Ask HN: Hobbies/Skills which can be picked in 30s and compete at world level?

Ultra marathon .. it&#x27;s possible to start at age 56 and be world class by 61 (with some prior outdoor living as a farmer).<p>eg:<p>&gt; Albert Ernest Clifford Young OAM (8 February 1922 – 2 November 2003) was an Australian potato farmer from Beech Forest, Victoria.<p>&gt; He was best known for his unexpected win of the inaugural Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon in 1983 at 61 years of age<p>NB: this is literally an instance in which YMMV . . .<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cliff_Young_(athlete)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cliff_Young_(athlete)</a>

Gardening, once you have the basics (ie you know how to keep a plant alive, and have developed a good idea of when a plant is happy) then you can create _art_<p>Blacksmithing (either sword&#x2F;knife or artistic)<p>Photography, not physical, and the basics can be learnt with a simple course.<p>Anything to do with machining&#x2F;lathes metalwork, the only barrier is cost and time.<p>Music, Its perfectly possible to learn an instrument and be good, world class is a difficult term though.<p>General knowledge, paul Sinha was a doctor turned comedian, then pivoted to &quot;quizzer&quot;<p>Story teller, life experience can be an excellent spring board to creating good narratives<p>Cuneiform scholar: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khanacademy.org&#x2F;humanities&#x2F;ancient-art-civilizations&#x2F;ancient-near-east1&#x2F;the-ancient-near-east-an-introduction&#x2F;a&#x2F;cuneiform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.khanacademy.org&#x2F;humanities&#x2F;ancient-art-civilizat...</a> There are tonnes of tablets yet to be deciphered

Writing is one of the skills that you get better at later in life, because of accumulated experiences broadening the range of situations and interactions your characters are placed into.

If you haven’t done <i>it</i> by the time you’re 30, you can apparently become a world-class archwizard.

Ken Block, famous rally driver, started his rally career in his late 30s. Yes, he had money, connections and access to the best teams. But you could easily buy a second hand car for a few grand, tune it gradually, do courses and practice, practice, practice. You should carefully choose your speciality: rally, race tracks, drifting or just regional events (where entry can be as low as 100 eur). So your only disadvantage are the expenses. But they aren&#x27;t as bad as you think they were.

Video and music production, game development, stock trading, book writing. You&#x27;ve got every prerequisit by the time you hit 30, you can do anything at a global level.

&quot;Hobby&quot; seems to be in complete opposition to &quot;compete at world level&quot;

One might think that chess would qualify. People become grandmasters in their 20s, with less than 20 years total experience, so surely if you quit your job and focus on only chess from 30 to 50, you can gain enough skill and experience to compete at the world level...<p>And yet, in practice, almost all chess grandmasters have started young. I don&#x27;t know of any grandmaster who started playing chess seriously past 30 (and chess.com didn&#x27;t have any concrete examples that I saw: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chess.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;view&#x2F;general&#x2F;gmsims-who-started-late" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chess.com&#x2F;forum&#x2F;view&#x2F;general&#x2F;gmsims-who-started-...</a>)<p>Physical sports are obviously out, as the world level is dominated by people under 30 for all of them.<p>I&#x27;ll also comment further on two things you wrote in your original question:<p>1. &quot;compete at world level&quot; and 2. &quot;don&#x27;t have to be your full time thing&quot;<p>In practice, the majority of things that have world competitions will also have people who will devote themselves, body and soul, to it, so if you are intent at not spending all your time on this, not making it your passion, then you should not reasonably expect to &quot;compete at world level&quot;.<p>I think you might do better by classifying &quot;compete at world level&quot; as being very broad, like considering writing a &quot;new york times best seller&quot; to be competing at writing at the world level (in which case, yes, some authors started after 30). If you broaden it to simply &quot;be able to have fun&quot;, I think you&#x27;ll have a far better time of it, and at that point almost any physical activity now becomes something you can start past 30.

I think Vincent van Gogh, started seriously painting in his late 20s. Needless to say in his brief overall career as a painter he made some works which had a great impact in the art scene after his own death.

