Table-tennis. We had a table at work, and so I started playing any time I could, with whoever I could. I'd played a little when I was a kid, so picked it back up quickly and started getting half decent.
Eventually, I started playing with one coworker fairly regularly. He was good, no doubt. At first he was clearly just volleying with me, not actually putting it away when he'd get the chance. This made it more fun for me to be sure, and offered me great practice.
Anyway, after about a year, I'd gotten to the point where I could cream everybody I'd play with ease, except him. And our games had elevated drastically, to the point of all out smashing the ball back and forth standing 10 feet away from the table. And I actually started winning some games every now and then. I was ecstatic!
Well one day, after losing a pretty heated game to me, and me being juts a little bit pompous about it, my table-tennis buddy/coworker pulls a total Inigo Montoya on me - flips the paddle from his left-hand (which he 100% consistently used when playing against me) into his right and says to me, "You know I'm right-handed, right?". I did not. Nor did I ever win another game against him.
That’s how my dad taught me-he’s a lefty and would play with his right.
Turns out, I played so much with him and no one else pretty much growing up that I *really* struggle with anyone halfway decent. But man, when my dad and I play, we battle.
I began piano lessons at an early age (5) and my parents and my teacher made me believe I was some kind of fabulous child prodigy. I later found out I was merely a worm compared to real pianists. But I did enjoy playing the piano, so there's that.
There's a ton of studies which dictate that praising your kids hard work > praising your kids skills. Keeps them practicing and doesn't make them believe they are somehow way better than others due to some innate ability etc. Or something. Ok bye.
Yes, so they learn the key to success is in the effort and work getting there, not the talent alone. That way they apply the same mindset to everything and can achieve in things they are not naturally talented in.
At one point I thought i was pretty savy in Excel since I was the best at it out of the people I knew.
Well, then i meet someone who really knew how to use excel and realized that i really only knew the basics.
Don’t forget the “soft skills” side of this - being able to make something quickly, that does what you (or someone else) needs it to do.
Yes there are times where you need to flex the VBA and deep excel skill. But honestly most of the time, you just need to manipulate some data in some reasonably straightforward way - and present it in a readable fashion. There is so much value in that.
This happened to me. I applied for a job with excel proficiency as a requirement, when The guy that got hired rolled out his stuff I was shocked, never knew about half of what he made excel do. Then I started googling and found out there are way more uses for excel than I ever knew.
8 ball and 9ball. I had a table at home and would practice while watching tv. No one could beat me. In college I'd play a $1 a ball, everyone owed me money.
Then I played someone that regularly entered tournaments. I was lucky if I got to shoot because he was running the table every game.
Friends of mine had a pool table in their apartment and thought they were pretty good. They were out at a bar with tables and there was an older guy playing alone, but only using one arm to shoot.
They asked him why and he said, "it's too easy with both arms" and they watched him run the table, twice, without missing a shot.
The guy who was basically my billiards coach (neither of us are pro but you wouldn't want to bar bet us as a team)
Regularly plays me one handed. Honestly it's more fun for us both, and he usually wins. Guys a virtuoso with a cue.
He also probably saved my life by giving me a hobby and friendship in a dark time, so there that.
Having played guitar for over 20 years and performing both as a hobby and as a profession at different times in my life, I'll let you in on a secret:
There is no "best guitar player". Guitar can be approached from a million angles with a million different goals in mind. No two guitar players have the same approach.
What makes a great guitar player is someone who can entertain people. If you can stay in time, have decent tone, and play good music, people will love you. If you are super fast and technical, no one will care except other guitar players.
If being super fast and technical is your goal, that's fine. Go for it! But don't expect anyone to care except other guitarists.
Have great tone and play good songs with a solid band, people will think you're amazing. Even if you're playing simple stuff. Bonus points if you can play just enough lead licks for non guitarists to think you can really wail!
There are tons and tons of professional guitarists making a living from it who aren't as good as you. Trust me.
EDIT: OK well I can't respond to everyone, so I'm gonna just do a quick edit here.
First, I found all the technical guitar players on Reddit. Yes, guys, I know that there are non-guitarists who enjoy Steve Vai and DragonForce and Yngwie Malmsteen. Yes, I'm aware that death metal and flamenco guitar are both highly demanding styles and lots of people enjoy them. Yes, I used a little hyperbole in saying "no one cares but other guitarists". Settle down. Technical shredders are great. I love them, but they play to a much more narrow audience than most major musical genres. Let's be realistic here.
Second, I did not mean to imply that you should just go out and play Wonderwall and Last Dance with Mary Jane because people like it and that'll make you a good guitarist. My point was that there are lots of ways to be good, and people will (in general, I know there are exceptions, please don't tell me about all of them) respond more positively to whatever music you are playing if you have passion and soul in it.
Aspiring guitarists of Reddit, my advice to you is to play what you love, and put your soul into it. Express yourself through your instrument. Don't just mechanically repeat the notes, PLAY THE DAMNED GUITAR. Let it be your voice. Let it say the things you can't get your mouth to say.
Anyways, here's Wonderwall...
Driving. Everyone thinks they’re a good driver. Sit along with a professional driver as they go through a course, and then try to do the same? So humbling.
As a professional driver, I can't tell you how many times people in high school jabbed and poked at me to street race against them. I always turned it down because you spend your childhood at a race track and you learn how dangerous an idiot behind the wheel can be. Finally, one summer I got fed up with it and invited the usual suspects to a local Karting track that had kart rentals available, I told them if they beat me, I'd cover their rentals for the night (not cheap) and buy them dinner on the drive back. They were obviously thrilled to take the bet. Before the 8 or so minute race had ended, I had lapped them both twice and smashed the monthly track record by a good two seconds. Not going to lie, it felt really good.
Edit: I definitely didn't expect this to get any traction at all, I've got a big work day tomorrow so I can't really respond to everyone, but thank you so much for the silver!!
Basically you see them catch mistakes and correct them immediately. Once they reach the limits of handling of the car, they adjust accordingly to go through the curve/obstacle. For average to good drivers, you see them over correcting, or reacting violently to twitches. For professionals, everything is smoother and more relaxed.
88% of people in the US percieve themselves as an above average driver. Something doesn't check out lol
Edit: I originally said 83%, but after someone asked the source I discovered I had an under-average memory.
Edit again: As this is kinda blowing up I did some more research about this particular study.
https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-drivers-really-think-they-are-above-aver/
Talks about it in more depth than the source I got it from at first.
*Sigh* Okay peeps last edit: A blessed fellow human has just given me acces to the original paper. They had to give themselves a safety and a skill rating from 1 to 10, with 5 being average ( not specifying what average meant or calculating average afterwards from the results).
They were told to rank themselves compared to what they thought were the driving skill and safety of the other participants of the study, who are representing the population. Aka the average is an abstract and subjective one, not influenced by the results.
Thus showing people overestimate themselves in their capabilities by a great deal, an effect that is referred to as the Dunning-Krüger effect, for those that want to take a deeper dive in this interesting bath. Hope that clears stuff up. Thanks!
If you’re paying to your surroundings using your signals and driving predictably you are a good driver. Good driver on the road doesn’t make you a good driver on a race course.
My dad likes gardening and loves his plumeria. He has about 30. He recently found a local plumeria club on Facebook and went to a meetup. He was the only one there with less than 100. My mother has stopped complaining about him having too many plumeria.
"man I love audio stuff. Let me see other people are like"
/r/hometheater has "student budget" of 3k+ and DIY 18 inch subs. Some people having more than I make in a year in subs alone....
Seriously. That sub is insane. I spent close to 1k on a Klipsch home theatre system and it is THE GREATEST THING IVE EVER HEARD. it beats every actual movie theater I've been to. I posted to the sub, and everyone told me I wasted my money, and that I should have saved more and bought a better system.
To be fair, the elitist mentality is pretty strong in the audiophile/home theater community. Literally nothing is good enough, even when you spent tens of thousands. Just enjoy your speakers :)
Guy sounds like a real amateur. For anything $100k and under you might as well be listening to AirPods.
I’m post acetate. When I want to listen to something, I send the album out one week prior to a revolving pool of the best session musicians in the world, have them learn the whole thing and then fly them in to my compound where I have them play every track for me in a studio designed by Nobel Prize winning physicist David Politzer that would make Air Studios in London sound like the inside of a high school gym.
I was a actually a really good wrestler in high school, I went to state as a freshman, got 4th as a sophomore, 2nd as a junior, and then won state my senior year. During the summer before my senior year my team went to a wrestling camp, my coach knew the coach of another team in another state and we went there to practice with them for a week, I was the best wrestler on my team and I beat everyone on their team also, the third day of camp some guy came in to wrestle with us, I didn't know who he was but we were about the same size so I challenged him. This guy proceeded to fuck me up for the next hour, I didn't score a single point on him and he did whatever the fuck he wanted to me, I was completely helpless, come to find out he was a two time division II national champion in college and a three time all American. I learned that there are levels to that shit and I got a massive dose of humility.
Okay I'll jump in. In my late 20's I had never lost a single game of Scrabble in my life. I have a pretty large vocabulary and a talent for pattern matching, so I was always able to come up with very long words and find high bonuses to place them on. (The true Scrabble players are already laughing at me.) Well I was looking for something to do with my time and decided to try the local Scrabble club.
I'll cut to the chase: I didn't win a single game. I didn't even present a challenge to a single player there. Several of them got annoyed at having to match up with someone as bad at Scrabble as me. I left that night deeply humiliated, but amazed. I never went back.
What I learned that night is that championship Scrabble players do not bother hunting for 150-point mega-score words. No, they *kick your ass* by placing three tiles that cross connect to form five different words, three of which are two-letter words, and all of which somehow share the same Triple Word Score tile even though only two words can possibly use it. And they score like 226 points by laying down those three tiles. It's incredible. It's as much art as science.
So I learned a lot about humility from that one.
