Something you’re just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average.
For me, it’s paper snowflakes. My brain just seems to effortlessly figure out what cuts to make to the paper wedge to make it turn out exactly how I want it. Largely useless, but good fun and was a much-needed ego boost when I was a kid :]
You must log in or register to comment.
Being alive. In my whole life I haven’t died even once.
Reminds me of an obvious/interesting factoid I once saw pointed out:
Every single one of us is at the end of an unbroken line — aaalllll the way back to microorganisms — of folks / critters / etc. that lived long enough to procreate.
Hearty fuckers, every one of us. In a certain sense…
I can hear you, listen to you, and forget about what you say all at the same time!
The ADHD superpower.
You forgot the asking for what they said the instant it pops back in your head
No you just say “yes” and move on with your life and then refuse to believe you agreed to be pegged by 56 bearded men in a Toyota Yaris when they insist you did.
The power to read a book page 3-4 times before full comprehension.
As a kid I used to read like 2 books a day, now I have the same problem. Like wtf happened
I can cook minute rice is 56 seconds.
God damn it!
my two special snowflake things:
i can stop my own hiccups at will 100% of the time
i have always lucid dreamed since as far back as i can remember, i genuinely believed that everyone experienced sleep like that until i was in my mid-twenties
deleted by creator
Very fast reflexes and I can see in the dark far better than most people.
I had never realized that my eyes were different until my compulsory miltary service. I could reasily read maps when others couldn’t see shit and I never stumbled during night training in the forest.
Fast reflexes are generally pretty cool to havel, but it’s not fun when a knife falls off the kitchen table and it is impossible to stop your own hand trying to catch it.
My “learned talent” is fixing mechanical devices. When I was 6 or 7 I took apart and fixed the family VCR so I could finish watching the Smurfs. My mom found me studying the jammed mechanism, with all the parts lying on the living room carpet. She had a fit and wanted to collect the parts away, I started crying and told her that I’ll never get it back together if she messes up their places. She watched as I released the stuck tape wheel and reassembled the device. And it worked.
I’ve fixed countless devices with just visual analysis and pure intuition after that.
I’m really good at getting cats to vocally respond to me. I don’t know if I’m just on their wavelength or what, but almost every time I start a convo with a kitty I get a response. Oddly specific, but also pretty fun. Kids love it lol.
deleted by creator
I’m a level 15 bureaucrat. I’ve filled out government applications longer than my thesis, with only a pen and the bitter joy of precision.
I am literally unable to remember people’s faces. If you talk to me, go for a walk, and come back ten minutes later, I won’t recognize you.
Once, the guy who sat next to me at university for two years, and with whom I spent countless time together, took the same bus as me. I hopped on the bus, saw him, and my brain told me “Uh, that’s kind of a familiar face, I guess”. I smiled to him (because he looked familiar), then I passed him and and went to sit some rows behind.
He’s made fun of me ever since.
The worst thing is, I work at the front desk of a hotel. I always struggle to remember who’s who. Sometimes I recognize their shirt, their hair, their voice, or I see a family with two kids and remember “oh yeah, they’re from room 210”. But most of the time, I must ask them to remind me which room they are, even if they checked-in just ten minutes before.
Chess. I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and sometimes I’ll create new accounts on chess websites to see how quickly I’ll get them rated to 2000+. I’m living proof that chess players aren’t that smart though because I’m a dumbass when it comes to literally anything else.
Realising you’re dumb makes you smarter than 80% of humanity 😎
Understanding maths and remembering things in school, just don’t ask me what you told me a second ago because it’s already out my head.
I’ve got a competent and authoritative voice. People frequently assume I’m the most qualified in a group when I’m really objectively not as soon as i start speaking. Whatever I say or decide rarely gets questioned and people just keep letting me do stuff. When something is my word against another’s, people believe me.When I say something is needed, it’s done. When I make a proposal, that’s usually what’s agreed on and done without me really trying to push it.
This is familiar.
In particular, my accent gives me a distinct advantage, as I speak with what some might describe as a “BBC” English accent. I work using English outside of the UK in a multinational company, and it’s served me very well.
In international contexts people just seem to trust that I know what I’m talking about, because they think that I sound like I should be narrating a nature documentary.
I’m not super sure what it is for me. I’m able to code switch pretty easily, and I don’t speak obvious dialect unless I explicitly mean to (I’m not a native english speaker, but it applies to english as well). It’s generally a great thing to have. I know a few people who struggle with being listened to, and honestly, it looks like it sucks.
The only downside I’ve ever seen is that you have to be super honest to yourself about what you can and can not handle, or it can spin out of control quickly. Sometimes others assume you’re capable of anything they ask you to, and you don’t correct them because you think you might get away with it. But when you can’t pull it off, they will be disappointed and not very understanding. So it kinda becomes your job to point out your shortcomings to others early and frequently, which takes some mental energy, and I struggled with it when i was younger. I was very insecure on the inside, while seeming very confident to others. But I learned that if you do it in a competent voice, it just makes you more trustworthy because being honest about your mistakes and shortcomings when other people already think you’re capable is seen as a mature and responsible thing. So it works out in the end.
Completely agree with your suggestion for handling this issue. This is something I’ve experienced most of my life as well and have only started realizing it at work the past few years. As I started working on more complicated subjects with a lot of room for ambiguity and error, I really have to make sure and qualify what I know for certain and what is more speculation in my work conversations.