Most Master Model Railroader awards are granted to people in their 50s and up. It takes time to master the many aspects of the hobby, and an MMR must show breadth of knowledge as well as depth. But because of the initial outlay cost (in time and money and space for a layout) of the hobby, the majority of &quot;world class&quot; modelers don&#x27;t really get serious about it until they&#x27;ve settled into good-paying jobs and their kids are out of the house.

Woodworking. Where competing means making the most beautiful (for whatever style you want).

So over the pandemic, I (in my mid 40&#x27;s) went through ViBE&#x27;s B2GM videos [1], and spending a couple of hours a week over six months or so managed to get up to Platinum 3 on the Starcraft 2 ladder; which, if I&#x27;m reading the stats right, means that (at that point) I would have been able to beat 50% of the people playing SC2 <i>on the ladder</i>. And there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit for me to deliberately practice when I moved on to some other projects in my precious free time.<p>Now, you&#x27;re not going to compete in SC2 with people who practice 10-20 hours a week unless you also practice 10-20 hours a week; but you can certainly get pretty good and have a lot of fun. (<i>Maybe</i> neurological limitations from being older would prevent you from being top-tier even if you did practice 10-20 hours a week; but I&#x27;m inclined to believe it&#x27;s more that older people are less likely to practice 10-20 hours a week for whatever reason.)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mfFas8p5g7M" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;mfFas8p5g7M</a>

Amateur radio (in particular &quot;Contesting&quot;).

Running ultra-marathons is what comes to my mind also, because this is a rare kind of activities where age is at your side. No 14-years-old can run 100km a day without requiring a medical help, because of kinda another structure of muscles.<p>To tell the truth, if you have not picked some skill which you are going to be a world level of, in your 10s, then there is no hope you will do it in 30s. Your question is awesome to see how little of people (even such brilliant ones as HN crowd) can see this obvious thing.<p>Reading comments is so funny, everybody has their confirmation bias. For example, from my PoV the easiest stuff you can do is metal cutting&#x2F;wood turning. Just buy a lathe, solve that safety issues for your eyes and fingers (this is the hardest part, no jokes), read few tens of books on metals, than work few years with a more and more competitive master - volia, you are a world-class metal cutter... Then I remembered, that not every child use to have the skills I have.<p>If you have not hammered a few thousand nails in your childhood than you need to hammer tens of thousand in adult age just to achieve my level of hammering. Obviously to hammer a thousand nails in childhood is in extreme way simpler than to hammer ten thousand nails in 30s. Another example of sad trend of being older is just a reading books. If you don&#x27;t use to read books in your childhood, there is no way you will start it in your 30s, having such issues as: bad eyes, hard work, big house to take care of, demanding spouse, growing kids, and of course - lost ability to enjoy reading.<p>OK, while writing this comment, I realized what is the best answer to your question. This is <i>aging</i>. Any 30-yo (who has not done too danger things for longevity like drinking too much of alcohol or having a contact with too danger chemicals) can pretend to compete at a world level about who will have a longer life. I am really convinced that a significant amount of today&#x27;s 30-years-olds from HN crowd will live to 100 yo, which is a world-level competition from all points of view.

I understand exactly what OP means and I&#x27;ve been looking for something like this too.<p>When it comes to sports I think it needs to be something with lower physical bar such as table tennis, archery, shooting. Unlikely you can compete on world level but at least locally.<p>For other things I think certain computer games might do but you will be competing with kids that play 12 hours every day so again you can only compete on small scale and in my experience online competitive games attract the most toxic people. You can try Geoguessr which I think is your best option.<p>Then you have the more arty skills such as stand-up comedy, music production, cooking all can be competitive if you are into any of these and your age shouldn&#x27;t matter much in fact it might help.

