A couple:
Programming: I never took programming classes, but somehow my friend convinced me to put together the data sets for a BASIC program he was making for math class. Somehow I did it without knowing how to do it. A long time ago though I decided that computers would strictly be my hobby, not by career. I regret that now though. This was years before the Y2K bug and IT as a major in college.
Gardening: I inherited my mother’s green thumb, but I hate plants.
This. Except that I actually have an adult child. I was quite in demand as a babysitter when I was a youngster, and since it was the only way I had to make money, that’s what I did. I was very good at it, and both the kids and the parents liked me. But I always hated doing it.
In as noncreepy a way as possible, I’m a good manipulator, I can see what people want, and give it to them or tease them with it until they agree with me.
I’m great at commission based sales (Car sales, advertising sales, etc), but I hate it. It’s a high pressure environment, and while I can function… I don’t like to, and I don’t have any interest in doing it anymore. Despite the fact that I’d make far more in a commission based job than I will at the one I’m about to start, I just want that kind of lifestyle, I’ve seen what people end up like and I don’t want to be 45, over worked, over stressed and a drunk with three bad organs.
In that same vein, I’m also really good at calming people down. It was a skill I had to develop living with my mother (Stories abound… :rolleyes:), and I just don’t like it anymore. When there’s a fight, if it’s at all possible I ignore it, and unless I have an interest in it turning out one way or the other, I do everything I can to avoid intervening, I’ve just been party to too much drama in the past, and I’m done with it.
I have a fair degree of musical talent (so does my whole family) and was forced to take piano and voice when I was a kid. My teachers always seemed enthusiastic about my ability; but I never had any interest in it because I loathed every aspect of performing so much. I quit as soon as I could (which wasn’t until my mom got tired of fighting me on it when I was a teenager). I do love to sing but only when no one is around.
I am awesome at baking and used to do it constantly, but I don’t anymore because I stopped eating sugar and grains myself for general health reasons, and I feel like I’m poisoning people if I give them baked goods.
Golf, and as a bowler in cricket. Not interested in either.
Technical writing.
Apparently I am very good at it, judging from feedback received from my coworkers. They always want me to proofread their reports.
I guess I am pretty good at technical writing. But I hate doing it.
My daughter could swim like a champ and was being groomed for the Olympics. As soon as she discovered boys that fell by the wayside.
My son has perfect pitch and can play piano and harmonica with no training but refuses to sing around people and never wanted to take music lessons.
I can’t really think of anything that I’m good at that I don’t want to do. If I try something and am good at it I want to keep doing it. And if I try something and, through practice, develop more than adequate competency then likewise.
I could say that I’m good in the kitchen and after forty-three years of feeding people it’s only occasionally now that I feel like cooking up a storm. We settle for sandwiches a lot. We can’t eat as much as we used to and it’s not as much fun to produce an all-stops-out dinner with only one other person to enjoy it.
Math.
I slept through all my high school math classes and still earned high marks. I’m very good at understanding theories and concepts, but I have trouble answering questions with ambiguous answers. A math oriented career would have been perfect for me.
However, I hated math so much I went to law school (the Mecca of questions with ambiguous answers.) Even law professors will avoid teaching something that requires us to solve a math problem. For cases with math we can always assume that the lower court’s calculation was correct.
I can sell ice to an Eskimo, as they say. I worked as a service rep many years ago for Ma Bell when we had to sell phones, and I could outperform everyone else all the time. I hate selling, and always felt like I was pulling the wool over peoples’ eyes. We were told not to put our hands in the customers’ pockets, so to speak, but I could tell who really couldn’t afford the shit I charmed them into.
Now I use my people skills at the library, and there’s no selling involved there!
I, too, was good at math through high school but have never had any interest in it beyond what was mandatory. I took grade 11 math in grade 10; in British Columbia you didn’t need grade 12 math to graduate at the time. My plan was to have two math-free (and gym-free) years. Then my family moved to Alberta and I needed grade 12 math to graduate, so I took it in grade 11. I got great grades, but just didn’t give a shit about math at all.
