Didn’t fail, I withdrew from Mechanical engineering. Wasn’t what I expected, and the high level math wiped me out. I thought I would be a perfect path for me because I can fix shit too. It was funny, we are in the middle of a move and had to do some stuff to our old house. I just did not have the time at all, and a lot of it was a two man job. Anyway, I hired two ‘handymen’ and a day did not go by that I was not helping them, especially loaning tools. It became kinda funny. “Of course I have that, it’s in the tool shed that you are currently working on”
Which reminds me, another thing I’m terrible at is organizing my tools. I probably have two or three copies of every tool I have because I never can seem to find it when I need it and I end up back at the Home Depot finding another one. There was a day about a decade ago I gathered and organized them all together, but they’ve somehow managed to grow legs and scatter since.
I have terrible penmanship. I had been working on improving it for a couple of years of course my recent injury has been a huge setback. I’m hoping that the nature of the injury will allow me ‘relearn’ writing.
Yeah, that can really be frustrating. When I was creating my woodshop, organization was the first thing on the agenda. There was nothing in there that I couldn’t lay my hands on immediately.
I’m a little better off in that department. I too compose and record, and generally do my own vocals (though my wife is a better singer and can sometimes be persuaded to do lead vocals).
I have no illusions that I’m a good singer, but I can hold a tune reasonably well. I’ve sung a number of lead vocals with bands over the years and nobody has thrown rotten fruit yet. Mind you I would never put myself forward as featured lead singer: I was always the relief / contrast guy…
Heh. I’m down to two 1/2 “ hammer drills from 3. At the new house I bought proper storage for in the garage. Nice big roll around tool cabinet too. I have most of my tools at the new house. The last count was 96 screwdrivers. Got about 10 more to come. 6 hammers used for different purposes. When I used to frame, I always carried two hammers. They can do different things and work together as well. BUT I am determined to keep this organized now. Couldn’t really do that at the other house.
Cooking. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m bad at it, and have zero interest in it. So I don’t do it, basically.
I suck at art.
Learning a language. I struggled with Spanish in HS. Had to take it in college, too, and barely passed the class. I don’t remember a single thing, other than uno, dos, tres. What a colossal waste of time.
In academics, math.
In life, probably holding my tongue.
I’ve been to Mexico enough that I can puzzle it out. Funny story, coming back from Mexico one time, at customs, the angry man asked if we where US citizens. My wife and I both said si, we realized it and just cracked up. It wasn’t deliberate, we had just been in Mexico for 2 weeks and si = yes.
I did try to learn German. Ummm. Sometimes in life you realize that that’s not your gig. Old dog new tricks and all of that.
I would have put singing if I wasn’t so bad at fishing. But I can’t carry a tune at all if I am singing above a whisper. I’m slightly better when I am barely not whispering, but then people think my voice is too breathy.
At regular volume, I wouldn’t even be a good contrast singer except in Icelandic pop which has multiple instances of extremely bad male singing contrasting with the clean female lead. Or maybe I could be that guy from the B-52s. Or maybe I can be one of those gimmicky singers that has two styles.
I have a terrible sense of direction. Coming out of a parking lot in a somewhat unfamiliar place, I will turn the wrong way.
I don’t do arts or crafts. I have no patience for any of it, and I’m not good at it.
But the thing that bothers me the most is that I’m terrible at mingling and making small-talk in an environment where I’m not very familiar with the people, say a wedding that’s not for a family member. I’d rather just sit at my table and people-watch.
Nobody is bad at fishing. You may not be good at catching, but fishing is easy. Unless your attempts at fishing involve getting your line wrapped around overhanging tree branches, hooking your cousin in the head on your backcast, casting the tip section of your rod out into the lake, or losing your grip on your rod on the cast and throwing the whole thing into the lake. Yeah, I’ve done all that. But I still enjoy fishing.
I have a BA in Spanish and I’ll have you know I use it quite regularly to complete crossword clues. 
