From an early age, most people are taught skills that will soon prove lucrative for adulthood. These skills may include a host of technical and interpersonal skills that will let them become a well-functioning member of society.
While these skills may indeed be practical for their potential profitability and for maintaining a cohesive community, these are not the only skills you can learn to succeed in life.
Skills you learn from hobbies or out of sheer curiosity can also be beneficial to you in many ways in the long term or in your day-to-day living. Actively learned or innate in nature, these unique skills are what make you stand out from the crowd and perhaps even keep you sane after long, grueling hours of work.
Here are some skills unique skills that may prove useful for you sooner than later.
Slaying Games
From quickly learning a new interface to mastering the mechanics of the game to raising a character’s level, gaming entails a lot of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills that make gamers some of the most quick-witted and smartest bunch around.
Playing video games or almost any kind of game trains you to think on your feet and react rapidly to a new stimulus. The cognitive benefits of gaming are well-documented by science, touting evidence for its advantage as a stress reliever and a good alternative to pain therapy. It also helps gaming individuals become more creative and decisive.
These skills are not only applicable in games but in life as a whole. Not to mention that a career in e-sports is already completely possible today.
Knowing Self-Defense
Learning how to defend yourself is a very useful skill for obvious reasons. But it’s not only your ability to fight the bad guys that make martial arts a useful skill. When you’re learning to defend yourself, you are also discovering so much about yourself and your own strengths and weaknesses.
Learning martial arts teaches you discipline, a very useful skill that can be applied to many aspects of life, from pursuing a career to self-improvement.
Furthermore, you learn so much about respect and why, despite possessing the capacity to hurt, you should guide the freedom of others instead of exploiting your knowledge. Just make sure you’re at it for the right reasons.
Picking Locks
Do you know that lockpicking is actually a sport? You read that right. Picking locks is not just for professional locksmiths but for anyone who is curious enough to decipher and beat the most challenging lock systems.
The sport is officially called locksport, and its enthusiasts learn a wide range of skills, like lockpicking, lock bumping, and many other capabilities that are only known among locksmiths and security professionals. You’ll also amass an incredible amount of knowledge about lockpick guns, bump keys, tension tools, and the most fascinating tools of the craft.
It’s an interesting sport that is more than just a hobby, because why not make money out of it, right?
A Knack for Patterns
Do you like solving puzzles? Do you ever feel weirded out by your own ability to connect one thing to another, despite how seemingly different they can be at the outset? Before you entertain the possibility of paranoia, perhaps you should consider the idea that you’re probably gifted.
Being able to detect patterns is a sign of high intelligence and may speak of your hidden talent for breaking codes, deciphering ciphers, and figuring out the rules of an unknown system.
So if you have a knack for patterns, perhaps you may want to consider a career as a cryptographer, programmer, logician, mathematician, etc.
A Way with People
Are you confident in your people skills? If so, then you’re one of the lucky ones. Interpersonal skills are not easy to come by. There are people with very high IQs who can’t even finish a sentence when talking in front of a crowd.
Having your way with people is an incredible talent that can help you so much in life—in your career, in friendships, and in getting to the top. Once you realize the power of effective communication, you’re immediately on the frontier.
Being a Kitchen Queen/King
Not many people can say they can cook. Really cook. Being able to receive people and entertain them with a good meal will make your friends love you even more. If you’re a family person, your spouse and your kids will surely look forward to homemade meals. You can even use it as a bonding activity for the family.
And if you’re business-minded, you can put your talent to good use by opening your own food shop, bakery, or pastry shop.
Final Word
Having these skills may seem solely like a personal quirk but skills are built on a mastery of a very particular set of competencies that you can take advantage of and apply to different areas in your life.
Hone your abilities and seize opportunities for improvement. You never know what’s possible until you aim at it.