For a while in middle school I was interested in becoming a writer, and seemed to have a knack for it, but have long since lost interest. I apparently still have the knack for it. In my last semester in acting school, we each had to write a short film; the best one in each section would be produced as one of our final projects. I threw one together in a few hours, and it was picked. In a different class we did a similar thing with writing outlines for an improvised short, and mine was picked for that project too. I was the lead in the latter, but was in the former for about forty seconds. They both turned out really well, and (putting aside humility conventions) I nailed my final live performances. I was somewhat annoyed when, after the grad performances and screenings, that I received nearly as many compliments for my writing as for my acting. I was very annoyed when so many of my former classmates kept pestering me to write things for/with them.
I could likely be very good at endurance sporting events (my birth mother holds several trophies in running events of that sort, and I don’t tire easily at all), but find running to be deadly boring, and bicycling to be very dangerous, around here at least. I am interested in motor sports endurance races, but that of course costs $$$.
Customer service.
I run my own business, part of which entails developing and selling high ticket gear for musicians. I love the development part, feel “meh” about the selling part, but really despise the customer service and support part, so much so that I sometimes let the phones go to voicemail if I see a customer calling yet again (I usually call them right back though!). Yet across the board, all my customers have expressed the opinion that my company has, hands down, the best customer support they have ever experienced from a company. They sometime even want to hire me to do custom support work for them. I always turn them down.
Acting.
I can really put myself into a character–feel the way he feels, do what he would do. It was really cool at first, until the first time I got stuck–then it was incredibly scary. Never again.
I wouldn’t say that I have musical talent, but rather a large amount of training. I started at age 5 and was checked out totally by age 16. Made the All-State orchestra as one of the 8 best violists in Ohio as a HS soph and quit the next year.
I probably would have been a pretty good high school wrestler but didn’t have the slightest interest. Track was then (and still is) my reason for existence.
Was a National Merit Scholar, very good at math. I teach math now. Science…meh. I probably could have named my field and been good at it but it didn’t fascinate me like numbers do. In the 8th grade I invented my own college football computer rankings system that later I found out was essentially unique. By contrast I struggled with everything but physics.
Care to elaborate? Did you essentially “become” the character?
This. I can gruntle the most disgruntled. I can charm the most difficult of customers. I have actually had someone offer ME a hug and invite me to visit her if I was in her neighborhood after I was “deputized” to tell her that our valet department had badly dented her brand new Cadillac (while my manager watched, slack-jawed in amazement.) I hate doing this shit, but I’m good at it.
In my residency I did a gastroenterology rotation where I got to do some colonoscopies. The very first time I did one, the doc said he had seen second-year GI fellows who weren’t as good at driving the scope as I was. By the end of the month I was a pro.
I ended up not getting privileges to do them, because I think a general internist like me has no business doing any procedure he doesn’t do on a fairly regular basis, and I can’t imagine anything more boring than spending several hours a week running a camera up somebody’s pooper.
I don’t think I have a “great” talent, but I had a flair for 2D art. I enjoyed drawing as a kid, took art classes through junior high and high school. It was an easy class, so that partly explains why I stuck with it.
I remember saying I wanted to be a comic book artist when I grew up. Now I sometimes doodle during slow meetings or scribble crayons with my kids but that’s all my talent came to.
Semi-related, I apparently am fluent in tech-speak, at least judging by how many times I’ve been asked by bosses to explain things to the tech staff. I’m good at diplomatically explaining exactly how their stupid program is screwing up this time…and I also seem to be one of the few people who actually understands that the program isn’t capriciously producing errors, but that there’s virtually always a cause/effect relationship to the bugs - this is simply an extension at being a good pattern finder.
But I really don’t like communicating with the tech people. I find most of them smug and irritating, and they really don’t like having errors pointed out. Sometimes they fix things based on what I’ve told them, but of course I never get any credit for that.
Football, apparently. I was forced to play a couple times in Phys Ed and even though I wasn’t very familiar with the rules, the teacher wanted me for the varsity squad. I had, and still have, absolutely zero interest in football.