I’d trade my car repair skill for house repair, and my musical ability for math ability. Both of those are far more useful in life. Maybe also trade my computer ability for welding or woodworking.
Na i am good. I might be just a bartender, but I gave so much to become one of the best in my trade. Giving away that would mean giving away part of myself. I paid a high price to get where I am now and I am good damn proud of myself.
But if I had to I would want to git gud. Always wanted to be able to beat Dark Souls with ease.
Trading my “people always want to tell me what went wrong in their life”-superpower for excellent executive function. Pretty please.
I’d trade the ability to pick up my underwear with my foot and toss it into the laundry hamper for invisibility.
I would trade my accumulated engineering training and skills in order to be a great musician. I’m done with office work, staring at a screen all day, and coming home mentally exhausted. I want to be able to go to a jam session and shred with the best.
So many folks here just mentioning things that with time and effort they could just straight-up learn.
Music isn’t magic, Art isn’t something you’re born with
Respectfully disagree with you.
I’ve been taking music lessons for years, to find that I don’t have the ear nor the rhythm for it.
Ten years of dance classes, I love the feeling of floating over the floor with an English Waltz. But ask me to stop counting in my head, or improvise rather than trained patterns, and I fall apart, just rocking in place.
Painting too. Aquarels, not acrylic. I don’t have the imagination nor, again, the fine motor skills.
The Arts are not for me.
I am a man of electronics, mechanics, computing, soldering, Lego, woodworking, sailing, geometry, 3d modeling. And I can teach and plan and organise.
It’s all practical, tangible stuff. That is who I am.
Sounds like you’ve just not found the right way to learn that works for you, tbh
I’m in the same boat as him. I have zero talent or understanding if music and art
Math comes very easily and naturally to me. Even advanced calculus felt east to learn
I couldn’t sing a single song from memory. Not in a, “I’m bad at singing” way. Literally I don’t remember a single song. I have memorized songs before, but it’s quick to forget them, because it’s just that to me - memorization
With practice and effort I can memorize songs and generally replicate patterns to make music, but that’s it. It isn’t really learning music
It literally is.
That’s all learning music is, remembering more and more patterns, and then fucking around to see if you can combine them in interesting ways.
You all sound like you’ve just started, hit a chest-high wall and then went “this must be all there is! Woe is me!” instead of just climbing over the wall
Eh you can’t ignore the effect talent has on skill development. Their brain can literally be wired in a way that something like rhythm can be difficult to master whereas someone else can pick it up easily. Some of these things you’re just born with and can never change.
The same applies to high level math and art
It’s at most a headstart
It’s more of a multiplier. Regardless of practice someone without talent will never catch a talented and dedicated person.
Huh, I guess that explains all those bands of musicians where none of them had any talent and then went on to have zero success, such as AC/DC, Slayer and Metallica
Mainstream musical success is not a metric of musical skill. However if you look at any violin soloist, they have to be talented.
Also I’d also argue many of those band members do have talent.
I would trade all my skill and knowledge in history and geography for just being able to program in rust
I would happily trade my very good writing abilities for the ability to engage with higher mathematics. The first can be learned, the second requires the right sort of brain (which I don’t have).
Funny, while i would never give up my ability to do math for writing, i feel the other way around in regards to which one can be learned and which one can only be “gifted”.
I always was utterly unable to get decent grades in linguistics. No matter how much i tried ;)
Hilariously I’m a linguist. I actually have several degrees in the humanities and social sciences plus a masters in IT management but made the potentially questionable decision to jump into an engineering doctorate with no engineering experience. It’s been as fun as you might imagine, but I am learning lots and advancing through the program.
I wish that my undergrad advisor had let me take calculus like I wanted to, but he wouldn’t since it wasn’t required for the program. My doctoral advisor didn’t say anything so I figured that I was in the clear. What do you know? It’s all calculus based and I’m learning to do derivatives and integrals in realtime.
What I’ve learned here is that if we squished our brains together, we’d form a single, complete person.
That or two vacant bodyes XD
On a more practical note. If you have some time to spare, i really would advise you (if you’ve got spare time ofc) to watch videos by 3b1b, the gray cuber, 2swap, lines that connect etc… While you don’t come out with a complete mastery of the subject, you do get a really deep intuition which i can’t seem to get from teachers. + you get to learn that math is trully FUN rather than jusy interesting ;)
I will check those out, thanks.
I have long understood that one of the problems with mathematics (and you see this in chemistry, physics, logic, etc) is that it is assumed that by learning to approach a problem algorithmically, an intuition has been formed. Then the test maker will throw a problem at you that does not follow the algorithm and the student who does not notice the relationship between two things is unable to complete it. This is basically where I am at with my statistics work–some basic probability questions still escape me.
I totally get this, it’s so frustrating when you know there is a geometric, aproachable and intuitive way to get at the subject and your proffessor just throws formulas at his students •π•
I just finished a course called Statistical Process Control. In brief, create two normal distributions and hope that the means of your customer specification and your manufacturing tolerances match up. If they don’t fix it.
I put together a study guide of just equations. No information on how to use them or interpret their results, just the equations and it came to 14 pages. This professor provided an equation sheet for the final exam that listed 2 of them, suggesting that we should be able to derive the remainder. This seemed like a big ask and requiring additional cognitive load when not necessary, but, apparently, I am the exception in this course because I scored below the fourth quartile (66%) with a median of 82%. Guess the others could, indeed, do the derivations…
Fortunately my homework, course project, and course paper are much better and helped raise final grade. I found it frustrating because I believe that he is teaching towards those who need a guide rather than those who need to learn.
Good luck with that. It must be difficult in a field where everybody’s got a head start on you. But i believe you can do it [insert never give up japanese man here] as you get more comfortable, pathways should start to form in your mind which will truly help to cut down on the cognitive load of memoryzing all the different variations of formulas ;)
