It’s hard to tell how good you are at something, until you try it.
Most people don’t try most things, so advice like “follow your passion” or “unlock your inner child” are drawing on a terrifyingly small pool of things you’ve actually tried. And our best skills may not have obvious correlations, and a person’s distribution of skills could be lumpy and all-over-the-place. (The exception being IQ, which kinda helps a lot of things. But you can’t “specialize” just in “tasks that are easier at this IQ level”.).
Example: “gaming” seems like a specific, not-super-useful skill. But video games can be wildly different from each other. I have bad aim and awareness in FPS games, but I’m unusually good at The Wiki Game. I think this is a combination of some tiny subskills I excel at, like “bus-ticket obsession with some trivia” and “making random torturous connections between topics”.
Large lists of tiny, oddly-specific skills. Less “Programming”, more “pattern recognition (logic)” and “problem precisification” and “interpreting what someone wants” and “efficient googling”.
Free/cheap quick ways to test skills. What’s the quickest thing I can do, to see if my brain easily turns sideways in that particular dimension?
Large or systematic attempts to match tiny skills with jobs, hobbies, fields, and things-you-can-do-for-others. “You’re really fast at that shape task, have you considered going into surveying?”
[Question] How to test tiny skills?
It’s hard to tell how good you are at something, until you try it.
Most people don’t try most things, so advice like “follow your passion” or “unlock your inner child” are drawing on a terrifyingly small pool of things you’ve actually tried. And our best skills may not have obvious correlations, and a person’s distribution of skills could be lumpy and all-over-the-place. (The exception being IQ, which kinda helps a lot of things. But you can’t “specialize” just in “tasks that are easier at this IQ level”.).
Example: “gaming” seems like a specific, not-super-useful skill. But video games can be wildly different from each other. I have bad aim and awareness in FPS games, but I’m unusually good at The Wiki Game. I think this is a combination of some tiny subskills I excel at, like “bus-ticket obsession with some trivia” and “making random torturous connections between topics”.
Being good at The Wiki Game isn’t that valuable, but it matches some subskills. And some things that are (or seem) valuable, don’t match your subskills.
So here’s what I’m looking for:
Large lists of tiny, oddly-specific skills. Less “Programming”, more “pattern recognition (logic)” and “problem precisification” and “interpreting what someone wants” and “efficient googling”.
Free/cheap quick ways to test skills. What’s the quickest thing I can do, to see if my brain easily turns sideways in that particular dimension?
Large or systematic attempts to match tiny skills with jobs, hobbies, fields, and things-you-can-do-for-others. “You’re really fast at that shape task, have you considered going into surveying?”
EDIT: see also: discussion on reddit.