I'm frequently surprised by the amount of seemingly ordinary skills I picked up as a bored child that other people didn't. This was an obvious way to solve those "spot the difference" pictures in magazines.
I wonder what skills other people picked up that I didn't.
Some recent example of things I shared:
+ When your belt buckle hangs a little loosely on the front of your pants. You can hook the buckle's prong onto the front button of your pants and it'll stay put. So many people are excited to learn this.
+ Putting a jacket or any open-front garment on quickly. I saw someone struggling to maneuver their second arm in a tight jacket behind their back. I explained that if they hold their jacket out in front of them, put their hands in the arm holds, and slide their arm in further as they swing it around their body they'll get it on in a moment. It's also more stylish. They were so surprised.
My odd claim to fame which is hard to garner praise for is that when I was a kid I always followed a certain pattern when I did something on a left or right foot. I always tried to even it out. So if I pinched my left toes, then I would do my right. But then I would undo that by going right then left. And then I would undo that by undoing the entire thing: right left left right. And the pattern went on:
LRRLRLLRRLLRLRRL…
and so on. It seemed easy enough to remember because you would just undo what you did last.
A few decades later and I learn that’s the Thue Morse word (1) which has many interesting properties like being overlap free. Unfortunately it didn’t give me any kind of advantage when studying combinatorics on words. Just a weird “wait… where have I seen this before?” moment.
I did the exact same thing, due to a feeling of wanting to "even" things out between right and left. Blew my mind that it was a known pattern; after watching this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prh72BLNjIk&t=549s
I'm always reminded that we are all more alike than we realise :)
> When your belt buckle hangs a little loosely on the front of your pants. You can hook the buckle's prong onto the front button of your pants and it'll stay put. So many people are excited to learn this.
Yep. And there is a special vertical prong keeper tab on some trousers for exactly this purpose.
Some of us are born with small frenula of the tongue (or we undergo tongue-tie surgery as kids) and can thus perform Khecari mudra without the traditional self-mutilation used by yoga-masters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khecar%C4%AB_mudr%C4%81 This can be useful for cleaning tonsil stones or post-nasal drip, but of course you must do so discretely since people would consider that absolutely disgusting
If you want to read out loud for long stretches of time and you hate taking breaks to catch your breath: you can read out loud while inhaling too! (It feels and sounds super weird though so this isn't very useful in practice.)
And here's a party trick related to OP's super power. Pick a distant object and cross your eyes so as to see it double, preferably with the two doubles distant from each other (i.e., cross your eyes significantly). Then, alternately switch between staring at the left double, and the right double. If you do it right, it will look like your eyes are moving in a bizarre alien way.
> I'm frequently surprised by the amount of seemingly ordinary skills I picked up as a bored child that other people didn't. This was an obvious way to solve those "spot the difference" pictures in magazines.
Conversely, I'm amazed by the amount of things I discover as an adult are not common experiences or skills for people, despite being considered as such. This includes, for example, having an inner voice (which I do), or ability to visualize things in your head (which I don't).
Wrt. the latter, when I learned as an adult that some people actually can conjure up images in their mind on demand[0], and conversely that aphantasia is a thing, it took me few more years to connect that back to some early experiences in childhood - being bored out of my mind by some well-known novels that my parents and teachers found particularly engaging. Specifically, the ones rich in descriptions of scenery. They'd say that's the best part, what makes the story rich and immersive, and that's what imagination is for and those books are good for exercising it. Meanwhile, I'd feel ashamed and wonder what the fuck are they talking about, while skimming to find where the descriptions end so I can resume reading from there. Well, it turns out what they said was true for them, but is not true for people like me, who can't visualize to save their life.
Well, except in dreams. Which makes the whole thing even more fascinating.
> Some recent example of things I shared:
Interesting. I somehow managed to never learn either, so thanks! Ironically, I realize now I've probably seen people do the jacket swing trick hundreds of times, and yet it never registered in my mind as a distinct technique, much less one that I could learn.
EDIT:
One such skill I didn't pick up until my wife taught me, and that I know many (most?) people don't know, is how to correctly pour liquids out of rectangular containers with off-centre openings. Think a milk box, or 5L jug, or fuel canister. Turns out, you shouldn't flip them to give the liquid the shortest path to destination, but the opposite - have it flow alongside the entire top edge of the container. This gives you steadier flow, and you'll spill less. I still find it counterintuitive, but it works.
--
[0] - Fun fact: that makes "undressing someone with your eyes" a literal ability for them too.
>> Well, it turns out what they said was true for them, but is not true for people like me, who can't visualize to save their life.
I used to be exactly like this - I could not visualize anything. Which was very perplexing for young me - I was astonishingly good at math (winning some country level math competitions even) but could not get past some arbitrary but somehow low level geometry problems. Then it struck me - I could not see the solutions in my head, only on paper, which drastically limited my search space.
But latley after years od doing other thing (including more artsy stuff like drawing) I discovered that I was wrong - its it possible to learn, its just that some people gets this faster and with little effort. For me it was just a other few thousend hours of doing staff that accidentally expanded my visualization ability and then "miracle" happend.
The same was with my supposed tone deafness - guess what, I only believed my self info being tone deaf (real tone deafness is very bery rare). I just was lazy in this departament (in building my ability to perceive tones).
I wonder what skills other people picked up that I didn't.
Some recent example of things I shared:
+ When your belt buckle hangs a little loosely on the front of your pants. You can hook the buckle's prong onto the front button of your pants and it'll stay put. So many people are excited to learn this.
+ Putting a jacket or any open-front garment on quickly. I saw someone struggling to maneuver their second arm in a tight jacket behind their back. I explained that if they hold their jacket out in front of them, put their hands in the arm holds, and slide their arm in further as they swing it around their body they'll get it on in a moment. It's also more stylish. They were so surprised.