Ok, I might as well go first: I wish I could draw. Not at the level where I could make photorealistic portraits, but I’ve always been envious of those who are able to scetch something together in a few minutes that perfectly captures what they want to convey. Sometimes words aren’t enough to express what I want to say, and for those situations I would love to have a simple drawing do the talking for me.
Focusing on the things I need to actually do.
I swear, if even if I was forced to do something at gunpoint, I’d manage to get distracted anyway.
I wish I could speak a lot of languages fluently.
This is my answer also. I wish I was multi-lingual.
I’m regularly on calls with people for whom English is not their primary language. Almost without fail they apologize for their poor English. I regularly tell those people, “please don’t apologize, you do me that courtesy of communicating with me in my native tongue. I am completely unable to reciprocate that courtesy.”
I’d love to be fluent in Spanish, French, German.
Look into Comprehensible Input. Dreaming Spanish is a great channel/site.
It’s really not difficult to do per se, it just takes a LOT of time. 1500+ hours. But if you can replace the time you spend watching YouTube videos and doomscrolling, you’ll get there eventually. Especially once you reach the point of understanding media in the language you’re learning. You can then go mindlessly watch YouTube again… but in that language lmao.
Check out this playlist for an explanation of the method (turn on subtitles) https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlpPf-YgbU7GrtxQ9yde-J2tfxJDvReNf , TL;DW don’t study the language. Don’t do grammar/vocab by rote. Literally just listen to a crap ton of the language. You will learn grammar/vocab naturally with repetition in context. But you must listen/watch at a level you can understand. That starts with content with a lot of hand gestures and simple stories, where maybe you don’t understand the words but you understand the meaning by the rest of the context. After a hundred hours or so you can move on to content with less context clues, and after maybe 400-600 hours start with media meant for native speakers.
That’s the problem with native lingua franca speakers. They don’t have a foreign language that they really have to learn.
If you don’t speak English people are mostly limited to their own country. German is worthless in France. So we all need to learn English, while you don’t have a lot of benefit of actually learning other languages.
To show my point: My team at work is spread over most of Europe. We don’t have an English native speaker in the team and there are maybe a small handful of them in the whole company. Still, we all speak English at work, because it’s the only language everyone knows.
I’ve been using italki.com to learn Russian. It’s pretty cool.
Not op, but French, Russian, and Japanese. They’re all hard for Americans to learn (vs, say, Spanish or German).
Other than ALL, Spanish would be very useful. Japanese so I can watch Anime and not miss half of it because I’m reading subtitles. French so I can cuss at you and sound like I’m quoting a love song. German so I can quote you a love song and sound like I’m cussing at you. And Chinese (mandarin?) because that has a lot of business opportunity.
I literally wish I had the ability to practice.
That’s really what all my other answers to this come down to. I would love to write better, be a better woodworker, play music, learn languages, learn programming languages, etc. But my mind just… slides right off it. I can’t bring myself to put in the time necessary to cultivate literally any skill.
This may be old advice, and I can’t speak for music or languages (where I myself have the same issue) but for woodworking and programming this is my experience: Once I get some idea for something I want to build, that becomes the goal of the project, not learning the skill itself. It could be carving a small model boat, or writing a sudoku solver, but at least for my part, once I get caught up in some project, I have a hard time letting it go. That’s as opposed to if I sit down and try to systematically learn a skill.
Some suggestions for projects off the top of my head:
- Some kind of simple encryption/decryption method.
- A nice wooden box to put something nice in (possibly without visible metal parts)
- A sudoku solver
- Model car (maybe with wheels and movable doors)
- A little “river steamer” with a rubber-band driven “propeller” (don’t know what the wheel on the back of a river steamer is called)
- A “peg solitaire” solver (because I was really frustrated at not being able to solve it)
The point is just to find something else that interests you, that can motivate you to learn the skill you want :) good luck!
Wow, this was cool to read! I definitely use the goal of the project to motivate myself to learn how to complete it, but I never realized it until you laid it out. I understand what OP says about the skill “sliding off” but the project is usually complete before that happens and only becomes an issue on revisiting it later. Like my Magic Mirror project that I completed but it’s using the Pi and some software that I don’t remember now. But the mirror is still great, hooked up to a PC with wallpaper engine running.
See a lot of comments here about creative skills like drawing or singing, and I feel a little bit privileged having skill in both and more besides, on the creative side.
But I can’t really feel good about it, because I have serious problems with math and strict, rule-based stuff.
I really wish I was more logical and structured. I also lack a lot in the department of executive function, being so chaotic and creative. I am really bad at most everything that would actually get me a decent wage. The creative skills are worth nothing (in the sense of getting paid) if you can’t manage to stick to deadlines or sell yourself as an employee or a freelancer, and I keep getting into deep trouble due to miscalculating and misestimating my budgets, timespans, conceptualizing bigger picture when I am thrown into doing small picture stuff, or seeing the small pictures when I’m working with the big picture.
But it’s pretty interesting and fun seeing these different kind of responses. I guess there’s a little bit of a zero sum game here; if one’s good at something, almost always they’re bad on something else. Seems obvious, but somehow I’ve never thought about that.
I think this response is great, because, while I’m on the other side of the fence (theoretical chemist that sucks at anything artistry related) I think it’s a common misconception that math/science/engineering isn’t creative.
I find that misconception both with people struggling to learn it, and often with people teaching it. The reason I bring it up is that, in my experience, the “hard” sciences become both more fun and easy to learn, and more easy to teach, when creativity is encouraged. For my own part, I’m wildly chaotic in the way I solve problems, and my notes are typically a jumbled mess of drawings and scribbles. For my students part, I’ve seen stuff loosen for a lot of people when they’re encouraged to just let their thoughts flow out on their paper, rather than thinking everything through five times first.
By all means: There’s a difference between math and art, but I think a lot of maths teachers and students could have a better time if they allowed themselves to think more artistically, especially those that are well inclined to it.
Go lay down and fall asleep within a few minutes no matter what. I know a few people who can do this and I am so jealous.