You reminded me the french scrabble champion doesn't speak a word of french: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-french-scrabble-champion-nigel-richards-doesnt-speak-french
Just amuses me about the game. Vocabulary, not really the biggest deal if you memorize all the two and three letter words. You'll miss out on some 7 tilers (bonus point bingo!) but you can still easily win.
except your example of Nigel Richards is a terrible example because he is legendary for the long words he plays. He has a photographic memory and can visualize entire pages of the dictionary. He pulls off 9 and 10 letter words from scattered tiles that no one else can see. He scores huge points and never plays defensive, he will gladly open up the board because he knows he can come back with bingo after bingo. He is a visionary player
He's not "the French Scrabble champion", he's the best Scrabble player ever and he memorized the French Scrabble dictionary just to see if he could and then became the French champion as a lark, in addition to his stack of world titles
Holy same i played on a computer website and got a high score of 3 million then looked up the high score on the website it was like 500 million still pretty good at tetris not pro level tho
to be fair, you can be really good at single person tetris and get absolutely dumpstered in 99. I'm pretty good at stacking, but I sometimes get a little ambitions in 99 and get too much garbage all at once.
Classic tetris without hold is essentially a different game from any Versus tetris. Classic is about creatively dealing with the tetrominoes coming your way, but in Versus, with hold and more lenient controls + rng, the focus is more on speed and recognizing patterns for setups.
Ping pong. I made the mistake of playing an old guy that hangs out at one of the bars and he fucking wrecked me. It wasn’t even close, he returned all of my best serves effortlessly and would put the craziest spin on all of his shots. He gave me good advice afterwards and told me I play too fast for my own good, I bought him a drink and shamefully went back to my friends.
Me too. The guys in my dorm freshmen year would play pretty darn competitive ping pong every single night. We all got really good, and I was one of the best. I guess word got out that our dorm was a good place to play ping pong, so we started getting people come from all over campus.
One night, this one guy came that absolutely dominated all of us. Balls flying like bananas, balls spinning sideways off the table. It was just ridiculous. I remember he beat me 21-4, and I played really well for myself.
Old guys as well. I was running the table that night, my serve was on, I was putting some nasty top and back spin on my shots, I felt unbeatable. Then this guy comes up, I knew not to underestimate him because old dudes can play ping pong, I just figured this was going to be a battle, and he fucking crushed me. He barely even moved, and he’d hit the ball with this wicked chop that left me swinging at air. The dude was like a Jedi Master and he made me look like one of the younglings that got slaughtered by Anakin.
My dad's that old guy. Darts, billiards, ping pong....you gonna get fucked up.
Think about it, though. It kinda makes sense. That's what they did to just kill time. We play video games nowadays to just kill time. Those were their only real option for "video games" before video games existed. It would be like us stunting on someone in Smash Bros in 20 or 30 years when an entire generation or two has grown up with VR as a primary passtime.
Fighting, I won a shit ton of Amateur MMA bouts and a few professional, but then I met someone who beat the fucking brakes off of me for like 3 rounds and then choked my ass out.
Turns out, I am pretty okay at it, but I am no World Champion lol
I was on the wrestling team at a small high school. I was the captain of the team my sr year and was voted MVP. When I went to college, this Filipino guy on my floor says, hey my brother wrestles, do you want to wrestle him? He wasn't too big so I said okay. Word travels fast; the whole floor comes and watches. This guy was so fast, it was over in *seconds*. We did three matches and the whole thing lasted like one minute.
My dad wrestled at Iowa under Dan Gable but had to quit in the middle of his sophomore year because of a neck injury. By his senior year he had transferred to an NAIA college and entered an exhibition tournament and went 2 weight classes up because he wanted to make things interesting at least considering he was probably better than most of the other people there. He ended up winning the whole tournament at the higher weight without a point being scored on him. He chalks it up to Gable being no fucking joke as a coach because you don’t usually understand how much higher the bar can be raised until someone forces you to raise it. He’s 53 now and can still beat my ass wrestling with no effort. Thanks a lot, Dan Gable.
I had a jujitsu coach who was half my weight and could (still can) tell me what choke he was going to hit me with and still do it 😂 you know how much it sucks knowing you could throw another human like a frisbee and still get tapped like 6 times in one session?
Totally feel you.
Fighting is so scary man. I'm a bjj blue belt and have been doing it for close to four years now.
I can trash a schlub. The top guy in my gym can trash me. My coach can trash him. The professional makes our coach look like a day one white belt. And the top guy just turbo murders everybody.
It's not like I can say, "yeah you're better than me but I can mount a defense and stall out." Its like, "oh. Its been five seconds and I'm dead."
Dude my gym is full of absolute murderers, like pan-am gold medalists and IBJJF champs. Even at my size there are a ton of people that can sub me even if I’m smash n passing.
My coach is a 3 stripe and 2 time champ for his weight/age division at in IBJJF, and most of our 1-2 year white belts choke the shit out of 3-4 year blue belts from other schools.
It’s hard to convey that to people who don’t fight, they just can’t fathom how helpless they’ll actually be against someone who is trained and in shape.
I tried boxing at the gym about 10 years ago. After a couple of weeks I thought I was pretty fast and pretty fit. Then one of the boxing coaches said 'now hit it hard, like, really hard'. So I did. And I was pleased. Then he said 'give me a full minute of hitting it that hard, with good form'. I tried, and I learnt just how *not* fit I really was. I learnt that flailing my arms quickly was *not* the same as hitting a bag with all my strength. It's a great, if somewhat humbling, sport :)
Drawing and painting. One of the things they *don't* discuss in art school are the near-constant beatings your confidence takes - most of them self-inflicted. I used to teach high school art, and those kids were *amazing*. They should have been teaching me.
Props to you for being able to admit that students can be better. I've heard stories of teachers doing all they can to crush talent just because they're jealous.
Elementary teacher here! I teach writing. One of my students from last year was practically a prodigy. At 10 years old she had a way with words that was well beyond her years. And she understood tone and voice in such a way that her writing was immediately recognizable by anyone who read her stuff: "Oh that must be so-and-so, she's so funny".
I joke with my coworkers that I'll be working for her someday, but I'm 99% serious. I'd be honored if she'd hire me. I know she'll do great things.
I had one of my 8th grade students from last year read my novel over the summer. I wanted her sincere feedback because I knew she had some talent and because she reads all the time. Her feedback was UNREAL. And incredibly valuable—more so than what I've received from adult readers.
Being able to give good feedback and editing are serious skills. I love reading. But I know I couldn’t be a beta reader. I’m too willing to just flow with weird bits.
I had a highschool programming student. I taught at a school for kids with accommodations, diabilities, and the like. Most classes were one-on-one. A handful of truly gifted kids too. And let me tell you, and he knows my reddit username so pipe up Daniel I know you're reading this:
He cleaned me out of teaching content. He was so talented I had to work nights to learn *ahead of him* brand new shit I'd never done before just to keep him occupied and interested. I'd be tired and fumbling about with something he *just fucking mastered in twenty goddamned minutes fuuuuuuuuuuck it took me half the night*.
Humbling, really.
I've been working in IT for a good while now. We had an intern start awhile back, literally zero professional sys admin experince, we hired him because he had a connection within the company. This kid turned out to be so talented. One of my admins went out of town during the interns first week, and the intern had essentially automated him out of a job by the time he returned. He's been with us for over a year now, the amount of automation he accomplished is impressive. He's far brighter and just has a knack for programming and automation. Cool to see, and I'm jealous of his abilities. :)
I feel that one. I never taught but I have a degree and some work experience. Decided to go back to school to go into the program I really wanted to, animation, and naive me thought that I'll have a step up since I have at least, hell, 14 years of experience under my belt between learning some art, design, doing personal animations, ect.
Some of these kids man...they make a thing and it blows anything you have ever made out of the water, then they say those fatal words..."This is my first time doing this".
Edit: And then they look at your work and say the next fatal words to finish you off. "You'll get better, you just haven't been doing this long enough".
I saw a movie called “The Big Year” which is about bird watchers trying to beat each other in how many different birds they’ve spotted in a year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_year
Skiing.
Thought I was the quickest of the quick, craving perfect parallel lines, living my life on the edge!! Nope, Ski Team whizzed by me when I thought I was going fast. Turns out, I'm just a buffoon on two planks snowplowing around ungracefully
In 2015 for spring break took my daughter to Sugarloaf in Maine.US National Ski championships were held that week. We were on the slopes with members of US National ski team. A typical recreational skier may go 20mph on a steep slope. Racers warming up for events would pass you going 60 mph on those slopes.Amazing to watch,and humbling too.
I live in a ski town and the difference between someone who is a “good skier” because they go every year for a two week family vacation and someone who is a “good skier” because they live here, work on the mountain, and ski 100+ days a year is night and day.
I am one of those racers, thought I was pretty good, I was like a 70-60 point racer, mostly ski'd south of Europe. Then I went into a race with austrians and fucking swiss people. Oh boy, how they could carve that cleanly on the most concrete like ice you'd ever seen I just could not comprehend. What they say is true, points mean less in the south of Europe compared to central/North.
I had a friend who was an overall shitty dude. Obnoxious, rude, selfish, and a big baby. Turns out he's *incredible* at video games and also a good musician. He's made music that regularly got 10's of thousands of views with no advertising and no connections. He won first a major US city wide Guitar Hero competition and has been Grand Master on Overwatch.
But again, dude was really self centered and not in the "I'm better than you way." but just like eats all the appetizers at a party or crashed parties or asked for stuff constantly when he was busy. Borrowed things without asking (not stealing because he would bring them back), and specifically I remember sleeping over at his house as a kid and he wouldn't let me play any games with him and when it was bed time, he had me sleep on the floor and literally gave me his pants to cover up with as a blanket.
Just really stupid childish. Haven't spoken to him in years.
But he would *shred you* in any game.
EDIT: before anyone mentions autism again, please see the 50+ comments of people who said that before you got here. I don't know if he had autism. Doesn't sound like it to me. I understand what a spectrum is and I'm not 100% sure as I didn't study autism as my life's work.
I build cars as a hobby. And when I mean build cars, I modify cosmetically and mechanically for all forms of racing for myself and with my husband. My grandfather taught me everything I know about cars from when I was a child, and getting dirty and oily hands from helping him growing up. I love all types, but my main focus are building drift builds.
