My two are:
Making sourdough. I personally always heard like this weird almost mysticism around making it. But I bought a $7 starter from a bakery store, and using just stuff in my kitchen and cheap bread flour I’ve been eating fresh sourdough every day and been super happy with it. Some loafs aren’t super consistent because I don’t have like temperature controlled box or anything. But they’ve all been tasty.
Drawing. I’m by no means an artist, but I always felt like people who were good at drawing were like on a different level. But I buckled down and every day for a month I tried drawing my favorite anime character following an online guide. So just 30 minutes every day. The first one was so bad I almost gave up, but I was in love with the last one and made me realize that like… yeah it really is just practice. Years and years of it to be good at drawing things consistently, quickly, and a variety of things. But I had fun and got something I enjoyed much faster than I expected. So if you want to learn to draw, I would recommend just trying to draw something you really like following a guide and just try it once a day until you are happy with the result.
Hypnosis. Pretty much 100% of what the average person thinks about how hypnosis works is wrong: there’s no mysticism, no magnetism, no magic, no Freud, no “clash of willpower”, no “permanent side effects”, no “mind control”, no risk of “never coming back”.
You simply have to put a convincing act that you, the hypnotist, have “the power”, and nearly everything you say will work. You play with people’s expectations. There’s no “recipe” for a surefire way to hypnotize someone, because it doesn’t “work” with everyone and even on the people it works, it’s not the same experience.
Ironically, I have difficulty being hypnotized myself, which sucks. Or maybe I have too high expectations of how I should feel while being hypnotized.
Fantastic trick for getting young kids to sleep - at least, until they get freaked out that someone has the power to induce sleep and fight the technique. Which, in hindsight, fair I guess.
Tried passing on the trick from a self-hypnosis perspective after that point but it just didn’t take. Interesting stuff though - makes me wonder if I should look into hypnosis from a hobbyist perspective again.
Edit: Of course, there was also the time I did it with my then girlfriend to induce an a super vivid but otherwise undefined imaginary scene, and butted right against some repressed trauma I was not equipped to handle, aside from lots of hugs and "You’re ok"s. Soooo… this is what I get for hypnotizing people armed only with the experience of being hypnotized once, a self-hypnosis book I played around with as a teen, and a pretty detailed scene from an underground fiction novel, I suppose.
To get good at being hypnotized practice guided meditation. It’s the same thing, but guided meditation is often easier as it tends to exclusively be aiming at getting you into trance and taking you out.
Gonna look into that. Got any recommendations?