I think everybody has been there. You wake up one day, decide to take up a new skill, and you dive into the sea of tutorials about that one subject. Whether you're actually learning what you need to or not is irrelevant to one concrete truth; You are guaranteed to learn something that you don't need to use. I'll run through a few of my own and talk a little about why I didn't need those things.
I'll start with a simple one. I've made a variety of music, I've studied music theory, and I know how scales work and sound. I play a real guitar, I used to play the clarinet, and I can read music. But the problem is that I don't actually need to.
I've said it before: A brilliant mind will overcomplicate a simple problem. If the notes sound good together, you don't even necessarily need to know what they are. All you need to know is that they sound good together. Music is a matter of feeling as much as it is a matter of technicality. Once you learn the patterns and structures of musical measures, you can intuitively combine that knowledge without actually needing to know what any of the exact notes are. In reverse, you can know what every single note is and that won't matter a lick if you have no clue what the structure of a composition looks like.
Artists are pretentious. The irony in that statement is that I'm inherently calling myself pretentious. It is what it is. But I'll be the first to tell you that plenty of artists lie about how to actually be an artist.
You don't have to draw with pens and paper. Animators and artists alike have told me this in the past. It's always something like "well aCkShUaLlY drawing with pens will make you screw up less because you can't erase" which is just tedious and flawed logic. On the tedious side of things, one has to sketch the same object multiple times to refine it into something viewable. On the flawed logic side; The ability to erase a line means the ability to reform that line into what it is supposed to look like. You get to visually see the individual difference for that one line, which is a far better practice than just throwing your head at a wall hoping you learn what you did wrong.
It doesn't matter what tools you use, but you should absolutely use the most convenient tools. That's the entire point of their existence. The introduction of convenience makes the learning process much easier. The reason artists are quick to discourage this is because they spent thousands of dollars going to a school that forced them into tedium, so therefore they believe you should also subject yourself to the same tedium. If you don't, they look at you as lesser than they are. But you know what? Fuck 'em. You can get good without wasting your precious life on somebody else's ideas, and you really don't need their validation. We live in a world where Home Movies on Adult Swim was wildly successful despite having objectively the worst art in television at the time. Proof positive that modern artists are just lying to save face for wasting their own time.
There is nothing here. Literally every skill I've picked up editing videos has been put to use at some point or another. I've never even been given advice because actual video editors who professionally edit videos are too busy to provide any real insight into the process. Generally speaking, Video Editing is the one place where you're the least likely to get shitty advice.
Again, not a lot to say. The majority of advice on programming is good, whether you use it or not. Chances are, if something is wrong and you try it, you'll never try that thing again.
BUT and this is a huge BUT:
As a solo hobbyist programmer, I absolutely do not need comments. I know, horrible shock. But realistically, I am the only person looking at my code. I don't need to waste time leaving comments for people who don't exist, and I rarely need to leave a comment for myself. At first I genuinely thought comments were helpful so that I would remember what a block of code does. But after a while, I realized that I should just do that block a few times to cement the idea in my head. If I already know what the code does, I don't have to write the comment. If ever I was going to work on a team, then I would definitely make the effort to habitualize comments. But just by myself, I really don't need them.
There are a lot.
-Play the meta
-Advice from a dead teammate
-Some bullshit about how to build a character
-The opinions of some top player who doesn't want anybody to become better than them.
If I'm being completely real, nobody is helpful in video games. Your teammates don't want you to get better because you'll eventually be an enemy. Top players don't want you to get better because they want to remain at the top. Retrospective analysts don't want you to get better because the majority of them don't actually understand the game that they've broken down in-depth. People will tell you a lot of things about video games, and you should ignore literally all of that. The way to attain the level of a top player is to do as they do and not as they say. If you do as they say, they'll keep you down forever.
This is perhaps the most important entry here. It's a real life thing.
-Math. You joke about it when you're young, but math in many forms is so extremely useful for real life. Just habitually practicing math will help to prevent stuff like wasting money that you don't have, or building an unlevel structure. It applies to more than you might think.
