Forums » Smalltalk » What do you want to be best at?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately. If you had to pick one, or two at most, real life skills that you want most of all to be great at, what would that skill be?

I'm talking about something that you could potentially study and practice to become good at, if you were devoted to it with an iron will to get as many hours of focused practice as you could. Like playing a musical instrument, or learning to salsa dance at a competitive level.

For me, the skills that I am currently pouring all of my off hours into are belly dance and graphic design. What are you studying? Or what would you want to study, in a perfect world?

Sometimes I think it would be great to have some musical talent, either playing or composing.

Accounting. I'd love to be the very best accountant in the world! All that dosh.

And character descriptions, I'm pretty horrible at those.

I would really love to be a better Artist; I think I have the inspiration from some great artists on deviantART. However, I don't think I'd ever have that much of a talent.

I'd really really like to be able to art. Sadly that's beyond my reach, so I am practicing the second best thing: musics.

Writing and...okay, my guilty pleasure. Acting.

Doing combat displays for the public, and writing. Art's just a hobby.

Guilty why?

Speech writing/Speech giving (I have Public Speaking Anxiety-- although "minor" [as in not passing out/vomiting before a speech], it is still obnoxious and unpleasant) and human anatomy knowledge. It would certainly help in my drawings.

These are some really interesting answers!

For those of you who've said you'll never be good at something or it's beyond your reach, why do you feel that way? Would you feel the same even if a tutor magically fell from the sky and spent a few hours with you every day breaking down the basics and leading you through how to get benefit out of practice? Or is it a time or priority barrier or something else?

For me, I never really had a good sense of rhythm, which is essential for music. If a magic tutor could fix that, I'd be all for it

Blacksmithing and leathercraft. I'd love to be able to do this. So very, very, very badly.

Art most definately, otherwise, culinary arts!

Playing french horn and learning languages, i'm currently studying Swahili and improving on my French, Italian and Spanish...I'm kind of interest in learning Farsi and Russian, but my brain doesn't want to grasp the foreign letters. French horns...I've been playing for around 6 years, one of the hardest instruments to play if only for the fact that the ranges are so close together. Haha. But yeah, music and languages.

I would like to become the best bowyer in the Alaskan territory. It is something that I've done back in the younger days with my Grandfather. I'd like to pick it back up again.

I'd like to be a good artist, good enough to make a fancy, professional webcomic, such as Unsounded and Lackadaisy. I'm not sure if I could, but if I had all my time to put in practicing and if I had a teacher to guide me, I would certainly try my very best.

As for things that are slightly more realistically within my reach, I would like to pour time in learning more about professional writing, improve my English, and become a damn good writer. I would also like to get a better grasp on statistics. I am faced with it practically every day, and yet it still is this scary, elusive, neccesary evil to me. I want to be good at it. I don't want to have to spend hours on looking up which tests to run on which data, and I want to be able to glance over the results of an experiment and point out exactly what went wrong with the final analyses. Life would be good if I didn't need to trust that an experiment's statistics are in order, I want to be able to know for certain. Ah... wishful thinking.

I'm not sure this would count, but the one thing I'm focusing on right now would be self discipline. I have a really hard time forcing myself to go through with stuff and make myself practice and learn, and I think with more discipline I could teach myself to do LOTS of stuff - live healthier, practice drawing and writing, do well in school...

Of course, wishing to have good discipline is probably bad in and of itself.