heard of this.

0

Snapping my fongers. People tried to teach me throughout my childhood, but zi just couldn't get it. Then, when I was maybe sixteen or so, I had a dream that someone taught me to snap, and in the dream I could do it! I woke up from that dream snapping my fingers, and have been able to do it ever since.

I guess my unconscious mind finally put all the pieces together and it all finally just, pun intended, clicked.

7

Driving stick, still haven't figured it out and now that I lost sensation in my feet, seems like I'll never get it.

I understand how it's supposed to work, I just can't do it without stalling.

5

Learning to work the clutch and feel the friction zone is a more difficult skill than some want to admit.

Learning to drive a motorcycle was a bit overwhelming, I remember my instructor talking about applying the brakes with right hand and foot while disengaging the clutch with the left hand and downshifting with the left foot… and thinking “how the hell is anyone supposed to keep track of all that!”

I do miss my stick shift though, it was more fun to drive even if less practical.

5
- Oh right… It’s a good thing I already knew how to drive stick before taking up motorcycling.
  
  2
This might sound dumb, but I'm doing this with Euro Truck Simulator. I've got the wheel/pedals/shifter, but I can't for the life of me get it to not stall out, especially when pulling heavy loads from a standstill.

I've seen pedals that have haptic feedback for feeling the clutch engage, and I'm honestly considering saving up for it, cause I'm obviously missing something here.

4
- I doubt it will really compare to an actual truck. When you're driving one, the pedal is the easy part. The truck has so much torque it is harder to stall, unless you're loaded heavy and on a hill. The tricky part is getting your shift windows without synchromesh.
  
  I remember when I was learning, it was a bit challenging to hit my shift windows at first, and remember what split I was in when I was on the road. Back then I had a little xB and a FJ40. Both of those were manual. When I got back into one of them, it felt insane that anyone could screw up in one of them.
  
  I had already learned front end loaders, skid loaders, and a skid steer, and was working on a certification for case controls on an excavator, so the coordination complexity of hands and feet were no big deal.
  
  The clutch is all about feeling the difference between the spring pressure and the friction.
  
  Anyways, at least for me it can help to think in perspective like this; about other areas where the same basic skill applies with perhaps even more complexity. Like after a few days on an excavator you stop thinking about the individual controls and start thinking about the bucket like your hand and the boom like your arm and the pivot like your waist. The brain, or at least mine, abstracts away the motions like an extension of your body. It is such a strong connection and the hydraulic feedback is so direct, that you can "feel" with the bucket without actually seeing into the trench. Like if you hit a rock, a root, or even conduit in the ground, you can feel it in the controls like it is a part of you.
  
  3
- Too much clutch, not enough revs.
  
  I had a lot of trouble learning on my brother's Kia. When I got my own MT car, it was so much easier, mainly because the clutch on the Kia was extremely heavy. See if you can adjust the clutch pedal spring to make pushing the clutch pedal easier.
  
  1
The key for me was being told: it’s okay to ride (to hold) the clutch a little before/during/after you’re switching gears.

2

Driving. I was 40 when I finally got my license.

5

Reading an analogue clock face. I could do digital though.

5

The small hands tell the hour, the large hands the minutes.

1

The ECS design pattern.

Oh you meant talent? Well I didn't get my drivers license until I was 19.

5

Skate stuff. Could never do anything more difficult than a static, barely decent Ollie. And I was a teen, lots of free time, I spent hours and hours and hours for weeks and months. Nothing.

Effort is not everything.

I am so glad I had no money, because I really wanted to be better and if I had to learn the lesson later in life I would have tried to "fix" it with high quality gear.

3

Tying a tie for meetings, interviews etc.

I've always had issues trying to do myself from "my angle" if you know what I mean, I've always worn light blue or grayish dress shirts without the tie to interviews, or I'd just leave the tie spaced out so I can shrink it again when I got around my neck.

Still trying to get the hang of it!

3

Forget those complex “classic” knots and try the “Van Wijk” knot. It couldn’t be easier, you only move the fat end of the tie and wrap it around the skinny end 2-4 times before pulling the fat end through the wraps. So fast, impossible to forget, and looks classy while being distinct.

1

Compassion. I used to be a terribly selfish person. Still mostly am.

2

so you're a normal person then?

1
- Relatively
  
  1

I'm also just spit balling but many skills are needing an account if muscle memory.

So with that I'm mine i wonder if you spent 10-20 minutes a day just tracing styles or things you want to be able to draw to develop that muscle memory would be helpful

2

Social skill. Havent learnt it since

2

Whistling. Still can only barely do it

1

I started getting into music in 2017, couldn't make a song for shit until 2023 I finally got to a decent spot. Though even then I have a lot of failed attempts still but I think that's normal.

1

Hey that's about when I started! And I also have a LOOOOT of awful stuff, but only now am I starting to occasionally make stuff that I don't immediately hate.

Currently participating in Weekly Beats, which is something I'd never have considered even a year ago.

Of course, I'll be learning the entire rest of my life, so...

3

Not being a fucking ADHD retard. … and I still haven’t learned it properly.

-1

keep trying little smurf.

2
- Every day.
  
  1