-History. Again, as a kid I didn't know why I needed to know about some dudes from 200 years ago. But realistically, their actions set forth the consequences that led to society today. Things are the way they are because of history, and things will change leaving our current time as history. From one perspective, history is the study of the past. From another, history is the study of action and consequence. The latter is obviously much more appreciable.
-Document formatting. This one is something that slips by if you don't pay attention. You won't even notice the difference it makes if you've never tried. Formatting a document is so useful. Not just for readability and navigation, but also for professionalism. If you can write an organized document for yourself, you'll make your own life easier when the time comes to navigate that document. If you can write an organized document for your work, you make life easier for everybody else and by extension make yourself a more valuable employee. If you're a boss and you can write organized documents from your employees, the job becomes much more straightforward for every role involved. It's so menial, but it's so helpful.
-Saving pennies. I know they're small and not useful for much but being just a few cents away from the minimum gas purchase could mean the difference between getting promoted and getting fired or getting to the hospital for something serious before it's too late. It could mean the difference between eating and not eating today. It doesn't even depend on the situation. You would be surprised how useful a few cents can be even to the wealthiest of individuals. If you're mega rich, a single dime could mean the difference between the investment of a lifetime and missing a golden opportunity. We take 1 cent for granted, despite how many times that 1 cent has done so much good.
-Portioning food. Learning the scale of what one can and cannot eat is hella important to prevent waste. Preventing waste saves money. To that effect, preventing waste saves time you would otherwise spend cleaning up that waste. It's amazing how much life you retain by adapting to a more organized style of living. You would be amazed at the time you save.
-Clothes as gifts. Kids get upset when they get clothes for Christmas, and people who are well off take extra clothes for granted. But I genuinely appreciate getting clothes. If I didn't, I would wear the exact same shirt and pair of pants every day. I don't like to waste time shopping for vanity. Clothes shopping is a trivial decision, and thinking about whether or not you like those clothes is a trivial decision. That brain power is better spent doing something productive, and the time spent shopping is better spent improving a skill or working or having fun.
-Water. I know this one sounds like a joke, but it's true. As a kid, I like many others just refused to drink a lot of water because tastier stuff like soft drinks and chocolate milk existed. But as I got older, my taste for those things wavered and my want for those things disappeared. Hydration now is essentially just that. Hydration. Sure, I still drink coffee in the morning, but that's not because water is bad. That's because I prefer a faster than natural way to wake up. After that, fluid is fluid regardless. Something trivial like cola or mountain dew and then what flavor of that thing can be completely avoided because I simply don't care.
-Realistic goals. I still firmly believe in reaching for the impossible, but you have to make your incremental goals realistically achievable to get there. If you're 15 with no forensic experience and you decide to solve the case of Jack the Ripper, you probably won't get very far because that's a distant goal. So you set incremental goals to get there. First you finish school, then you go to college for forensics in some form. From there, you can work on your distant goal by implementing incremental goals based on your discoveries. Every time you attain one of those incremental goals, you bring yourself closer to attaining that distant impossibility. Charting a path and then proving the concept with a success is a great motivator.
-The scientific method. Truthfully, this isn't something I thought would apply to every day life. I figured you did it only to experiment for the sake of science. But the scientific method has come in handy for so many general questions. Say I want to cook a pork chop, but I don't want to make it the same way. The hypothesis is: how do specific ingredients affect the flavor and texture of the chop. From there, designing the experiment is something as simple as thinking about what ingredients to try using and thinking about how those taste with pork. Once it boils down, the individual experiment is actually cooking the pork chop with one or a selection of the ingredients. If this were science, you could take it deeper and collect data about every ingredient individually, followed by combinations of ingredients across a table of combinations to some reasonable limit. But this isn't science, so the core experiment just becomes cooking the food with whatever ingredients you've chosen. You then get the result, which then gives you the thesis. The thesis being: "This ingredient makes this dish better or worse." It's unconscious application of the scientific method, and it happens constantly whether we know it or not. Every question can be met with an experiment.
-Articulation. People mumble a lot. Like, they know the words, they can form the sentences. But it rolls out with such a fluidity that it's impossible to understand. Being able to precisely articulate words is outright essential just to communicate. Otherwise you end up with trees of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Even if you articulate something, the person you're talking to still might not understand. But at least they actually heard the words you were saying.