Do your interests make you better than most?

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Do your interests make you better than most in your area of interest?

Or at least better than average?

I’m not talking about being a better person.

I’m talking about a natural?

Or at professional level?

And does it take extreme focus for you to study your interests?

In some ways the intensity of my interests and the detailed research and thinking I put into them makes my expertise better than most. The thing about being a perfectionist is that you're likely to achieve results of a high standard. But sometimes there are blind spots that send me the long way round to achieve something when most other people would probably see the shortcut.

I do apply extreme focus, though I'm not sure it takes extreme focus, it's just the habit I usually fall into. I do have a sense that if I don't study a thing in depth, I won't really understand it very well. These days I often try to limit how much effort I put into things, so as to keep them from becoming too obsessional and detracting from the rest of my life, but it never feels quite right to skimp on the details.

i would not say better except perhaps at aural discernment, my decades of audio restoration work saw to that.

More knowledgeable about details, not necessarily better in practice. Makes me think of a musical instrument being a special interest. I can learn about the history and background of the harpsicord, but still struggle to play it. A "natural" can come along and play it beautifully, even if he knows nothing of its background history and isn't really that interested in the instrument itself.

My interests don’t really involve any sort of skill or finished products or anything, unless one wants to call the ability to ramble on for hours and/or make everything pertain in some way to that interest a skill Things like one specific movie or one specific band, where there isn’t really anything to measure talent, skill, or quality. I guess maybe Pokemon battles would count, but I’m not particularly good at those besides knowing all the type matchups. My interest is in filling the Pokedex, I don’t pay much attention to stats and stuff.

On occasion I spend hours searching the Internet for every trace of information I can find on whichever interest is my main one at the time. I naturally hyperfocus when that happens, but I don’t need any sort of effort besides being interested in it. I don’t know that that’s really the sort of “studying” you’re wondering about, but it’s as close as I really get.

Well, I do think so, at least better than other amateurs. I'm thinking of my interest in my natural environment. I can identify dozens of bird species easily by ear, lots of trees without their leaves, weeds and wildflowers, that kind of thing. I live next to a park that attracts a lot of avid amateur naturalists, as well as professional scientists, and I do think I'm one of the best at absorbing a lot of knowledge about our environment. It makes sense, doesn't it? There's nothing I like better than what someone else would call sweaty, scratchy, tedious field work!

My interests are very questionable right down to my favourite symbol.

Of course.
Obviously fans of Lulu are the most enlightened beings in the universe.



f**k Trump, there's our real God-Emperor, right there^^^.

I statistically seem to have high natural and professional "skills" in patterns thinking systems "ideas." High focus and intensity come naturally and need no forcing.

It may be an OCD to extend and complete "what's needed." The needs must be there, but are not just mine but something larger. The end results are often in math models of the something "large."

It's been my natural personal style since early elementary school, my parents say. I like it.

When I was in my teens, I was told by a university professor I'd been infodumping to that I was probably at a graduate student level. So in my case, having an interest did make me more skilled.

The more time you spend on something, the better you get at it. If you pair that with a capacity for deep and long focus (as some, but far from all, people on the spectrum have), and perhaps what we for lack of better words call "talent", then you can become something of an expert in that field.

I've never had much of a social life (although I consider it the most important part of my life), so I was able to put a lot of time into my interests when I was younger. It gave me a steady career and income, but I don't consider myself an expert - part motivational issues, part lack of aforementioned talent.