What are you really good at?

In My Humble Opinion
1

And, what is it like to be really good at something?

Mostly, I am just in awe of people who can do something even fairly well. Like, I have no idea what it feels like to be able to play a musical instrument or think alternately in two different languages, or throw a runner out from shortstop, or put frosting on a cake.

I’m not really good at anything. If I learn the rudiments of something, I tend to add it to my list of things about which I’m a generalist, and quit rather than face the prospect of humiliation at failure.

2

Being a generalist is actually something not everybody is good at :slight_smile:

I’m good at matching a bunch of data from different sources and finding out where the mismatches are, and at communicating the results in a way that’s easy to understand.

I’m also good at process improvement. In my last job as a synthetic chemist, I was given a recipe that took 5 days of work, very dangerous conditions and very expensive materials, and in less than a month I’d whittled it down to 2 days, home-kitchen conditions and less than a quarter of the cost, with a higher yield. In my job as a consultant, I’ve been called by colleagues working in areas of expertise not my own to help them get unstuck when they had a process that they knew scratched but couldn’t figure a way to improve (they were too close to it, basically). People tend to think that “process improvement” is something which happens only in production lines, but I’ve never found a process that couldn’t use some tweaking… (that doesn’t mean I always jump on them: I did pay attention to “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”).

3

I’m good at organizing things. It comes from years in management at a large tech company and my program management skills I suppose.

Last year I thought we needed a film festival in my small town and nobody wanted to work on it, so I put it together myself. I had never done anything like that before, but once I broke the project down into discrete tasks it was fairly easy to pull off. People were amazed that I had organized it alone, but it really wasn’t all that hard to do. I learned a lot in the process, and it will be much easier next year, and the year after that.

Anyone can learn a language or learn a musical instrument, but to get really good at something takes lots and lots of practice. You have to push yourself to get to that level, and most people don’t find that it’s worth it. Set a goal for yourself and once you achive that goal set another one. It may take a few years and 10,000 hours of practice, but you will become very good at it if you stick with it. It helps if you have a passion for something or the inherent motivation to be very good at something. YMMV.

4

I’m really good at writing HTML code by hand. Good, valid, clean code.

5

I can play guitar well enough to get paid to play it and teach others.

6

I won spelling bees all through school. (And doggone if I didn’t just spell “shcool!” Gaudere’s Law is a monster!)

I also got very good grades in logic and math. I can still do ordinary “real world” integral calculus (e.g. figuring the center of gravity of a pyramid.)

And I’ll meet anybody here in a pizza-eating contest! (Not volume: speed!)

7

I am insanely good at removing ovaries from fruit flies.

No one cares.

8

Sometimes I wonder if I was really good at something or the other people around me were just bad at it. I seemed to have a knack for solving production problems very quickly and trouble shooting mechanical things. I excelled at math but dropped out of school very young. I also had a weird propensity for remembering statistics, all kinds of stats. The obsessive part of this went away as an adult but aspects of it continued to linger.

 I also excelled at most everything physical but I placed no value on that, it was always a sore spot with me.
9

I know American Sign Language really well for a hearing person. Some Deaf people don’t believe me when I tell them I’m hearing. When I was an interpreter, I was really good.

I have a very good memory. When I wrote papers in college, and wanted a quote (long before Google), I could remember the book in which I’d read it, the place (floor, shelf, and side of shelf) it had been, although occasionally it had been moved, but never far, and then how far into the book it was, and which side of the leaf, and top or bottom of page, even if I’d read it five or six years earlier. I can also recall whole passages from movies I’ve seen once.

I once volunteered for some memory experiment in college, when people taking basic psychology had to volunteer for experiments. I had to take a test though, because they didn’t want outliers as subjects, since the experiment was on mnemonics. People with memory impairment, or who didn’t need mnemonics would mess up the data. I was an outlier with a memory that was too good.

When I was a kid I used to memorize lists for fun.

I’m a really good cook. Not only does everything I make taste good, but I have basic recipes memorized, so I can make pretty much any basic thing without a cookbook. I know a basic muffin recipe, for example, and can vary it to make carrot muffins, banana muffins, blueberry muffins, chocolate muffins, etc. I also make really good things with yeast. I credit my aunt with that. She is a totally amazing cook, and she taught me. She never cracks a cookbook. She can taste something at a pitch-in, and reproduce it without getting the recipe. That’s how well she knows her seasonings and other stuff.

Those are about the only things I really excel at. I know a few other quirky things: I can do arithmetic in my head, including division, but I suck at higher math. I can solve the Rubik’s cube, but I’m not a speed solver; I can juggle, but I don’t work at it anymore, so even though I used to be able to perform, I can’t anymore. I just amuse my son’s friends. I can draw little cartoons and things, but I don’t have ideas often enough to be a cartoonist, and I never took lessons, so i can’t produce stuff on demand, and couldn’t really be a commercial artist.