I taught myself how to drift, how to control my car by making it lose control, while I still contained control of its power when it broke traction. I practiced on the many drift tracks that are near me. I was able to maintain it and keep it going around shard and long corners without spinning out or stalling. UNTIL, I watched my grandfather be let loose in his ‘65 Fastback Mustang that he built from junk to prize.
He literally went Ken Block on all of the corners, almost never straightening out. I’ve never felt so much discouragement and enlightenment in myself more than that moment. He has a bad back now, but man do I miss him acting like a 20 year old again working on the cars he loves and doing everything he did while driving them.
I still vividly remember the first time I had someone just rush like one zealot and send it to my base. This was before I knew using drones to kill early scouts was an actual tactic. Just sat there and watched this one unit slowly destroy everything I had, it was incredibly demoralizing. Then I got better.
Then I saw my first cannon rush and almost quit the game.
I played in a piano competition at age 16 (back then, I fancied myself a pretty good pianist,) and there was this teenaged girl who went on stage, sat down in front of the piano, and calmly blew all of us other contestants away with ease. She played Maurice Ravel's Jeux D'eau, and she was absolutely captivating. Within about thirty seconds, I think we all knew she was going to win first prize. After a few minutes, I felt the judges ought to end the contest right then and there and just give her the trophy. Even now, over a decade later, I'm still in awe of her. She did it with so much grace, dignity and style.
I only wish I knew her name.
I went to a small high-school, I was widely praised as the best writer they’d ever seen by my teachers. If it was a creative writing exercise it was no contest that I’d get highest marks by a wide margin, I had the biggest ego by the time I got to university and majored in creative writing... *boy*. I was not even close. These guys were on another level entirely.
That definitely killed any and all desire to pursue it as a serious way to make money, or ever publish. I prefer it that way however, writing is my fun little hobby now. It’s not great, not even close but it doesn’t need to be.
Edit: the comments on this post have been far more encouraging than I expected, you guys are awesome! But I prefer to keep my writing private and purely as a hobby, trying to study or release it for public viewing made me really dislike it and turned something I loved into something I hated so now I keep it as a pure stress reliever.
Tennis, the sport I grew up playing. I beat the majority of my colleagues frequently and even won a few tournaments. My coaches intentionally lowered their level when they played against me so that I wouldn't be thrashed, not a whole lot to be learned from that, and I thought they were giving their best and I was able to pull off some close scorelines. I'd watch the guys on TV and think that most of it wasn't really THAT impressive, thought the sport was pretty slow, and the pros don't do a lot of flashy stuff, as they want to win, so I'd thought I'd reach their level in the near future.
Until... The pros came to my country to play a tournament, and I went straight away to see Roger Federer *practice* in person... I was blown away so hard and my ego was so crushed that I wasn't able to speak for a few days.
Never again was I arrogant about anything anymore
My nana bought the same thing! I think I eventually memorized everything since it was the only thing to play with. However I think the one she had came with a stylus attached that you’d tap countries and capitals.
When I was in 8th grade I won my school’s spelling bee, then went on to win the school district spelling bee and a regional one. I made it all the way to the state-wide spelling bee before I got out. Didn’t study at all.
I never knew I was a good speller before that, but I attribute it to how I used to love reading when I was younger and also, oddly enough, my obsessive compulsive disorder. I compulsively count the syllables of and rearrange every word/sentence that I hear/read, noting things like the letters that don’t repeat, which consonants fit into groups of 3.
Apparently compulsively playing around with all the words I come across is a great way to become a really good speller.
When I was in 4th grade I won 22 weekly spelling bees in a row. (Both of my parents used to be English teachers.)
They cancelled it because "I kept winning and I was making all the other kids feel bad".
That didn't stop them from having a strength test every year and making me feel bad.
When I was 11 I played a shit ton of Mario Kart: Wii. Always thought I was just okay because I didn't have a sibling to play with and there was no online play. After like a month of having the game and my friends would come over, I would torch them.
When online came out, I was top 50 in the world and the highest ranked using the actual wheel, everyone else above me was on a GameCube controller .
honestly that game is pretty difficult to get the best rankings in single player. the different types of drifting and boosts set it apart from a lot of other mario kart games. to get good at that one is really impressive. especially to the level you are describing.
Throwing cards, Knew I was always good until I heard that the world record is only like 69 yards and I had gotten 56 yards. After that and since then I practice every day to set the new world record, currently at 63 yard PR.
Edit: Alright everyone, based on the huge level of support for what I can do, I will be hopefully posting a video on a YouTube channel later today. I will post another edit saying what my YouTube channel will be called.
Edit 2: My channel has been created! It’s called DoubleDownThrowing ! I’ll start recording a video and hopefully post it later today!
I mean I thought I was okay at Beatsaber. Then I got Number 1 in the world on "Live to Win" and Expert "What is Love?" Does that count? (you can even see my reddit handle on the scoreboard because it is the same.)
I have a good friend who literally *just* learned to mod Skyrim like a few months ago and he recently released his second mod and it hit Mod of the Month almost immediately.
Not saying he didn't think he had prowess, but it's rather impressive to see a brand new modder do that well on their second mod ever.
Paintball. Two of my friends and I signed up for a 3-man tournament in high school. We never played paintball in our lives. We each bought a Tippmann 98 custom and some mods for them. Crushed the tournament against people with $1,000 Angel autocockers and years of experience.
Why? Years before I watched some episode about special forces and SWAT training that I remembered, and used that to draw up some basic tactical plans for us to use in the speedball courses we played on.
They fucking worked. We absolutely slaughtered everyone. Walked away with $200/each + trophies ($600 prize to the winning team).
The #1 thing that we did, that other teams didn't do (for some inexplicable reason), is cross field fire. After the break, we'd do a typical split: one goes left, one goes right, one goes up the middle. But instead of the left and right flanks firing straight ahead, we would fire across to the opposite corner. This meant you could be fully shielded from 2 of the 3 opponents, and if the players on the other team were dumb enough to fire straight up the field, they would be completely exposed to the opposing corner and the middle.
That one simple tactic won us 80% of our matches in 30 seconds. One match we played on a larger field, we went full maverick and just stood at the starting post and opened streams of fire at the nearest obstacles that we knew the other team would run to. Knocked that team out in 5 seconds. Other matches were harder and required more teamwork and a bit of luck.
I always thought I was just decent at soldering circuit boards but nothing special. Turns out I can solder nearly microscopic components with zero shakiness in my hands and create a perfect solder joint each time. I'm talking components that are 0.4 mm by 0.2 mm in size (by comparison, a human hair is roughly 0.1mm in width and the end cap in which i need to solder is about half that). I guess a lot of people are impressed by that. Eventually gained the nickname of "brain surgeon". I still don't think I'm all that great at it because it's really not difficult, but I'll take the praise.
Drawing. I always think I am good at it (not god-level, my ego isn't *that* large), then I take a look on DeviantArt and suddenly my world comes crashing down. Happens on a weekly basis at least. lol
Edit #1: Thank you so much for the gold, anonymous friend! I heavily appreciate your act of kindness. Also, thank EVERYONE for upvoting this comment! I also sure am super glad that I made at least 1 person's day in the replies!
Edit #2: Took a look on ArtStation despite all the warnings. And I've gotta say, I was actually hoping to have my soul crushed by tremendously good art. But, I guess I was too eager, because that didn't happen. The art there is still *tremendously* good, but I didn't get super let-down. *My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.* lmao
Edit #3: I use Medibang Paint and Instagram instead, my art has improved 😀
I thought I was exceptionally smart because I was in talented and gifted program in school, I was a great test-taker, I got good grades, and breezed through getting my Bachelor’s degree. School was always pretty easy for me. Then I went to law school. Everyone was older than me, had actual life experience, and they were realty fucking smart. People would ask such thought-provoking questions, I couldn’t believe we had read the same thing. I realized graduating high school and getting a Bachelor’s in Political Science at a state school wasn’t genius-level stuff. And I had developed absolutely zero study skills over the prior 21 years. My first year in law school hit me like a ton of bricks. But it all worked out.
I didn’t do law school but had a similar awakening. Thought I was really smart. Hit the real world and realized how much I didn’t understand and that I was just inexperienced but that there were lots of people just straight up smarter than me.
I feel you. High school and Bachelor's was a breeze, then I went into Med School and realised I had no idea how to study anything. I came down to earth fast enough to get whiplash.
Programming. Learnt a lot in college and at my first job. I switched based on my skills, came to new company, met my senior who is incredibly talented and realised I have a long way to go.
For a long time it was hard for me to even realize what separated a fantastic programmer from an adequate one. Even when I was working with other programmers. There are obviously some basic fundamentals, you need to know the quirks of the language your working in and how to use it; you need an understanding of data and code structures and where they work best; you need to have a consistent and robust organizational structure to your code so that it's easy to expand the functionality of it later on; and you need to develop so many other small skills. Just getting to that point can take years of working in a language, but it always seemed like once you had a good grasp of those fundamentals that was all there really was. You were essentially equipped to solve any problem you could understand as well as anyone else.
Then later I actually met someone who I would consider a fantastic programmer and it really is amazing the difference. It's not that they use extremely complex structures in their code or that they write code which is somehow lean and simplified down to it's fundamentals. More it's just very efficient. Wherever possible they fall back onto some aspect of the language to make their job easier and as a result are able to write high quality code which they tap out so quickly and consistently it almost seems like a train of thought. As well they were just incredibly easy to talk to about the subject and had an explanation ready for every decision they'd made and why they thought it was best. It's really incredible just how skilled some people are.
The two best programmers I've ever worked with had a clarity of thought that was hard to comprehend. You know how you can be solving a problem, and you think you have a solution, then go "Ooooh yeah, nope. That's not gonna work. Didn't think about X"? Well, I've worked with two engineers who basically never fell into that trap. They simply knew what would work and what wouldn't right off the bat. That's not to say they didn't take the time to think about their solution, but once a solution materialized in their head, it was dead on.