I’m terrible at mental math. Written math I did well in - I earned As, though it was not my best subject. But very basic mental arithmetic is a struggle for me. I have poor working memory.
I’m also terrible at navigation. I’m constantly lost. It’s just a fact of my life. I can drive somewhere 100 times and still not really know where it is.
I find history fascinating and will sometimes do deep dives into different topics, and then almost immediately forget everything I learned.
Also, anytime you start timing me for any reason I become useless. Games with a timer countdown? Forget about it. I just panic and freak out.
Strangely, enipla, one of my best friends had the opposite problem with engineering. He got his degree from NC State University and went on to work for a couple firms before settling with (and retiring from) a municipality in western NC. He desperately wanted to get his PE license and would come stay with me every few years to take a two-day pre-exam review class. His math skills were impeccable, but he just couldn’t solve the practical problems on the exam. He just had a natural aptitude for math and numbers in general, but ask him how many apples were left after Johnny took two and Suzie took three and he froze.
Math. I barely scraped through high school geometry and going any further was out of the question. I was interested in science and in medicine, but to pursue either of those, I had to be highly skilled in math.
It has always bugged me that I couldn’t master this discipline. So many other students seemed to grasp mathematics and moved on to calculus and beyond, so why couldn’t I? So now and then I sit down to the computer and Google up some basic algebra and geometry online tutorials and try to make myself learn. But I get to about screen 4 of the tutorial and my brain glazes over. I guess I was standing behind the door when math skills were handed out.
I also suck at social skills and am ashamed to say that the basic life skills that Penny drills into Sheldon Cooper were good for me to listen to.
I tried Khan Academy algebra and it didn’t take long before I was lost. It didn’t hinder me career-wise at all. I had to take a statistics class for my MLS, but didn’t have any problem with it.
I’m pretty good at singing, except…the songs I sing start to sound alike. One or two songs, and it’s “he’s really good.”. A few more and it’s “wait a minute, all his songs sound kinda alike.”. Hearing recordings I can see what they’re saying. I’ve worked on changing things up a bit, but just end up frustrated. There ain’t no such thing as “productive struggle" with me; I have a very low tolerance for frustration, and it’s as bad as 60 as it was at 6.
It’s odd. I got confused on my start at college, and started to feel that maybe fine art would be the way to go instead of engineering (both my parents are artists). I took a computer class, I despised it (this was punch cards, there is not a person in the world that does not despise them).
But I ended up as a GIS Application Engineer. That’s my title. So, lots of math/engineering, programming. And art for cartography. You have to know layouts and colors composition and such. The math is pretty straight forward stuff. The programming… well… I would like to write an app in the same development tool more than once before needing a new IDE.
It’s really a mix of everything I can bring though. It has worked out very well.
I’m gonna retire before 2026. I see the sail on the horizon.
Preach. Lucky I don’t get lost coming out of the bathroom. One of the worst things in the military was going on field exercises where we had to go through a map and compass exercise. Even with a compass, I was terrible at it. I used to palm it off: “Petty officer Smith, you lead us through it this this time”. I learned at a young age that walking into the woods without a trail to follow was a really bad idea.
Looking at other responses: I’m fairly adept at languages. I’m a good and intuitive cook. I have (or had) a good singing voice but was too shy to sing in public. I’m really good at troubleshooting problems. I was an excellent personnel manager. My handwriting is fairly illegible and getting worse as I get older. I’m terrible at suffering fools and idiots. I swim like an anvil.
I am an absolute disaster at languages. I have been living in Montreal for 57 years; I’ve taken courses and I still cannot carry on a conversation. I can read French newspapers fairly well and read about half the Maigret books in French. I can usually manage to express myself not utterly badly, but if someone speaks French to me, it might as well be Greek.
Although I took 3 years of German in college, it is much the same there. I have spent over a year and half living in Zurich, but still cannot do much in German.
Me, too. That’s a reason i haven’t considered moving to a non-English-speaking country.