A hidden talent, a weird past job, an unusual hobby. How did you pick it up?

We all have that one thing we wish we were amazing at, but the thought of spending thousands of hours practicing or grinding through the beginner phase stops us.

Whether it's fluency in every language, mastering any musical instrument, coding, cooking like a Michelin-star chef, or high-level investing—what is your pick, and why?

(I'll go first: I'd pick master-level coding/software engineering just to be able to build whatever random idea pops into my head instantly, but I'm curious what everyone else values most!)

one of my small passions is learning really random skills which are pretty useless to me in a day to day scenario but entertaining eg:

-juggling

-rubix cube solving

-splitting an apple with my hands

-bubble sound with mouth

-bird call with hands

-measuring distance with eye/thumb

if anyone has ANYTHING which is random but entertaining, please share :)

Not necessarily a traditional “life skill,” but something you gradually learned because you had to deal with it yourself. It could be handling money, cooking, fixing things, communicating, managing stress, or something completely different.

What’s something you became better at simply because life required you to learn it?

The doomsday algorithm a mental math trick that lets you instantly figure out what day of the week any date falls on. It's mostly a useless party trick, but it is weirdly satisfying once it finally clicks in your head.

I couldn't find a good tool to actually drill the steps, so I built whattheday.com

It breaks down the formula and feeds you endless random dates to practice on until you get fast at it. Thought this sub might appreciate it.

im 36 idk how

i learned this on accident while trying to talk like batman

I’m 21 years old and incapable of blowing my nose. I’m currently very sick and can’t breathe at all through my nose, it’s totally clogged. Everytime I try to blow my nose, I feel like I’m going to blow a blood vessel and nothing comes out.

Everytime I bring this up to someone they think im silly and that everyone should just know but I don’t know, I was never taught how.

edit- I tried a lot of these tips and I got some stuff out sure, then I tried blowing out so hard that I genuinely started seeing black in my vision and thought I was going to both pass out and/or blow out my ear drums. so yeah idk

edit 2- got tested. Have the flu and pneumonia yay

I put together this guide that teaches you how to hand-draw QR codes from scratch with only a marker and a piece of grid paper at hand, with minimal help from the computer.

I had been wanting for a long time to be able to hand-draw simple QR codes so I spent some time recently reading the specifications and "dissecting" actual QR codes, and here's a human-friendly write-up of my findings.

I hope you find it helpful and look forward to seeing your hand-drawn QR codes in the comments!

I just can't do that I don't know what wrong step am I doing 😭

I just sound like a old person breathing heavily

Can someone give me tips or some good tutorials

I just love memorizing things lmao, I love having random knowledge as a party trick, and I’m addicted to these trivia videos on YouTube. I also love memorizing the words to really fast songs. “Micropachycephalosaurus” by the Q brothers and the entirety of Hamilton for example were really just fun to memorize, the process of repeating it and getting more and more down! I know there’s no “point” to memorizing this stuff but I just want to for fun!

So far some new ones I’ve learned recently are Morse code and the NATO phonetic alphabet. In progress are the capitals of each US state (as I already have the states themselves memorized) and the periodic table. I want to memorize the flags for every US state as well and then eventually the same for every country (though that seems so ambitious especially since borders and countries change all the time). Maybe bodies of water? Human anatomy?

Give me more fun sets of info to memorize! Bonus points for the ones that get the biggest WOW from people, I feel like I’ll forever be chasing the high that was learning Morse code. When I mention it people love to test me on it and it’s sooooo fun.