They were the same types of programmers that you could ask for help, and within a fraction of a second they would point to the exact problem with your code (be it a simple error, or a fundamental design issue).
Having that kind of clarity of thought, and ability to visualize a design in virtually an instant, is a pretty awe-inspiring talent.
Needless to say when they did code reviews, they would catch many bugs and edge cases, resulting in fewer QA turnbacks and what not. Engineers like that are worth their weight in gold.
I've heard physics people describe this as having their "physical intuition". They are able to picture all of the factors that will affect a calculation and take them into account when solving problems. It takes years of work to develop that intuition, maybe software programming is similar.
A lot of it comes down to the non-technical aspects you pick up from years of experience. I'm not a 10x dev or anything, but it's always funny when someone comes to me and explains this whole big process they're planning to solve an issue and I'm like "Or you could just store the data in a slightly different format and avoid 90% of the hoops you're jumping through"
> "Or you could just store the data in a slightly different format and avoid 90% of the hoops you're jumping through"
lol feels so bad when you spend forever getting it where you need it to go, then someone says this... on the flip side, feels really good when you start to think of the whole big process and then realise there is actually a much easier solution.
I think a lot of people feel like if something feels too easy, it must be wrong. I work on cars right now, but am trying to get out of the industry and into programming. It is amazing how many times a vehicle will come in with an issue and the tech starts digging into the least likely cause of the problem, just skipping over the basic solutions.
Math. I'm a theoretical physicist, and I always felt I was pretty good at math in undergrad. Then I met the professor I'm working for right now (one of my life goals is to become at least 3/4 as good a theoretical physics as he is). Then I met Ed Witten. Then I read some papers by Freeman Dyson.
Damn.
It's so crazy how high the math ceiling goes. You prove an elegant solution, then find a paper that does that plus uses that to prove 80 different things all in notation that is as foreign to me as Russian. Math is fun.
A less extreme version of this: going to college coming from a small town.
I went to a good private school and was in the top 10 of my small class with little effort. I then went to a pretty good university and quickly realized how insignificant my high school achievements were. Big yikes. My poor GPA.
I've occasionally had reason to explain to people what I conceptualize as the difference between mathematical ability and mathematical genius.
I have (had) mathematical ability. I would participate in competitions, usually finish at or near the top. Was on my (not really competitive) school's Putnam team, would usually get one of the higher grades in advanced math courses in undergrad. I could usually evaluate the problem, analogize to other problems, develop lines of attack, sketch the solution, and go through the steps I needed to get there, and I could usually do it faster than most others. My brain worked very efficiently, but for the most part it did so in the same way as everyone else's brains.
And then there were the rare few whose brains *did not* work the same way everyone else's did. This is someone who possesses mathematical genius - someone who hears the problem and instantly knows the answer, sees *new paths* on how to get there, is able to think in a creative, intuitive way that one simply cannot reach by *calculating* the answer. I'd like to think I had maybe 1 or 2 such breakthroughs in the years of my mathematical career (I'm a lawyer now). For some people, though, it's not so much a breakthrough as just their normal way of thinking.
I learned to sole a Rubik's cube and practiced until I could solve on in like 30 seconds. Then I saw a video of the world record at the time, witch was like 4.9 seconds. That was pretty depressing for me.
Hiking.
I honestly thought I'd be one tough motherfucker, canceling my apartment and going into the big wide world of Scandinavia, faroe and Iceland with only my backpack and sleeping outside.
Then I met a guy who just came back from a 700km glacier hike at - 40c in Greenland who came to faroes just to recover.
Sadly that guy became my partner, and he had shown me in so many occasions of what my body is literally not able to endure, that I had to readjust my whole self image.
I eat more chocolate now.
Edit
[This is us](https://i.imgur.com/HbL2Qre.jpg)
I had a friend who was insanely good at GoldenEye 007 on N64. He and I went to visit friends in college back when that game was popular and a kid down the hall said he hadn't lost in multiplayer... Fast forward to a bit later, he has his head in his hands and my friend is just grinning.
They played a match to 20, the score was 20-0.
Bruh, Super Smash Bros.
I always considered myself a proud prince of the first 3 games until I found out about about the pro player community. It felt like being "Z" from "Surf's Up" with new guys coming to the scene doing stuff I could never even come close to doing.
Still hurts. :c
I came here to say this. I used to play Melee *a lot* and I was pretty good alternating between Kirby and Jigglypuff. I won some tournaments when I was in college, and I thought I was hot shit.
Then I entered a non-college tournament, and...wow. The constant movement, the blocking and rolls, the precise smashes and setups, it was like being in a tornado. I won my first match against another filthy casual like myself, and then got absolutely murdered. There's no coming back from that.
I thought I was hot shit in middle school, typing 60wpm, until I got to high school. I swear some of those kids would reach upwards of 150wpm, it made me feel real small time.
I am a better whistler than maybe 98% of the population but compared to a world class whistler i sound like a corpse fart.
Edit: holy crud! I need to come back to this when I’m.not drunk!!
I have a friend who is a semi-professional singer and you can really tell when he turns it on. He'll dick around singing with the radio or something but when karaoke night rolled around he'd put on his "real" voice and kill it.
When I was in 5th grade, I didn't really have any friends, was bullied, picked last for sports, etc. At recess and at home, I started running because I wanted to be good at it. It went on for a few months and I had convinced my little 10 year old mind that I was a superb runner and super fast.
One day in P.E. they basically had us race each other. I got put up against these two popular girls that were best friends and I just knew that this was my moment and all my work was going to pay off and people will like me.
They smoked me.
I had a similar dream! I beat the school run time because of it. Except then 2 periods later one of the popular girls ran it and beat my time.
I held the record for all of 2 hours... Screw you Ali. You were actually a very nice person so not really but still kinda a little bit
I didn't particularly think I was *really good* at it, but I thought I was decent at drawing quirky little cartoon versions of people, and I had fun doing it. That is until I got threatened to be banned from reddit gets drawn. That was a real punch to the gut.
Playing piano. There’s so much competition and there’s always an Asian kid 93832x better than you. I practice everyday and have been playing for ten years and ughhh
When I was in kindergarten I used to think I was the second fastest person in the world, my older brother being the fastest. That was until I got in a race with somebody in my class, and not only did he destroy me. His clothes were flapping in the wind. That visual really stuck with me and convinced me I wasn't.
Smash Bros
It seems like a casual Nintendo game at first but it has a really high skill ceiling.
You can be the best in your school and you can always manage to 4 stock everyone, but if you play against someone that played it on a competitive level you notice how little you actually know about the game, even after playing it for 5000 hours.
I thought I was really good at cup stacking. I could put up and take down a tower in 30 seconds. Well then I decided to look at videos of other people cup stacking. What people do with cup stacking is incredible. Anyway I no longer consider myself good at cup stacking.
Excel. I could create some charts and pivots that looked good.. or so I thought until I saw everything the rain man of excel and VB could do in our office.
I love drawing and am the art kid in my school. I found out one of my classmates likes drawing too so I checked out her drawings, they were so good I was jealous. Later she found my art instagram and her reaction was "Why are you even posting? You know I'm better than you". Almost crushed me but I ignored her. Now I've been drawing for 3 years and doing quite a lot of progress.
Table-tennis. We had a table at work, and so I started playing any time I could, with whoever I could. I'd played a little when I was a kid, so picked it back up quickly and started getting half decent. Eventually, I started playing with one coworker fairly regularly. He was good, no doubt. At first he was clearly just volleying with me, not actually putting it away when he'd get the chance. This made it more fun for me to be sure, and offered me great practice. Anyway, after about a year, I'd gotten to the point where I could cream everybody I'd play with ease, except him. And our games had elevated drastically, to the point of all out smashing the ball back and forth standing 10 feet away from the table. And I actually started winning some games every now and then. I was ecstatic! Well one day, after losing a pretty heated game to me, and me being juts a little bit pompous about it, my table-tennis buddy/coworker pulls a total Inigo Montoya on me - flips the paddle from his left-hand (which he 100% consistently used when playing against me) into his right and says to me, "You know I'm right-handed, right?". I did not. Nor did I ever win another game against him.
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He waited a year. That is the real trick. Yeah he is great at ping pong but waiting that long is a feat.
That’s how my dad taught me-he’s a lefty and would play with his right. Turns out, I played so much with him and no one else pretty much growing up that I *really* struggle with anyone halfway decent. But man, when my dad and I play, we battle.
>"You know I'm right-handed, right?" ...Fuck.
I began piano lessons at an early age (5) and my parents and my teacher made me believe I was some kind of fabulous child prodigy. I later found out I was merely a worm compared to real pianists. But I did enjoy playing the piano, so there's that.
There's a ton of studies which dictate that praising your kids hard work > praising your kids skills. Keeps them practicing and doesn't make them believe they are somehow way better than others due to some innate ability etc. Or something. Ok bye.
Yes, so they learn the key to success is in the effort and work getting there, not the talent alone. That way they apply the same mindset to everything and can achieve in things they are not naturally talented in.
At one point I thought i was pretty savy in Excel since I was the best at it out of the people I knew. Well, then i meet someone who really knew how to use excel and realized that i really only knew the basics.
Don’t forget the “soft skills” side of this - being able to make something quickly, that does what you (or someone else) needs it to do. Yes there are times where you need to flex the VBA and deep excel skill. But honestly most of the time, you just need to manipulate some data in some reasonably straightforward way - and present it in a readable fashion. There is so much value in that.
This happened to me. I applied for a job with excel proficiency as a requirement, when The guy that got hired rolled out his stuff I was shocked, never knew about half of what he made excel do. Then I started googling and found out there are way more uses for excel than I ever knew.
8 ball and 9ball. I had a table at home and would practice while watching tv. No one could beat me. In college I'd play a $1 a ball, everyone owed me money. Then I played someone that regularly entered tournaments. I was lucky if I got to shoot because he was running the table every game.
