How smart are you?

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Have you ever had any interests you struggled to learn?

What did you do?

What’s the difference between an interest you learn easily and one you don’t learn easily?

I struggled to learn structural engineering and programming, but I needed them to save lifetimes of trial and error work on a project. I read the books and worked the problems with single-digit sums I could "see" in my head to check before plugging in the needed numbers. More math would have saved me more time, but the learning time didn't look like a definite win. More recently, I've been wishing I knew the gas laws better, but my head is too full of traumas to focus on learning them now.

I have often struggled with learning. I cannot remember spelling, multiplication tables or names of places or people very well. Which basically is all of grade school. I found computer programming and geometry incredibly easy to understand and learn and do well. I learned how to solve the Rubic's Cube from a book - but I was never good at any typical types of ball and team based sports. My hand eye co-ordination is terrible. I am no good at video games that require hand eye co-ordination. I am ok at games that require solving puzzles, but bad at card games that require you to keep a lot in your head. I can solve every SUDOKU puzzle I have ever tried. Algebra and calculus weren't very hard to learn but differential-equations was - lots of memorizing and little to "figure out". Statistics was not hard at first but when they threw in "e" and "ln(n)" and "Poisson distribution" I couldn't picture it in my head anymore and it became a kind of alphabet soup. The part with the "pulling colored marbles out of a bag" I was very good at. I am bad at planning and very good at improvising. I thought physics was easy and took extra physics classes in college to avoid "writing" classes - writing is very very hard for me.
At work I find I can write on the wiki - because the computer spell checks for me, and because I can arrange my thoughts in a kind of web or net instead of "beginning middle and end". When I write I often end up with "three middles". And mazes. I am very good at solving Mazes. I am also good at jigsaw puzzles and breakout-rooms - thought I sometimes get stuck in the latter.

I am working at using "elaborative encoding" and "pegging" and "memory palace" techniques to get better at remembering names and faces and long strings of numbers.

Writing for my final project in college was the hardest thing I ever did and it took years and I got a poor grade, and I am not sure I really learned anything from the process - except self-doubt.

My IQ is around 80 and I was branded ret*d at the age of eleven lol.