Imo it’s really the only way to handle it and not go either full psycho narcissist or insane pressure burnout. But learning that humility took me a few tries, ngl. Also, it’s not a really googleable problem and even genuinely complaining about it sounds like humblebragging to many people. Because in the end, it is a very good thing and a privilege, but boy I’ve had some stressful times with it.
(Well, I must say, you mentioned you’re not a native English speaker, but you could fool anyone because your English is crazy good - what is your native language?)
I agree, it’s a real strength and something you can learn to control and use when you need it. It has definitely led to burnout situations for me in the past. For me, I think that comes from wanting to meet the expectations I feel I’ve set, but I’ve struggled to differentiate between expectations that I’m setting for myself vs. what others actually expect. My entire life I’ve worked harder than needed, most likely. Does this sound familiar to you? It’s definitely led to some success for me that I don’t feel is really deserved, but I’m learning to be a little more grateful for it these days :)
Thank you. That’s what years of reddit and hating dubbed media will do for you :) my native language is German, and we do start learning English here pretty early in life. When I was young, we started at 8, but today it’s sometimes even earlier. But sadly since I’m out of school my speaking skills are a little rusty, since I don’t practice them enough.
Yes, I definitely felt that because of the expectations they had, i had to go the extra mile every time or I’d be worse than someone fulfilling already low expectations. But inevitably, you cannot go the extra mile all the time, so you ket some things slide, and they snowball and then you need to work extra extra hard to keep things from spinning out.
But then, many people’s success is earned through way shadier means than “working harder than needed”.
I have really good hand-eye coordination, move very quietly, have fast reflexes, and am good at solving riddles.
I think it sets me up to be talented at a profession which pays very well but is very illegal so it shall go nameless.
Are you a ninja?
If I told you, I’d have to kill you.
I tend to always come second in trivia competitions
I’m great with mechanical puzzles. I apparently have a really good intuition about how things interact.
I only know that I’m unique about it because of a military test my highschool made us take where I scored higher than 99% of people who took the test. I just thought it was the “easy” portion. I’m also pretty good at logic puzzles, but it definitely doesn’t feel as “natural” as mechanical puzzles.
If you’re wondering, no, I didn’t go into engineering because it turns out I’m not really good at math.
With math, is it arithmetic that gives you trouble or the actual symbolic manipulation of mathematics?
I am hot garbage at keeping track of numbers but turn those fuckers into letters and (at least for me) it’s off to the races. Then I just convert everything back to numbers in the last step before jamming it all into a calculator. This method saved my ass in 400-level biochemistry courses. (Annoyed the shit out of the grad students grading my exams, I’m sure…)
You may be better at “math” than you think :]
I assure you, I’m really just not good at math. It just doesn’t click with me the same way physical systems do.
Being bad at math was the short explanation; the long explanation is because pure math is super unintuitive to me, I got low grades in it throughout public school and therefore never pursued a college that would go into it heavily, even though I love the sciences. I ended up just going to my mom’s Alma Mater, which is a liberal art school and therefore didn’t have an engineering department. I actually did end up getting a computational physics degree because I loved my intro to physics class so much. When I could actually relate the formulae to physical systems, I was good. Did great in my upper level calculus classes, too, because I took them in parallel to the physics classes that directly used them. However, the more theoretical classes like linear algebra I barely passed and when it got to really complicated particle/quantum stuff I suffered greatly. Wave functions are a blight upon this world and my electricity and magnetism final made me cry.
Good on you for just casually getting a computational physics degree without inherent math talent… like holy shit that’s impressive!
I have also cried over coursework on linear algebra as well as electricity and magnetism :') Brutal stuff.
Please could you explain a bit more about the process you describe, above? Maybe with some simple examples? I’m woeful at maths but really good with mechanical and physical problems. If there’s a way I can improve upon the former, I’d love to try.
Thanks in advance!
C = BxA
Move A underneath C and swap the equality
B = C/A
A lot of algebra is spatial manipulation.
Mechanical adept here too. I am very good at holding and manipulating 3d objects in my brain, so I can kinda always just tell how something goes together to work.
I lived in Canada for 6 months surviving on nothing but being a medical Guinea pig (I had no working permit and due to anonymity, very little was asked of people participating in medical trials, plus they paid a decent amount especially if pain or discomfort was involved); as part of this I went through a raft of IQ tests (there was always some gambling addiction trial going at UofT for some reason) and found out that, like you, I have exceptional visual intelligence - rotating objects in my head, and figuring out if something would fit together was super skills of mine. In every other way I’m decidedly average.
Wow we’re actually very different there. My visualization skills suck. Like, I’ve tried that thing where you imagine an apple in your head and rotate it, but I can’t even fully visualize a 2d apple. If I’m looking at a system though, I can just understand how it works without visualizing anything about it. Because of that, I did have to draw out some diagrams from the word problems on the aformentioned military test…
Probably a major part to why I’m still not fully convinced I’m actually doing anything out of the ordinary. I’m not using any special skills or anything - the questions on that test felt to me about the same as asking “what would happen if you pushed this wheel from the top of this hill”.
Are you me.?
I have the same situation as you have.
I’m pretty good at sensing the emotions of people around me. It’s not magic like some people think, but an obsessive awareness of small facial and body movements.
Oh, and writing dialogue is super easy for me, not sure why some people have a hard time with it.
deleted by creator