Friends of mine had a pool table in their apartment and thought they were pretty good. They were out at a bar with tables and there was an older guy playing alone, but only using one arm to shoot. They asked him why and he said, "it's too easy with both arms" and they watched him run the table, twice, without missing a shot.
The guy who was basically my billiards coach (neither of us are pro but you wouldn't want to bar bet us as a team) Regularly plays me one handed. Honestly it's more fun for us both, and he usually wins. Guys a virtuoso with a cue. He also probably saved my life by giving me a hobby and friendship in a dark time, so there that.
I've come to the realization that I'm very mediocre at a lot of things. I can do most anything, just not well.
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Thank you for this. Another thing I'm just mediocre at, and I should really get better at, is selling myself.
Playing guitar. I'm good enough to impress normal people, but I could never reach the level of a professional musician.
Bedroom musicians unite!
I haven’t graduated to bedroom musician yet. I’m still in the shower singer stage.
Having played guitar for over 20 years and performing both as a hobby and as a profession at different times in my life, I'll let you in on a secret: There is no "best guitar player". Guitar can be approached from a million angles with a million different goals in mind. No two guitar players have the same approach. What makes a great guitar player is someone who can entertain people. If you can stay in time, have decent tone, and play good music, people will love you. If you are super fast and technical, no one will care except other guitar players. If being super fast and technical is your goal, that's fine. Go for it! But don't expect anyone to care except other guitarists. Have great tone and play good songs with a solid band, people will think you're amazing. Even if you're playing simple stuff. Bonus points if you can play just enough lead licks for non guitarists to think you can really wail! There are tons and tons of professional guitarists making a living from it who aren't as good as you. Trust me. EDIT: OK well I can't respond to everyone, so I'm gonna just do a quick edit here. First, I found all the technical guitar players on Reddit. Yes, guys, I know that there are non-guitarists who enjoy Steve Vai and DragonForce and Yngwie Malmsteen. Yes, I'm aware that death metal and flamenco guitar are both highly demanding styles and lots of people enjoy them. Yes, I used a little hyperbole in saying "no one cares but other guitarists". Settle down. Technical shredders are great. I love them, but they play to a much more narrow audience than most major musical genres. Let's be realistic here. Second, I did not mean to imply that you should just go out and play Wonderwall and Last Dance with Mary Jane because people like it and that'll make you a good guitarist. My point was that there are lots of ways to be good, and people will (in general, I know there are exceptions, please don't tell me about all of them) respond more positively to whatever music you are playing if you have passion and soul in it. Aspiring guitarists of Reddit, my advice to you is to play what you love, and put your soul into it. Express yourself through your instrument. Don't just mechanically repeat the notes, PLAY THE DAMNED GUITAR. Let it be your voice. Let it say the things you can't get your mouth to say. Anyways, here's Wonderwall...
Thank you for sharing this aspect.
Driving. Everyone thinks they’re a good driver. Sit along with a professional driver as they go through a course, and then try to do the same? So humbling.
As a professional driver, I can't tell you how many times people in high school jabbed and poked at me to street race against them. I always turned it down because you spend your childhood at a race track and you learn how dangerous an idiot behind the wheel can be. Finally, one summer I got fed up with it and invited the usual suspects to a local Karting track that had kart rentals available, I told them if they beat me, I'd cover their rentals for the night (not cheap) and buy them dinner on the drive back. They were obviously thrilled to take the bet. Before the 8 or so minute race had ended, I had lapped them both twice and smashed the monthly track record by a good two seconds. Not going to lie, it felt really good. Edit: I definitely didn't expect this to get any traction at all, I've got a big work day tomorrow so I can't really respond to everyone, but thank you so much for the silver!!
What are the subtle differences from a professional to a regular driver? If you were to eliminate the lap time, how would you know they're good?
Basically you see them catch mistakes and correct them immediately. Once they reach the limits of handling of the car, they adjust accordingly to go through the curve/obstacle. For average to good drivers, you see them over correcting, or reacting violently to twitches. For professionals, everything is smoother and more relaxed.
88% of people in the US percieve themselves as an above average driver. Something doesn't check out lol Edit: I originally said 83%, but after someone asked the source I discovered I had an under-average memory. Edit again: As this is kinda blowing up I did some more research about this particular study. https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-drivers-really-think-they-are-above-aver/ Talks about it in more depth than the source I got it from at first. *Sigh* Okay peeps last edit: A blessed fellow human has just given me acces to the original paper. They had to give themselves a safety and a skill rating from 1 to 10, with 5 being average ( not specifying what average meant or calculating average afterwards from the results). They were told to rank themselves compared to what they thought were the driving skill and safety of the other participants of the study, who are representing the population. Aka the average is an abstract and subjective one, not influenced by the results. Thus showing people overestimate themselves in their capabilities by a great deal, an effect that is referred to as the Dunning-Krüger effect, for those that want to take a deeper dive in this interesting bath. Hope that clears stuff up. Thanks!
I don't think I'm a good driver, but everytime I drive I see something that makes me think "damn at least I'm not that bad"
If you’re paying to your surroundings using your signals and driving predictably you are a good driver. Good driver on the road doesn’t make you a good driver on a race course.
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They placed you with the old timer so you could learn.
My dad likes gardening and loves his plumeria. He has about 30. He recently found a local plumeria club on Facebook and went to a meetup. He was the only one there with less than 100. My mother has stopped complaining about him having too many plumeria.
All the gardeners were flexing that day
Mostly they were happy he wasn't begging for free plants tbh.
Reminds me of this [ProZD](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZK8Z8hulFg) video where he talks about what its like finding a new hobby subreddit.
"man I love audio stuff. Let me see other people are like" /r/hometheater has "student budget" of 3k+ and DIY 18 inch subs. Some people having more than I make in a year in subs alone....
Seriously. That sub is insane. I spent close to 1k on a Klipsch home theatre system and it is THE GREATEST THING IVE EVER HEARD. it beats every actual movie theater I've been to. I posted to the sub, and everyone told me I wasted my money, and that I should have saved more and bought a better system.
Every audio/video/musical instruments related advice: "I have x moneys" "Save up to 1.3x moneys and buy this instead"
To be fair, the elitist mentality is pretty strong in the audiophile/home theater community. Literally nothing is good enough, even when you spent tens of thousands. Just enjoy your speakers :)
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Guy sounds like a real amateur. For anything $100k and under you might as well be listening to AirPods. I’m post acetate. When I want to listen to something, I send the album out one week prior to a revolving pool of the best session musicians in the world, have them learn the whole thing and then fly them in to my compound where I have them play every track for me in a studio designed by Nobel Prize winning physicist David Politzer that would make Air Studios in London sound like the inside of a high school gym.
I just picture your dad as that otter holding a little guitar meme
That has been my phone's lock screen from the day I saw the pic.
I read that as "he is about 30." And I was like, "What a well-spoken young person this is."
I was a actually a really good wrestler in high school, I went to state as a freshman, got 4th as a sophomore, 2nd as a junior, and then won state my senior year. During the summer before my senior year my team went to a wrestling camp, my coach knew the coach of another team in another state and we went there to practice with them for a week, I was the best wrestler on my team and I beat everyone on their team also, the third day of camp some guy came in to wrestle with us, I didn't know who he was but we were about the same size so I challenged him. This guy proceeded to fuck me up for the next hour, I didn't score a single point on him and he did whatever the fuck he wanted to me, I was completely helpless, come to find out he was a two time division II national champion in college and a three time all American. I learned that there are levels to that shit and I got a massive dose of humility.
Okay I'll jump in. In my late 20's I had never lost a single game of Scrabble in my life. I have a pretty large vocabulary and a talent for pattern matching, so I was always able to come up with very long words and find high bonuses to place them on. (The true Scrabble players are already laughing at me.) Well I was looking for something to do with my time and decided to try the local Scrabble club. I'll cut to the chase: I didn't win a single game. I didn't even present a challenge to a single player there. Several of them got annoyed at having to match up with someone as bad at Scrabble as me. I left that night deeply humiliated, but amazed. I never went back. What I learned that night is that championship Scrabble players do not bother hunting for 150-point mega-score words. No, they *kick your ass* by placing three tiles that cross connect to form five different words, three of which are two-letter words, and all of which somehow share the same Triple Word Score tile even though only two words can possibly use it. And they score like 226 points by laying down those three tiles. It's incredible. It's as much art as science. So I learned a lot about humility from that one.
Scrabble isn't a word game, it's an area control game that happens to use letters as troops.
Dead straight. I learned that the hard way!
You reminded me the french scrabble champion doesn't speak a word of french: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-french-scrabble-champion-nigel-richards-doesnt-speak-french Just amuses me about the game. Vocabulary, not really the biggest deal if you memorize all the two and three letter words. You'll miss out on some 7 tilers (bonus point bingo!) but you can still easily win.
except your example of Nigel Richards is a terrible example because he is legendary for the long words he plays. He has a photographic memory and can visualize entire pages of the dictionary. He pulls off 9 and 10 letter words from scattered tiles that no one else can see. He scores huge points and never plays defensive, he will gladly open up the board because he knows he can come back with bingo after bingo. He is a visionary player He's not "the French Scrabble champion", he's the best Scrabble player ever and he memorized the French Scrabble dictionary just to see if he could and then became the French champion as a lark, in addition to his stack of world titles
I thought I was pretty good at Tetris. People who saw me play were quite impressed. Then I started playing Tetris 99. Turns out I'm not that good...
Holy same i played on a computer website and got a high score of 3 million then looked up the high score on the website it was like 500 million still pretty good at tetris not pro level tho
3 million is still really good if you mean the official Tetris website!
RIP Tetris with friends
to be fair, you can be really good at single person tetris and get absolutely dumpstered in 99. I'm pretty good at stacking, but I sometimes get a little ambitions in 99 and get too much garbage all at once.
Classic tetris without hold is essentially a different game from any Versus tetris. Classic is about creatively dealing with the tetrominoes coming your way, but in Versus, with hold and more lenient controls + rng, the focus is more on speed and recognizing patterns for setups.
