Can't do stuff I am not interested in.

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I have always been described as a very intelligent person, but I notice I have one problem. I may be very intelligent in one area (the area I am interested in) and everything else is of no importance at all. The main things are projects. OMG projects drive me CRAZY. I can not start them and if I do it is always on the last day and I am literally about to go crazy every second while working on projects that I am not interested. The only thing academic wise that I care about is foreign language, over the last 4 months I have become virtually obsessed with these, I don't know if this is normal or not. Like I work really hard in my Spanish class, have like a 105 in there and can translate to English at about 1/10th the time it takes the rest of the class to do it.

But I lack badly in my other classes, in world history we had to do a project where we had to make a comic book about trade, I just COULD NOT do it. So I ultimately took a 0. Some projects, where I have to research facts, are not a big problem, but when it involves putting them together in a creative and fun way, I CAN'T do it. Anyone else feel this way?

of course, that's very aspie

I agree that one shouldn't force him/herself to do something that he/she is not interested in.

I had the same kind of experience. In school, this made life difficult. Doing the wrong kind of work for one's personality definitely comes into play here, too; even the industrial psychologists did a study in which they were looking at industrial disability cases, stress breakdowns, etc, and came to the same conclusion about stress from doing too much work that was un-interesting to people of certain personalities, that other personalities would handle well.

But, I suspect that if I'd personally been taught in an environment ideally suited to my intellect, I'd probably have found every subject interesting, if the teachers were top-notch and up to and appreciative of my level of intelligence and mental maturity.

I've found subjects interesting when well taught by someone who has a real understanding, and a real interest in the subject, but got turned right off by lack of expertise, sometime lack of real interest in the subject by the teacher ("it's just a job" mentality) and the lack of intelligent equality that it seemed should of existed with the teacher in school, which was very different from how much more mature and intelligent I was treated by adults outside of the school environment

My first "real " job had a lot of the routine, un-interesting aspects, as a Library of Congress deck messenger. There was a very interesting advantage, however; I could browse the stacks of one of the world's greatest libraries on my breaks and lunchtime, and due to my division's priveledges, I was able to get a circulating-book card!

Every working day I got enough time to indulge whatever I was interested in, and that was a lot of fun!

In the working world, I was un-fortunate in the second "real" job, I hadn't gotten any trade-school and college had been a disaster, so first job was as an "engineering clerk", a glorified paper-pusher; a real vitality and mentality killer.

Then I "got picked" to become a drop-out, a late hippie so to speak (this was 1972, and the Diggers had proclaimed the "Death of Hippie" in late 1968). At the end of this time, I went to a good Electronic Engineering Technology trade school, and had for the first 9 year job, a combination of mostly interesting work, until they made me take over the document controllers job near the end (as well as thinking, erroneously, that I could do that plus design printed circuit boards for a company project that was impinging on the day to day bread and butter production; the company went out of business). Being compelled by necessity of paycheck (it's been said the average worker lives only one paycheck away from homelessness), it drove me crazy doing this mindless stuff I had no interest in, so I was relieved when they had to get this project done, and they had to have their boards and quickly, so they had to choose between that and Doc Control.

Had a similar problem the next job as a temp, I wanted to do PCB design, they wanted me to do something un-interesting, and much of the time they just had me hanging around for this-and-that without always having anything actually to do.

Finally got rescued from that job, by a headhunter for a now-defunct Medical Scanner company, and found that job generally more satisfactory from an interest point of view, as they were on the cutting edge of an electron-beam scanner with a stationary electron gun, thus they could scan at virtual light-speed without the physical limitations of the conventional rotating-gun scanner.

Some levels of work were boring, such as the inevitable documentation of bills-of-material and other stuff, that a previous generation of engineers had secretaries to handle, though some of that was a bit interesting, as when I had to do creative writing for some service manuals for a sopisticated HV supply.

I've always, of course, generally felt this same, basic preferential thing; it's hard to do something un-interesting to me at the moment; at least now that I'm retired, I can choose to do mainly what interests me.

But, after 63 years, I suspect that the issue gets affected by many factors through life, and a lot of things seem more complex than simple by this time.

And right now, I feel too complicated, so I'll shut up!

Hope this made some sense,

Cheers, Johnpipe

yea, sports. never have liked em, never will
hate my gym teacher too. only likes athletic people.

Yes. I have always been labelled a big "underachiever" for this and other reasons, but what can you do. In college, when this tendency was worst in me, I used to procrastinate from doing projects I didn't want to do BY DOING TOTALLY UNECESSARY RESEARCH in another area that interested me more. Yes, I was a nerd. Luckily, this "unecessary" research (special interest, I guess), was what pushed me on to graduate school, which is generally a lot of fun...and where I still procrastinate.

One thing that I've found to help me get motivated to do work at all, and to remember stuff in subjects unrelated to my interests, is to find a way that a required (and otherwise boring) subject can be related to my interests. So for you, for example, maybe there's a way you could relate foreign languages to world history by...I don't know, putting in a section about trade in Spain or South America or something.

But yeah. Anyway you slice it, it can be a challenge.

I tend to do well in things I am interested in. Other than that it normally doesn't interest me or I plain out just don't care.

I have big problems with this - passing uni and keeping a job are really really hard, only because nothing stays interesting to me for very long. Even if I LOVE something, I can't rely on my still liking it in a month. And when I'm not interested but try to do something anyway, I meltdown, and after 4 or 5 day-long meltdowns on one topic, I totally freak out and need weeks or months to recover interest in anything.

The thread title is stereotypically Asperger's Disorder.

I had a psycho at Attwood's tell me that someone with Asperger's can only concentrate on something they aren't interested in for 15 minutes, and a 30 minute break after said 15 minutes is needed.

So what's the solution? What happens when I have to do something I'm not interested in for 8 hours? Right now it's a real struggle to do two hours of schoolwork a day. That's my maximum capacity. You can't live on two hours of work a day... and there's no guarantee you'll get a job that you're interested in.

You should also explore ADHD and hyperfocus. I find it hard to do things that I'm not interested in. If I am interested in something I get obsessed with it.