I still suck at guitar after 26 years. It’s just 12 damn notes.
Took me a decade before strum patterns clicked. I still suck though.
11 notes really. 🤷♂️😅
Same here! It’s fun to make noise though
Just learn to play the 4 chords so you can make a pop hit.
You really only need 3 chords played fast for punk. Keep it up, I believe in you!
Same. 30 years.
Running. I don’t think I ran a consecutive mile until at least age 28, but now i love to run.
why?
i can run like 15 but i fucking hate every second of it. it’s so BORING.
A good playlist and somewhere interesting to explore make it great, but I also just love running. I bring running shoes when I travel: there’s nothing like running through a new city as a tourist.
That last bit gives me a ton of anxiety just thinking about it. Do you map out where you can run before you go to a new place? How do you just like run on the sidewalk if it ends up congested with too many people? Do you only run in nearby parks?
Sorry if these are weird questions! I legitimately want to know!
I always research unsafe areas for tourists when traveling to a new city, so when I run with my phone map I have a general idea of where I should avoid. Otherwise, I just turn down random streets, though populated and well lit ones. As to large crowds, I have only had this issue occasionally: just be ready to walk and don’t be a nuisance to others. If it’s a rural area, I mostly worry about surprise hills, not safety.
If it’s a foreign country I am especially cautious as running is not really a hobby in many places. I wanted to go for a run by myself in Guatemala, but eventually decided that i wouldn’t outside of very touristy areas or very rural areas. I had a great time running alone in downtown Montreal with minimal research. It depends on the country, so pay attention to local cultural norms and dress codes.
I started getting into music in 2017, couldn’t make a song for shit until 2023 I finally got to a decent spot. Though even then I have a lot of failed attempts still but I think that’s normal.
Hey that’s about when I started! And I also have a LOOOOT of awful stuff, but only now am I starting to occasionally make stuff that I don’t immediately hate.
Currently participating in Weekly Beats, which is something I’d never have considered even a year ago.
Of course, I’ll be learning the entire rest of my life, so…
Skate stuff. Could never do anything more difficult than a static, barely decent Ollie. And I was a teen, lots of free time, I spent hours and hours and hours for weeks and months. Nothing.
Effort is not everything.
I am so glad I had no money, because I really wanted to be better and if I had to learn the lesson later in life I would have tried to “fix” it with high quality gear.
Driving stick, still haven’t figured it out and now that I lost sensation in my feet, seems like I’ll never get it.
I understand how it’s supposed to work, I just can’t do it without stalling.
Learning to work the clutch and feel the friction zone is a more difficult skill than some want to admit.
Learning to drive a motorcycle was a bit overwhelming, I remember my instructor talking about applying the brakes with right hand and foot while disengaging the clutch with the left hand and downshifting with the left foot… and thinking “how the hell is anyone supposed to keep track of all that!”
I do miss my stick shift though, it was more fun to drive even if less practical.
Oh right… It’s a good thing I already knew how to drive stick before taking up motorcycling.
This might sound dumb, but I’m doing this with Euro Truck Simulator. I’ve got the wheel/pedals/shifter, but I can’t for the life of me get it to not stall out, especially when pulling heavy loads from a standstill.
I’ve seen pedals that have haptic feedback for feeling the clutch engage, and I’m honestly considering saving up for it, cause I’m obviously missing something here.
I doubt it will really compare to an actual truck. When your diving one, the pedal is the easy part. The truck has so much torque it is harder to stall, unless you’re loaded heavy and on a hill. The tricky part is getting your shift windows without synchromesh.
I remember when I was learning, it was a bit challenging to hit my shift windows at first, and remember what split I was in when I was on the road. Back then I had a little xB and a FJ40. Both of those were manual. When I got back into one of them, it felt insane that anyone could screw up in one of them.
I had already learned front end loaders, skid loaders, and a skid steer, and was working on a certification for case controls on an excavator, so the coordination complexity of hands and feet were no big deal.