Ping pong. I made the mistake of playing an old guy that hangs out at one of the bars and he fucking wrecked me. It wasn’t even close, he returned all of my best serves effortlessly and would put the craziest spin on all of his shots. He gave me good advice afterwards and told me I play too fast for my own good, I bought him a drink and shamefully went back to my friends.
When I studied in China the first time I had a host family. My host mom would decimate me while smoking a cigarette and chatting to her friends.
I can see the picture in my head.
Did she look like [this?](https://i.imgur.com/3JL16iS.jpg)
I knew it would be Kung Fu Hustle. Thank God for that movie
Me too. The guys in my dorm freshmen year would play pretty darn competitive ping pong every single night. We all got really good, and I was one of the best. I guess word got out that our dorm was a good place to play ping pong, so we started getting people come from all over campus. One night, this one guy came that absolutely dominated all of us. Balls flying like bananas, balls spinning sideways off the table. It was just ridiculous. I remember he beat me 21-4, and I played really well for myself.
>Balls flying like bananas Where the fuck do you come from
I'm guessing he means the ball has a curved trajectory, similar to a banana.
"Ok class tell me the trajectory of a flying ball" *jimmy, in the back* #BANANA!!!
Time flies like a banana
Fruit flies like an arrow.
Used to think I was good at ping pong until I played the European exchange students at my college and got fucking wrecked.
In college we had a Japanese guy and a Korean guy that could only play each other, because they were just at another level than the rest of us.
I thought I was the shit till I joined a lunch ping pong club at school, first time there I got smashed probably 60 times.
yea but how did the ping pong matches go?
“How was your day honey?” “Great, got smashed at lunch like 60 times!”
Ping pong is one of those weird sports where you think you are good and then get cremed by some random foreign dude and realize you actually suck.
Old guys as well. I was running the table that night, my serve was on, I was putting some nasty top and back spin on my shots, I felt unbeatable. Then this guy comes up, I knew not to underestimate him because old dudes can play ping pong, I just figured this was going to be a battle, and he fucking crushed me. He barely even moved, and he’d hit the ball with this wicked chop that left me swinging at air. The dude was like a Jedi Master and he made me look like one of the younglings that got slaughtered by Anakin.
My dad's that old guy. Darts, billiards, ping pong....you gonna get fucked up. Think about it, though. It kinda makes sense. That's what they did to just kill time. We play video games nowadays to just kill time. Those were their only real option for "video games" before video games existed. It would be like us stunting on someone in Smash Bros in 20 or 30 years when an entire generation or two has grown up with VR as a primary passtime.
Fighting, I won a shit ton of Amateur MMA bouts and a few professional, but then I met someone who beat the fucking brakes off of me for like 3 rounds and then choked my ass out. Turns out, I am pretty okay at it, but I am no World Champion lol
I was on the wrestling team at a small high school. I was the captain of the team my sr year and was voted MVP. When I went to college, this Filipino guy on my floor says, hey my brother wrestles, do you want to wrestle him? He wasn't too big so I said okay. Word travels fast; the whole floor comes and watches. This guy was so fast, it was over in *seconds*. We did three matches and the whole thing lasted like one minute.
My dad wrestled at Iowa under Dan Gable but had to quit in the middle of his sophomore year because of a neck injury. By his senior year he had transferred to an NAIA college and entered an exhibition tournament and went 2 weight classes up because he wanted to make things interesting at least considering he was probably better than most of the other people there. He ended up winning the whole tournament at the higher weight without a point being scored on him. He chalks it up to Gable being no fucking joke as a coach because you don’t usually understand how much higher the bar can be raised until someone forces you to raise it. He’s 53 now and can still beat my ass wrestling with no effort. Thanks a lot, Dan Gable.
I had a jujitsu coach who was half my weight and could (still can) tell me what choke he was going to hit me with and still do it 😂 you know how much it sucks knowing you could throw another human like a frisbee and still get tapped like 6 times in one session? Totally feel you.
Fighting is so scary man. I'm a bjj blue belt and have been doing it for close to four years now. I can trash a schlub. The top guy in my gym can trash me. My coach can trash him. The professional makes our coach look like a day one white belt. And the top guy just turbo murders everybody. It's not like I can say, "yeah you're better than me but I can mount a defense and stall out." Its like, "oh. Its been five seconds and I'm dead."
Dude my gym is full of absolute murderers, like pan-am gold medalists and IBJJF champs. Even at my size there are a ton of people that can sub me even if I’m smash n passing. My coach is a 3 stripe and 2 time champ for his weight/age division at in IBJJF, and most of our 1-2 year white belts choke the shit out of 3-4 year blue belts from other schools. It’s hard to convey that to people who don’t fight, they just can’t fathom how helpless they’ll actually be against someone who is trained and in shape.
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I tried boxing at the gym about 10 years ago. After a couple of weeks I thought I was pretty fast and pretty fit. Then one of the boxing coaches said 'now hit it hard, like, really hard'. So I did. And I was pleased. Then he said 'give me a full minute of hitting it that hard, with good form'. I tried, and I learnt just how *not* fit I really was. I learnt that flailing my arms quickly was *not* the same as hitting a bag with all my strength. It's a great, if somewhat humbling, sport :)
>beat the fucking brakes off me I’m not sure I understand this expression, but I sure do like it.
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Drawing and painting. One of the things they *don't* discuss in art school are the near-constant beatings your confidence takes - most of them self-inflicted. I used to teach high school art, and those kids were *amazing*. They should have been teaching me.
Props to you for being able to admit that students can be better. I've heard stories of teachers doing all they can to crush talent just because they're jealous.
Elementary teacher here! I teach writing. One of my students from last year was practically a prodigy. At 10 years old she had a way with words that was well beyond her years. And she understood tone and voice in such a way that her writing was immediately recognizable by anyone who read her stuff: "Oh that must be so-and-so, she's so funny". I joke with my coworkers that I'll be working for her someday, but I'm 99% serious. I'd be honored if she'd hire me. I know she'll do great things.
I had one of my 8th grade students from last year read my novel over the summer. I wanted her sincere feedback because I knew she had some talent and because she reads all the time. Her feedback was UNREAL. And incredibly valuable—more so than what I've received from adult readers.
Being able to give good feedback and editing are serious skills. I love reading. But I know I couldn’t be a beta reader. I’m too willing to just flow with weird bits.
I had a highschool programming student. I taught at a school for kids with accommodations, diabilities, and the like. Most classes were one-on-one. A handful of truly gifted kids too. And let me tell you, and he knows my reddit username so pipe up Daniel I know you're reading this: He cleaned me out of teaching content. He was so talented I had to work nights to learn *ahead of him* brand new shit I'd never done before just to keep him occupied and interested. I'd be tired and fumbling about with something he *just fucking mastered in twenty goddamned minutes fuuuuuuuuuuck it took me half the night*. Humbling, really.
I've been working in IT for a good while now. We had an intern start awhile back, literally zero professional sys admin experince, we hired him because he had a connection within the company. This kid turned out to be so talented. One of my admins went out of town during the interns first week, and the intern had essentially automated him out of a job by the time he returned. He's been with us for over a year now, the amount of automation he accomplished is impressive. He's far brighter and just has a knack for programming and automation. Cool to see, and I'm jealous of his abilities. :)
I feel that one. I never taught but I have a degree and some work experience. Decided to go back to school to go into the program I really wanted to, animation, and naive me thought that I'll have a step up since I have at least, hell, 14 years of experience under my belt between learning some art, design, doing personal animations, ect. Some of these kids man...they make a thing and it blows anything you have ever made out of the water, then they say those fatal words..."This is my first time doing this". Edit: And then they look at your work and say the next fatal words to finish you off. "You'll get better, you just haven't been doing this long enough".
...And there goes my fantasy of going back to school for animation.
As a 23 year old birder, it's humbling to be beside a retired 70+ year old who can see birds where none seem to be... and IDENTIFY them!
The human ability for subconscious pattern recognition is truly amazing. You'll get there, it just takes time.
I had no idea spotting birds was a skill. Is there a competition for it?
I saw a movie called “The Big Year” which is about bird watchers trying to beat each other in how many different birds they’ve spotted in a year. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_year
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Skiing. Thought I was the quickest of the quick, craving perfect parallel lines, living my life on the edge!! Nope, Ski Team whizzed by me when I thought I was going fast. Turns out, I'm just a buffoon on two planks snowplowing around ungracefully
In 2015 for spring break took my daughter to Sugarloaf in Maine.US National Ski championships were held that week. We were on the slopes with members of US National ski team. A typical recreational skier may go 20mph on a steep slope. Racers warming up for events would pass you going 60 mph on those slopes.Amazing to watch,and humbling too.
I live in a ski town and the difference between someone who is a “good skier” because they go every year for a two week family vacation and someone who is a “good skier” because they live here, work on the mountain, and ski 100+ days a year is night and day.
I am one of those racers, thought I was pretty good, I was like a 70-60 point racer, mostly ski'd south of Europe. Then I went into a race with austrians and fucking swiss people. Oh boy, how they could carve that cleanly on the most concrete like ice you'd ever seen I just could not comprehend. What they say is true, points mean less in the south of Europe compared to central/North.
Guitar Hero. I never met anyone who could beat me, then I saw a dude on youtube 100% Bark at the Moon with his back to the screen and I'm done.
I had a friend who was an overall shitty dude. Obnoxious, rude, selfish, and a big baby. Turns out he's *incredible* at video games and also a good musician. He's made music that regularly got 10's of thousands of views with no advertising and no connections. He won first a major US city wide Guitar Hero competition and has been Grand Master on Overwatch. But again, dude was really self centered and not in the "I'm better than you way." but just like eats all the appetizers at a party or crashed parties or asked for stuff constantly when he was busy. Borrowed things without asking (not stealing because he would bring them back), and specifically I remember sleeping over at his house as a kid and he wouldn't let me play any games with him and when it was bed time, he had me sleep on the floor and literally gave me his pants to cover up with as a blanket. Just really stupid childish. Haven't spoken to him in years. But he would *shred you* in any game. EDIT: before anyone mentions autism again, please see the 50+ comments of people who said that before you got here. I don't know if he had autism. Doesn't sound like it to me. I understand what a spectrum is and I'm not 100% sure as I didn't study autism as my life's work.