I just thought of another. I’m good at finding lost stuff. When other people at work lose something, they come get me to help look, and I’m almost always the one who finds it. My husband always asks for my help finding stuff a well. My mother recently called me over the phone to talk her through finding something, and found it.

10

I’m good at debugging. Computer programs mostly, but lots of other things as well.

In part I seem to have a general knack at it. More than once, I’ve looked at a page of code that someone’s been beating their head against for hours and instantly identified the error, even before really reading the code at all. But I know lots of the common errors and can identify them by sight.

I’m also good at harder bugs, which require a form of detective skills and the scientific method. You search for clues, come up with a hypothesis, and then run experiments to confirm that hypothesis. The fix is generally easy once you’ve identified the root cause, but root-causing is hard. One of the common deficiencies we see among junior programmers is that they stop debugging once they have a fix that seems to work; they haven’t spent the effort on rigorously ruling out other possibilities, or even figuring out why their “fix” even fixes the problem (granted, we’re all sometimes under extreme time pressure and it may be better to ship a possible fix than nothing).

Electronic stuff isn’t my profession but I’m a reasonably advanced hobbyist and I’m pretty good at debugging issues here as well.

11

I know a whole lot about different computer applications and platforms, even ones that I have never seen before. I am end-of-the-line support for a multi-billion dollar a year production facility and I have to. Large databases are my specialty but I know several programming languages as well and can generally read almost any modern ones if I need to.

My real power though is to just make things start working just by showing up. Seriously, it works over half the time and I have quite the reputation because of it. I used to tell people that I didn’t do anything but now I lay my hands on non-cooperative systems, close my eyes and say a short chant before I tell them to try again. It freaks people out when it magically starts working again.

12

Baking pie. Especially apple pie – two crust or Dutch.

13

Unintentionally bringing out the worst in people. :slight_smile:

14

I used to be amazingly good at math, music and art. I never got a wrong answer on a math test (without studying), I could sight read some scary-difficult music, and I always knew how to draw. But that was then, and these days I have trouble tying my own shoes. Things change.

15

I’m really good at copywriting, i.e., business writing that’s intended to sell a product, service or idea.

By “good” I mean both coherent and fast. I once wrote a full-fledged speech for a U.S. representative with one hour of research and two hours of writing, and neither my boss, the congressional aide, nor the congressman himself made any major change to it.

I consider it more of a skill rather than talent. I’ve written literally thousands of pieces. Some of them stank, a few won awards. Most of them were adequate.

That’s the nice thing about doing something for a living. You don’t think in terms of success or failure. You think in terms of doing it well enough the first time that you don’t have to redo it. (Brain surgeons, astronauts, bomb disposal specialists, etc. may disagree with me here.)

16

Pinball. Back in the late 70s, when arcades were lined with row after row of pinball machines, I drew crowds gathering around me to watch.

I can’t think of any other skill in which I come close to approaching expert level.
mmm

17

I can do the boogaloo.

18

Math. I never studied because I learned it all in class. There was only one exception (a grad course in algebraic geometry).

19

I am one of those people that doesn’t excel at any one thing, but I’m pretty good at quite a few things.

I have a head for the retention of trivial bullshit.
I read and retain history pretty well.
I can now play guitar reasonably well.
I have decent analytical/logic deductive/inductive skills.
I write well, when I can be bothered to make myself do it.
I can cook quite well for being untrained, but my knife skills suck. Ask me to batonnet carrots and I will be lost.
I am all around well read.
I can be an insufferable wine snob. Well, not so much anymore (wait…I can SPIT IT OUT INTO A BUCKET!)
I have an excellent knack for memorizing stats about cars…horsepower numbers, torque pounds feet, number of airbags, how features work in cars…I’ve always loved them. I still want a fully restored 1967 GTO coupe, 389, three deuces and four on the floor…a lot like this one: https://www.google.com/search?q=1967+gto&espv=2&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjp86WT2InTAhUD44MKHWFtD7oQ_AUIBigB&biw=1920&bih=974#imgrc=V0fWryJ1XzL9rM:

Finally, when the time comes, which with my cirrhosis I fear will be much sooner rather than later, I hope to die a good death: no regrets, no outstanding lies, with nothing other than departing wishes of love to those that care about me.

EDIT: I just remembered, you couldn’t get three deuce carbs on the 389 for that year…you had to take a Quadrajet four barrel or get a 400 cid motor. Okay, I’ll take the 400 then!

20

I’ve always been an excellent speller. In 1st grade I won our “class spelling bee” with “sesquicentennial”. I also went all the way to the state finals in 5th grade. I attribute my ability to spell to visually seeing the word in my head, as if I had mentally written it down.