What impressive skill looks hard but is secretly easy to learn? – 17 cool abilities that aren’t nearly as tricky as they look

The depths of Reddit have already shown us that some people don’t know the most basic of skills, but what about those expertise that take people’s breath away?

Well, it turns out that some of these skills are actually much easier to master than you’d expect. And we know this thanks to alexthegermanst2, who posed the following question to the good folk over at r/AskReddit:

‘What impressive skill looks hard but is secretly easy to learn?’

Here are the top replies you can pick up right now…

1.

‘Lock picking.

I taught my boss the basics in twenty minutes. By the end of the evening he was reliably popping all of my practice locks I’d brought into work.’
-paulmarchant

2.

‘Balloon animals! Took like two drunk nights of boredom, tutorials are quite easy and you remember just like 5-6 shapes for people to be impressed by rather easy thing to do lol’
-flonc

3.

‘These days: typing.

“Back in my day” we had typing classes in school so a lot of folks have the skill to understand how to type but not necessarily quickly or they haven’t used it much. There’s a lot of online tutorials or courses, as well as practice for typing.

I suggest it for anyone wanting to get into administrative type work or for those wanting to do emergency dispatch (my former career). People are always shocked at how fast I type or when someone is dictating slowly and I tell them they can speak faster they just say “you type so fast!”’
-Captain-No-Fun

4.

‘Stage lighting

If you have friends in bands but you don’t play any instruments, but you wish you could still be a part of the band anyway, buy some cheap stage lights and follow them to gigs. Don’t focus on making it all flashy and annoying, just get some colors shining from dramatic angles and have colors on either side of the stage that contrast with each other.’
-VoltasPigPile

5.

‘Killing flies with your hands. If a fly lands somewhere don’t try to swat it. Clap just above it and you’ll get it almost every time. Fly has to go up before it can go forward so it goes right into your hands.’
-cashlemke

6.

‘The most impressive thing I can do is rip a phone book in half, a skill that took me about twenty minutes to learn. I do not look like a particularly strong person* so it always causes a few jaws to drop. Honestly these days, the hardest part is finding an actual phone book to demonstrate on.

*this is mainly because I am not a particularly strong person’
-Lisellybeth

7.

‘I can fold an origami dragon! Great party trick! (I never go to parties)’
-MiIllIin

8.

‘Microsoft Excel

Master the various lookup or pivot table functions, and other office workers view you with a mix of awe and fear.’
-AlgonquinSquareTable

9.

‘Basic plumbing. I work with computers and had assumed that there was roughly the same number of components to be aware of and complexity with each part.

But a toilet is pretty much just 3 fairly simple things l, and if there’s something wrong with the toilet, worst case you need to replace one or more of those things. With a 5 minute YouTube video you can probably understand it well enough to fix anything with it.

Not to say there isn’t complexity with plumbing in general, but if it’s not an issue with the pipe coming in, or the pipe going out, it’s simple.’
-AndrasKrigare