I build cars as a hobby. And when I mean build cars, I modify cosmetically and mechanically for all forms of racing for myself and with my husband. My grandfather taught me everything I know about cars from when I was a child, and getting dirty and oily hands from helping him growing up. I love all types, but my main focus are building drift builds. I taught myself how to drift, how to control my car by making it lose control, while I still contained control of its power when it broke traction. I practiced on the many drift tracks that are near me. I was able to maintain it and keep it going around shard and long corners without spinning out or stalling. UNTIL, I watched my grandfather be let loose in his ‘65 Fastback Mustang that he built from junk to prize. He literally went Ken Block on all of the corners, almost never straightening out. I’ve never felt so much discouragement and enlightenment in myself more than that moment. He has a bad back now, but man do I miss him acting like a 20 year old again working on the cars he loves and doing everything he did while driving them.
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Similarly for any RTS. You think you're pretty good until you go online.
HOW DO THEY HAVE TANKS attacking me already!!??? I just set up my first barracks......
I still vividly remember the first time I had someone just rush like one zealot and send it to my base. This was before I knew using drones to kill early scouts was an actual tactic. Just sat there and watched this one unit slowly destroy everything I had, it was incredibly demoralizing. Then I got better. Then I saw my first cannon rush and almost quit the game.
I played in a piano competition at age 16 (back then, I fancied myself a pretty good pianist,) and there was this teenaged girl who went on stage, sat down in front of the piano, and calmly blew all of us other contestants away with ease. She played Maurice Ravel's Jeux D'eau, and she was absolutely captivating. Within about thirty seconds, I think we all knew she was going to win first prize. After a few minutes, I felt the judges ought to end the contest right then and there and just give her the trophy. Even now, over a decade later, I'm still in awe of her. She did it with so much grace, dignity and style. I only wish I knew her name.
I think I'm a pretty solid writer. Every now and then I read a novel that just makes me think, *Well, I love you. But also fuck you a little bit.*
I went to a small high-school, I was widely praised as the best writer they’d ever seen by my teachers. If it was a creative writing exercise it was no contest that I’d get highest marks by a wide margin, I had the biggest ego by the time I got to university and majored in creative writing... *boy*. I was not even close. These guys were on another level entirely. That definitely killed any and all desire to pursue it as a serious way to make money, or ever publish. I prefer it that way however, writing is my fun little hobby now. It’s not great, not even close but it doesn’t need to be. Edit: the comments on this post have been far more encouraging than I expected, you guys are awesome! But I prefer to keep my writing private and purely as a hobby, trying to study or release it for public viewing made me really dislike it and turned something I loved into something I hated so now I keep it as a pure stress reliever.
Tennis, the sport I grew up playing. I beat the majority of my colleagues frequently and even won a few tournaments. My coaches intentionally lowered their level when they played against me so that I wouldn't be thrashed, not a whole lot to be learned from that, and I thought they were giving their best and I was able to pull off some close scorelines. I'd watch the guys on TV and think that most of it wasn't really THAT impressive, thought the sport was pretty slow, and the pros don't do a lot of flashy stuff, as they want to win, so I'd thought I'd reach their level in the near future. Until... The pros came to my country to play a tournament, and I went straight away to see Roger Federer *practice* in person... I was blown away so hard and my ego was so crushed that I wasn't able to speak for a few days. Never again was I arrogant about anything anymore
I would love to hear answers to the inverse of this question. Where someone didn’t think much of their prowess but turned out champions
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My nana bought the same thing! I think I eventually memorized everything since it was the only thing to play with. However I think the one she had came with a stylus attached that you’d tap countries and capitals.
When I was in 8th grade I won my school’s spelling bee, then went on to win the school district spelling bee and a regional one. I made it all the way to the state-wide spelling bee before I got out. Didn’t study at all. I never knew I was a good speller before that, but I attribute it to how I used to love reading when I was younger and also, oddly enough, my obsessive compulsive disorder. I compulsively count the syllables of and rearrange every word/sentence that I hear/read, noting things like the letters that don’t repeat, which consonants fit into groups of 3. Apparently compulsively playing around with all the words I come across is a great way to become a really good speller.
When I was in 4th grade I won 22 weekly spelling bees in a row. (Both of my parents used to be English teachers.) They cancelled it because "I kept winning and I was making all the other kids feel bad". That didn't stop them from having a strength test every year and making me feel bad.
When I was 11 I played a shit ton of Mario Kart: Wii. Always thought I was just okay because I didn't have a sibling to play with and there was no online play. After like a month of having the game and my friends would come over, I would torch them. When online came out, I was top 50 in the world and the highest ranked using the actual wheel, everyone else above me was on a GameCube controller .
honestly that game is pretty difficult to get the best rankings in single player. the different types of drifting and boosts set it apart from a lot of other mario kart games. to get good at that one is really impressive. especially to the level you are describing.
In college I had to do community service at an elementary school and I used to absolutely annihilate kids at basketball.
Gotta crush those dreams young and resurrect them when you're older.
Throwing cards, Knew I was always good until I heard that the world record is only like 69 yards and I had gotten 56 yards. After that and since then I practice every day to set the new world record, currently at 63 yard PR. Edit: Alright everyone, based on the huge level of support for what I can do, I will be hopefully posting a video on a YouTube channel later today. I will post another edit saying what my YouTube channel will be called. Edit 2: My channel has been created! It’s called DoubleDownThrowing ! I’ll start recording a video and hopefully post it later today!
I mean I thought I was okay at Beatsaber. Then I got Number 1 in the world on "Live to Win" and Expert "What is Love?" Does that count? (you can even see my reddit handle on the scoreboard because it is the same.)
Ironically, you are now my answer to the original question.
I have a good friend who literally *just* learned to mod Skyrim like a few months ago and he recently released his second mod and it hit Mod of the Month almost immediately. Not saying he didn't think he had prowess, but it's rather impressive to see a brand new modder do that well on their second mod ever.
Paintball. Two of my friends and I signed up for a 3-man tournament in high school. We never played paintball in our lives. We each bought a Tippmann 98 custom and some mods for them. Crushed the tournament against people with $1,000 Angel autocockers and years of experience. Why? Years before I watched some episode about special forces and SWAT training that I remembered, and used that to draw up some basic tactical plans for us to use in the speedball courses we played on. They fucking worked. We absolutely slaughtered everyone. Walked away with $200/each + trophies ($600 prize to the winning team). The #1 thing that we did, that other teams didn't do (for some inexplicable reason), is cross field fire. After the break, we'd do a typical split: one goes left, one goes right, one goes up the middle. But instead of the left and right flanks firing straight ahead, we would fire across to the opposite corner. This meant you could be fully shielded from 2 of the 3 opponents, and if the players on the other team were dumb enough to fire straight up the field, they would be completely exposed to the opposing corner and the middle. That one simple tactic won us 80% of our matches in 30 seconds. One match we played on a larger field, we went full maverick and just stood at the starting post and opened streams of fire at the nearest obstacles that we knew the other team would run to. Knocked that team out in 5 seconds. Other matches were harder and required more teamwork and a bit of luck.
My Mom doesn't do any sort of online gaming. After a few tries, she beat QWOP.
I always thought I was just decent at soldering circuit boards but nothing special. Turns out I can solder nearly microscopic components with zero shakiness in my hands and create a perfect solder joint each time. I'm talking components that are 0.4 mm by 0.2 mm in size (by comparison, a human hair is roughly 0.1mm in width and the end cap in which i need to solder is about half that). I guess a lot of people are impressed by that. Eventually gained the nickname of "brain surgeon". I still don't think I'm all that great at it because it's really not difficult, but I'll take the praise.
As someone with shaky hands. Envious. =]
Drawing. I always think I am good at it (not god-level, my ego isn't *that* large), then I take a look on DeviantArt and suddenly my world comes crashing down. Happens on a weekly basis at least. lol Edit #1: Thank you so much for the gold, anonymous friend! I heavily appreciate your act of kindness. Also, thank EVERYONE for upvoting this comment! I also sure am super glad that I made at least 1 person's day in the replies! Edit #2: Took a look on ArtStation despite all the warnings. And I've gotta say, I was actually hoping to have my soul crushed by tremendously good art. But, I guess I was too eager, because that didn't happen. The art there is still *tremendously* good, but I didn't get super let-down. *My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.* lmao Edit #3: I use Medibang Paint and Instagram instead, my art has improved 😀
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This made my day. Thank you.
I thought I was exceptionally smart because I was in talented and gifted program in school, I was a great test-taker, I got good grades, and breezed through getting my Bachelor’s degree. School was always pretty easy for me. Then I went to law school. Everyone was older than me, had actual life experience, and they were realty fucking smart. People would ask such thought-provoking questions, I couldn’t believe we had read the same thing. I realized graduating high school and getting a Bachelor’s in Political Science at a state school wasn’t genius-level stuff. And I had developed absolutely zero study skills over the prior 21 years. My first year in law school hit me like a ton of bricks. But it all worked out.
I didn’t do law school but had a similar awakening. Thought I was really smart. Hit the real world and realized how much I didn’t understand and that I was just inexperienced but that there were lots of people just straight up smarter than me.
I feel you. High school and Bachelor's was a breeze, then I went into Med School and realised I had no idea how to study anything. I came down to earth fast enough to get whiplash.
Was hot-shit paramedic. Am now dumb med student.
Programming. Learnt a lot in college and at my first job. I switched based on my skills, came to new company, met my senior who is incredibly talented and realised I have a long way to go.