The clutch is all about feeling the difference between the spring pressure and the friction.
Anyways, at least for me it can help to think in perspective like this; about other areas where the same basic skill applies with perhaps even more complexity. Like after a few days on an excavator you stop thinking about the individual controls and start thinking about the bucket like your hand and the boom like your arm and the pivot like your waist. The brain, or at least mine, abstracts away the motions like an extension of your body. It is such a strong connection and the hydraulic feedback is so direct, that you can “feel” with the bucket without actually seeing into the trench. Like if you hit a rock, a root, or even conduit in the ground, you can feel it in the controls like it is a part of you.
The clutch is all about feeling the difference between the spring pressure and the friction.
I think this here is what gets me. With the cheap sim pedals, you can’t feel anything, and have to go entirely by visuals, like watching the tachometer for a sudden spike. By the time you can react, you’re already stalled half the time. I totally agree you need that visceral feedback from the machine to really use it with any degree of finesse.
I’ve driven a fair bit of heavy machinery in my time, and never had an issue working the clutch, but those simulators are a different beast altogether - at least at my price point. Maybe one day I’ll be able to afford some realism, haha.
The key for me was being told: it’s okay to ride (to hold) the clutch a little before/during/after you’re switching gears.
Driving. I was 40 when I finally got my license.
Drawing. I tried so hard in school, practiced regularly, and never got better. I’m in my 30s now and my DND group still makes fun of me when I draw anything other than walls on the wet erase mat.
I’m in my 30s, and I’m planning on taking up drawing for the first time ever. I don’t even doodle, but I think it would be cool to be able to do simple concept/placeholder art for my projects. I’m very much expecting to suck at it, but I’m entirely okay with that.
I started making whacky artistic progress after I started sketching shitty little project plans. Weird improvements too, like now I can imagne taking something apart and picture all the individual bits fitting together. Learning by doing rather than practicing just to practice is like night and day for me.
You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.
I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).
Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.
Smalltalk.
Smalltalk or small talk?
TIL!
Social interactions.
Reading an analogue clock face. I could do digital though.
Tying a tie for meetings, interviews etc.
I’ve always had issues trying to do myself from “my angle” if you know what I mean, I’ve always worn light blue or grayish dress shirts without the tie to interviews, or I’d just leave the tie spaced out so I can shrink it again when I got around my neck.
Still trying to get the hang of it!
I’m also just spit balling but many skills are needing an account if muscle memory.
So with that I’m mine i wonder if you spent 10-20 minutes a day just tracing styles or things you want to be able to draw to develop that muscle memory would be helpful
Programming took a lot of goes before it clicked. Having a real goal instead of just doing tutorials really helped.
That’s probably why I don’t feel good at programming. I just don’t have “that project” I want to do yet so I’m stuck in tutorial hell where I can finish the tasks but tell me to go build a website and I’m lost on where to start. Odin Project at least forced me to start from scratch after a while, but it really shows just how bad my planning is to build something from the ground up.
The things that got me through it were Learn Python The Hard Way and having a project I was aiming to build. I was working at a jazz bar at the time and I wanted to build a membership and seating plan system for them. Needless to say it was terrible and we never got to using it but it gave me a really good goal with real-life problems to solve.
Yeah I agree. I learned the most when I just set my mind to accomplish something. This will actually get you to do real troubleshooting as well and not just checking where you failed the tutorial.
Compassion. I used to be a terribly selfish person. Still mostly am.
so you’re a normal person then?
I’m a sideshow performer, have trained a variety of bizarre skills, but still can’t whistle.
So whistling
Wait, you can learn whistling? I only can do a high pitched gym-teacher sounding whistle, which was very entertaining in gym class, but has since fallen off hard
One day a couple years ago I decided to just learn it. I then tried to whistle for three months whenever I was alone and suddenly one day, it was whistling and not just wind-sounds.
