I know not everyone of us has a special talent, but many of us do. Some are just incredible. So, what are they??
Edit: Please don’t be humble. Let it out. Be proud of it and share so we can marvel.
I’m a software developer and for some reason I have the knack for breaking anything I touch.
I once wanted to add a calendar from a URL, and assumed that putting it into the “add calendar” entry would do that. Nope, turns out that just creates a new calendar with an invalid name. I kept getting emails about having a folder with an invalid name that my work’s IT team couldn’t actually remove.
I’m naturally good at making disparate connections and taking in a whole area of a business/tech etc and understanding it. But any ideas I then have are seen as too hairbrained or rediculous or out of the box or impossible and put down by others instead of being seen as clever and interesting and useful.
Conceptual thinking apparently. I guess most people think with words. I think with concepts, visuals, emotions, and other sensory inputs. It means I can understand things much more quickly by associating concepts. And combine those things quickly to make something new. I rarely need to memorize all the details of something if I can extrapolate those things from the conceptual models in my head as needed.
But it does mean that every word that I use needs to be translated from a concept first. Translation takes time and energy, just like it does for the majority of people who speak multiple languages with widely varying grammatical patterns.
This is relatable. It’s very useful for doing science, but the problem then is that you have all of these ideas in your head that are impossible to express succinctly because you need to invent new words, so it’s very hard to sell the idea to anyone, and you end up working alone on everything and achieving very little.
just a funny one:
following instructions, apparently?
as a youth, we had a guest lecture at school (computing) and were given a software tutorial to follow. i completed it and the instructors were impressed, to my absolute confusion.
“i just… followed the instructions?”
“you’d be surprised how many can’t do that!”
in hindsight, i do wonder if it’s a slight autism “perk” just because i think literally and follow instructions accurately so long as they aren’t vague. i wonder if some people will struggle with specific instructions but excel at parsing vague things.
it’s just so funny to me to get complimented on that specifically. but also the student teaching assistant was definitely flirting, which baby autistic me DID pick up on but considered mostly irrelevant to the strange praise??? xD
I had a similar experience. I’m not a computer programmer, but I took a computer programming class in high school. We had an assignment that I completed like normal. This was a long time ago, but if I remember correctly, it was something about making 3 separate programs, then making another program that all it did was run the 3 other programs in sequence. Apparently, I was the only one in the class that did it right and everyone else bombed it. All I did was follow instructions. I have no idea how anyone else didn’t complete the assignment correctly. Did they just add their own desires to it? Did they disagree with the instructions? How did they mess it up??
I have what I can best describe as a general knack for reverse engineering or understanding other people’s work the hard way. I learned to code by reverse engineering original DOOM, and back when I worked at a hobby shop my manager called me a mad scientist because I would, among other things, mix up my own paints to see if I figured it out. I also pick up how existing codebases work pretty quickly, which would probably be useful if I actually got hired. ¯_(ツ)_/¯