I read the instructions.
Knowledge: I just try to know a little bit on many subjects, and I have a talent for revealing that knowledge without flaunting. It gives the impression I know more than I do.
Efficiency: I’m a (loose) practitioner of the Getting Things Done methodology. At least I try to use the general principles. And I think it helps that I’m surrounded by fools (at work).
heretic!
This is my secret as well. Whenever I’ve installed a ceiling fan, built a chicken coop, performed a timing belt swap, built a deck, whipped up a Thanksgiving dinner … I always wipe up the blood before letting anyone see what I’ve been up to.
Actually, what seems to impress people is the sheer volume of things I can do well–rarely at the level of master, but I can competently pull off nearly any project I set out on. My secret? Something I heard my grandfather say when I was a wee lad: “Some other dumb sonofabitch figured it out, why can’t you?”
In essence, when something needs to be done I just jump in and do it without thinking about how difficult it might be, and eventually success happens because I am not smart enough to know the task is beyond me. Smarter people hesitate and tend to stick to what they know.
What’s your secret for doing seemingly impressive things with no effort
After a few minutes I just start thinking about baseball.
PowerPoint presentations. The key to any presentation is that the slides are the illustrations, not the presentation. So you follow three simple rules:
- The heading is a sentence describing your point.
- There is a graphic illustrating the point.
- No more than two bullet points.
Steve Jobs did great presentations by following an even more stripped down version of this concept.
I built an Ikea nightstand yesterday - I did it slowly, making sure I was understanding each step correctly, and got a nice nightstand at the end of a couple of hours. Well, I was impressed, anyway. 
Lucky you!
But yeah, high five on the key lime pie trick! 
“People often ask me my secret. I tell them it’s that I still remember how to open a dictionary.” –Cecil Adams
Back in my musician days I couldn’t believe how impressed some people could be with the simplest musical techniques. I’d drive myself crazy practicing some new idea only to get a whoosh from the audience, but go from am to C to G with a straight face while simply singing in tune and they’d react like I was some kind of artist. I still can hardly believe it!
- Practice. Practice, practice and more practice.
- Don’t be afraid to screw it up, especially in practice.
- Accept that you will not be perfect. Practice how to recover from errors.
I’m not a bad cook, but I’ve made plenty of bad dishes. OK, eat the mistakes (or toss if they’re truly foul), make notes in the recipe, try it again another time.
I can get up in front of an auditorium full of people and talk about whatever. The first time I did this (grad school TA) I was pretty nervous. After a few times, no big deal.
Once you really grasp that it’s OK to make mistakes, even when you’re doing whatever it is in front of a group, and you can handle them without getting flustered, people will often perceive it as “effortless” - they remember the smooth recovery, not the mistake that necessitated it.
My secret…don’t let anyone watch.
for example I made some etched glass mugs with very elaborate logos on them, I printed out the logos on a self adhesive transparency and stuck it on the glass, then proceeded to use an xacto knife to trim out the logo, smear etching stuff all over, wait a while, rinse off etching paste, peel off plastic, beautiful result.
My SCA chapter thinks I am some kind of budding artisan. The only thing I can draw and get what I want is a gun.
As others have said, music is one of the easiest ways to impress people with no effort. In fact, it seems that the more effort one puts in, the less impressed people are. People will be impressed by something I play that’s very simple, but I’ll also have pieces that have greater complexity and are difficult to play and not nearly as impressed. The thing is, I think a lot of that complexity is lost on non-musicians because they won’t recognize odd time-signatures or unusual scales as easily, they’ll just judge it on whether they like it or not and, because those parts are complex and unusual, it’s probably less like what they’re used to hearing and likely to enjoy.
I also work as a programmer and, apparently, some of the stuff I write is thoroughly amazing. But, again, I think it’s just people not really understanding the level of complexity. There have been some changes I’ve been able to make quickly and they apparently expected it to take days or weeks and so they’re shocked, but they don’t realize that it’s just modifying a constant or changing a few conditionals or something.
And the Rubik’s Cube too. Just that I can even solve it is apparently impossible. I had just decided I wanted to learn how to do it one day, found a few websites, and practiced for a couple hours. Now I can solve it pretty quickly, and much of it while not looking even though it’s just seeing one state, knowing the algorithm to get to the next state then applying it with some muscle memory.
Really, I think these sorts of things are just a level of disparity between people who don’t know anything about it and thinking it’s more complex than it is and an expert that is so used to it as to be second nature.
Practice, training, preparation. The acrobats and performers at Cirque du Soleil make seemingly impossible things look easy because they practiced constantly for months, and had years of preparation and training.
I did gymnastics as a kid, I’ve done martial arts for over half my life, I try to work out at least 2–3 days a week, and I pick up new physical skills as often as possible. I can and have learned the basics of a new sport or skill in an afternoon. I’m average sized, moderately muscular, not very impressive looking, but I can do a standing backflip, throw around anyone who isn’t an MMA fighter or a jailhouse yard-monster without much effort, and can help someone move without throwing my back out. (The latter of which is probably the most impressive thing when you’re pushing 40.)
I don’t think I’m a “natural athlete” or anything like that. I’m kind of a klutz. I knock stuff over, trip over things, bark my shins. I can do all those things because of doing gymnastics when young — which is probably the best foundation in movement of any sport imaginable — trying my hand at tons of different things, and practicing, practicing, practicing if I don’t get it right away. Learn enough different things, and you start being able to adapt similar skills to serve new ones, and you recognize the underlying patterns of movement quickly.
Same thing with speeches. I started doing competitive speech in my last year of high school. I sucked at first, and was constantly nervous even in front of a handful of people. When I later got a job as a teacher, that practice helped immensely. Being a teacher is pretty much like giving a speech (with audience participation) every class. I’ve since spoken to audiences of several hundred people, occasionally in Japanese — which is not my native language. While I can’t say that it’s no big deal to talk in front of a lot of people, it seems to be much, much easier for me than for most. Practice, training, preparation.
This. At work I am apparently the InDesign genius because I can tell people how to do the most obscure things within a minute or two.
Actually, when I’m saying “Er, just let me finish this and I’ll come over,” I’m Googling. At least 95% of the time I can find the right menu or keyboard shortcut straight away and then saunter over and say, “Hmm, I think that’s under the Type menu… yep here we go… Done.”
Why can nobody Google?