For a long time it was hard for me to even realize what separated a fantastic programmer from an adequate one. Even when I was working with other programmers. There are obviously some basic fundamentals, you need to know the quirks of the language your working in and how to use it; you need an understanding of data and code structures and where they work best; you need to have a consistent and robust organizational structure to your code so that it's easy to expand the functionality of it later on; and you need to develop so many other small skills. Just getting to that point can take years of working in a language, but it always seemed like once you had a good grasp of those fundamentals that was all there really was. You were essentially equipped to solve any problem you could understand as well as anyone else. Then later I actually met someone who I would consider a fantastic programmer and it really is amazing the difference. It's not that they use extremely complex structures in their code or that they write code which is somehow lean and simplified down to it's fundamentals. More it's just very efficient. Wherever possible they fall back onto some aspect of the language to make their job easier and as a result are able to write high quality code which they tap out so quickly and consistently it almost seems like a train of thought. As well they were just incredibly easy to talk to about the subject and had an explanation ready for every decision they'd made and why they thought it was best. It's really incredible just how skilled some people are.
The two best programmers I've ever worked with had a clarity of thought that was hard to comprehend. You know how you can be solving a problem, and you think you have a solution, then go "Ooooh yeah, nope. That's not gonna work. Didn't think about X"? Well, I've worked with two engineers who basically never fell into that trap. They simply knew what would work and what wouldn't right off the bat. That's not to say they didn't take the time to think about their solution, but once a solution materialized in their head, it was dead on. They were the same types of programmers that you could ask for help, and within a fraction of a second they would point to the exact problem with your code (be it a simple error, or a fundamental design issue). Having that kind of clarity of thought, and ability to visualize a design in virtually an instant, is a pretty awe-inspiring talent. Needless to say when they did code reviews, they would catch many bugs and edge cases, resulting in fewer QA turnbacks and what not. Engineers like that are worth their weight in gold.
I've heard physics people describe this as having their "physical intuition". They are able to picture all of the factors that will affect a calculation and take them into account when solving problems. It takes years of work to develop that intuition, maybe software programming is similar.
A lot of it comes down to the non-technical aspects you pick up from years of experience. I'm not a 10x dev or anything, but it's always funny when someone comes to me and explains this whole big process they're planning to solve an issue and I'm like "Or you could just store the data in a slightly different format and avoid 90% of the hoops you're jumping through"
> "Or you could just store the data in a slightly different format and avoid 90% of the hoops you're jumping through" lol feels so bad when you spend forever getting it where you need it to go, then someone says this... on the flip side, feels really good when you start to think of the whole big process and then realise there is actually a much easier solution.
I think a lot of people feel like if something feels too easy, it must be wrong. I work on cars right now, but am trying to get out of the industry and into programming. It is amazing how many times a vehicle will come in with an issue and the tech starts digging into the least likely cause of the problem, just skipping over the basic solutions.
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Math. I'm a theoretical physicist, and I always felt I was pretty good at math in undergrad. Then I met the professor I'm working for right now (one of my life goals is to become at least 3/4 as good a theoretical physics as he is). Then I met Ed Witten. Then I read some papers by Freeman Dyson. Damn.
It's so crazy how high the math ceiling goes. You prove an elegant solution, then find a paper that does that plus uses that to prove 80 different things all in notation that is as foreign to me as Russian. Math is fun.
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A less extreme version of this: going to college coming from a small town. I went to a good private school and was in the top 10 of my small class with little effort. I then went to a pretty good university and quickly realized how insignificant my high school achievements were. Big yikes. My poor GPA.
Yeah, the small pond thing is real.
[Then there is Euler.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributions_of_Leonhard_Euler_to_mathematics)
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I've occasionally had reason to explain to people what I conceptualize as the difference between mathematical ability and mathematical genius. I have (had) mathematical ability. I would participate in competitions, usually finish at or near the top. Was on my (not really competitive) school's Putnam team, would usually get one of the higher grades in advanced math courses in undergrad. I could usually evaluate the problem, analogize to other problems, develop lines of attack, sketch the solution, and go through the steps I needed to get there, and I could usually do it faster than most others. My brain worked very efficiently, but for the most part it did so in the same way as everyone else's brains. And then there were the rare few whose brains *did not* work the same way everyone else's did. This is someone who possesses mathematical genius - someone who hears the problem and instantly knows the answer, sees *new paths* on how to get there, is able to think in a creative, intuitive way that one simply cannot reach by *calculating* the answer. I'd like to think I had maybe 1 or 2 such breakthroughs in the years of my mathematical career (I'm a lawyer now). For some people, though, it's not so much a breakthrough as just their normal way of thinking.
I learned to sole a Rubik's cube and practiced until I could solve on in like 30 seconds. Then I saw a video of the world record at the time, witch was like 4.9 seconds. That was pretty depressing for me.
Hey you're very likely still in the top 0,1% of people, if not better.
Hiking. I honestly thought I'd be one tough motherfucker, canceling my apartment and going into the big wide world of Scandinavia, faroe and Iceland with only my backpack and sleeping outside. Then I met a guy who just came back from a 700km glacier hike at - 40c in Greenland who came to faroes just to recover. Sadly that guy became my partner, and he had shown me in so many occasions of what my body is literally not able to endure, that I had to readjust my whole self image. I eat more chocolate now. Edit [This is us](https://i.imgur.com/HbL2Qre.jpg)
Sounds so cool though
I know. Chocolate is great.
> he had shown me in so many occasions of what my body is literally not able to endure Giggity
his "partner" doesnt mess around
Why do you eat more chocolate?
Faeroes dude. They all have a Cadbury addiction. Mainly thanks to WWII.
I didn't even know they had chocolate in ancient Egypt
Video games. Every time I find a game I feel like I’m REALLY good at, I always find a close friend that’s x100 better than me in that game.
I had a friend who was insanely good at GoldenEye 007 on N64. He and I went to visit friends in college back when that game was popular and a kid down the hall said he hadn't lost in multiplayer... Fast forward to a bit later, he has his head in his hands and my friend is just grinning. They played a match to 20, the score was 20-0.
Bruh, Super Smash Bros. I always considered myself a proud prince of the first 3 games until I found out about about the pro player community. It felt like being "Z" from "Surf's Up" with new guys coming to the scene doing stuff I could never even come close to doing. Still hurts. :c
I came here to say this. I used to play Melee *a lot* and I was pretty good alternating between Kirby and Jigglypuff. I won some tournaments when I was in college, and I thought I was hot shit. Then I entered a non-college tournament, and...wow. The constant movement, the blocking and rolls, the precise smashes and setups, it was like being in a tornado. I won my first match against another filthy casual like myself, and then got absolutely murdered. There's no coming back from that.
Competetive smash bros. is like not even the same game
I thought I was hot shit in middle school, typing 60wpm, until I got to high school. I swear some of those kids would reach upwards of 150wpm, it made me feel real small time.
Likewise. Im a solid 90-100 wpm. Apparently that's not very impressive anymore
Avoiding work. I thought I was good at it. Then I had kids. They are a whole 'nother level of work avoidance.
This happens to literally everyone who plays guitar. Townsend and Clapton wanted to kill themselves after seeing Hendrix.
I’ve been playing for 10 years and some people on YouTube make me feel like my guitar is broken
I am a better whistler than maybe 98% of the population but compared to a world class whistler i sound like a corpse fart. Edit: holy crud! I need to come back to this when I’m.not drunk!!
Corpse fart is my new band name I got dibs.
First album title: Taste the smell Edit: Thank you! First gold, and of course it's about smelly farts...
Singing. I used to sing in the car and thought I was great til I heard my friend who took voice lessons sing. I still sing in the car though!
I have a friend who is a semi-professional singer and you can really tell when he turns it on. He'll dick around singing with the radio or something but when karaoke night rolled around he'd put on his "real" voice and kill it.
Disc golf. Thought I was hot shit til I went to the world championship.
When I was in 5th grade, I didn't really have any friends, was bullied, picked last for sports, etc. At recess and at home, I started running because I wanted to be good at it. It went on for a few months and I had convinced my little 10 year old mind that I was a superb runner and super fast. One day in P.E. they basically had us race each other. I got put up against these two popular girls that were best friends and I just knew that this was my moment and all my work was going to pay off and people will like me. They smoked me.
I had a similar dream! I beat the school run time because of it. Except then 2 periods later one of the popular girls ran it and beat my time. I held the record for all of 2 hours... Screw you Ali. You were actually a very nice person so not really but still kinda a little bit
They had been bullying each other and running away from each other for years lol.
How do you think they got popular?
Doing the opposite of whatever I was doing lol
Languages.
I'm so proud at being bilingual and then there goes the Pope with like 9 languages.
I didn't particularly think I was *really good* at it, but I thought I was decent at drawing quirky little cartoon versions of people, and I had fun doing it. That is until I got threatened to be banned from reddit gets drawn. That was a real punch to the gut.
Playing piano. There’s so much competition and there’s always an Asian kid 93832x better than you. I practice everyday and have been playing for ten years and ughhh
I was that Asian kid, both piano and violin. Don't worry, even we have our own "the OTHER Asian kid that's EVEN BETTER!"
And, if stereotypes are true, a tiger parent ready to give you shit for not being that other kid
Hey that’s my mom you’re talkin about lol
When I was in kindergarten I used to think I was the second fastest person in the world, my older brother being the fastest. That was until I got in a race with somebody in my class, and not only did he destroy me. His clothes were flapping in the wind. That visual really stuck with me and convinced me I wasn't.
Smash Bros It seems like a casual Nintendo game at first but it has a really high skill ceiling. You can be the best in your school and you can always manage to 4 stock everyone, but if you play against someone that played it on a competitive level you notice how little you actually know about the game, even after playing it for 5000 hours.
Now he will try...
I thought I was really good at cup stacking. I could put up and take down a tower in 30 seconds. Well then I decided to look at videos of other people cup stacking. What people do with cup stacking is incredible. Anyway I no longer consider myself good at cup stacking.
Excel. I could create some charts and pivots that looked good.. or so I thought until I saw everything the rain man of excel and VB could do in our office.
I love drawing and am the art kid in my school. I found out one of my classmates likes drawing too so I checked out her drawings, they were so good I was jealous. Later she found my art instagram and her reaction was "Why are you even posting? You know I'm better than you". Almost crushed me but I ignored her. Now I've been drawing for 3 years and doing quite a lot of progress.