I&#x27;ve been playing foosball competitively since I was around 14-15, and what I can say is that it&#x27;s easy to pick up, can be done at 60 ( Todd Loffredo is around that and still in the elite ).<p>It&#x27;s a weird thing, it looks physical and it seems like you need fast reflexes to do it on the highest level but it&#x27;s not true. The technique can be picked up in ~2 years with 2 hours of daily practice. What you need and what is hard to get is a calm mind and good decision making which could take a long time to get right, but some people are just born with that. You can easily start in your 30s and be at the highest level, or even be a world champion ( I&#x27;ve seen a few people starting in their 20s and get to that ).

Compete wouldn&#x27;t be the right word but there have been people starting art later in life that are world class.<p>Bjj tournaments have age brackets. Check the IBJJF worlds masters. If you win your bracket you do technically get the titles of world champ.

As OP mentioned &quot;running&quot;. As someone who started running in his 30ies:<p>Before you start running, learn warm up. And take it seriously. It&#x27;s the most important part of running.<p>Your knees in your 40ies will thank you for it. (My knees don&#x27;t.)

Quite a few (if any), I&#x27;m afraid. So few that I would not suggest any reasonable examples. Performance in the majority of human activities is rapidly getting so upscale that you need both to be exceptionally gifted (both mentally and physically) and begin no later than other competitors in the field. Also, two issues come to my mind: 1) Why do you need to compete at the world level? and 2) It&#x27;s somewhat worrying if one is in 30s and still looking for their hobbies&#x2F;skills to pick.

Pumpkin-growing competition. Competitive dog agility racing. Perler bead art. Woodworking. Professional merkin construction. The list of possibilities is longer than the list of impossibilities.

Bouldering - On lower levels, bouldering is easy, and you can make progress using only physical strength until you reach a plateau that requires you to learn technique. At some levels, you don&#x27;t even need much strength to begin. Competing is possible with enough practice and fine-tuning of your technique after a couple of years.<p>In addition, you meet new people by discussing solutions to problems (routes on the wall), which is a major benefit for people in their 30s.

A lot of art is like that. Or pick one of tabletop games - kind of warhammer or something like that. Less popular video games have the same property too.

Historical European Martial Arts.<p>At least for rapier and sabre, many people start late in the 30s and can compete pretty well internationally (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hemaratings.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hemaratings.com&#x2F;</a>)<p>Same with sword and buckler, Though I believe longsword and armored fighting needs more athleticism than other arts.<p>Feel free to see if you have a club nearby.

A lot of sports have competitions for &quot;masters&quot; only which is typically 40+ years old<p>So you could learn to sail in your 30s, spend 10 years getting good (need plenty of time on the water and coaching) and then enter the masters.<p>Sailing is a sport where you need lots of time on the water, coaching and some luck.<p>But a lot of people drop out of it in the 20s and 30s due to families and work.

Coffee brewing. Both pour over and classical barista world championships are possible once you win your nationals. I know someone who came 2nd in higly competitive nationals in my country and the person has a different full time job. It is a very deep skill with a lot of science behind it, if you wish, and not fully explored yet.

Shooting and gun sports. Lots of regional skeet and trap shooters. Lots of long range riflery and indoor pistol competitions.

FPL: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fantasy.premierleague.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;fantasy.premierleague.com&#x2F;</a> (or similar fantasy for the sports you follow). It is a numbers and intuition game. You have a real shot at becoming #1. It&#x27;s Carlsen&#x27;s favorite pastime.

Architecture, boat building.

Yoga<p>You learn something new about yourself every day. And you excel again and again only to learn that there is more to learn.<p>Changes how you think, live and breath.<p>Plus you look awesome after some time.

Yoyo &#x2F; kendama<p>Although I&#x27;m of the opinion they&#x27;re more fun as an activity than to do competitively.. but for many that&#x27;s the fun part.

Famous art collectors tend to be old (and rich).

Paramotoring. Bear in mind that elite-level competition is considerably more dangerous than paramotoring as a leisure activity.

Mountain biking, depending on where you live.

Paragliding. Physically not too difficult. It is more a mental game - chess in the sky.

Dance. There’s lots of dances out there that don’t require the body of a 18 year old to compete and be world class at.<p>That said - you will never have articles written about you, be interviewed for X, etc. Dance is mostly for enjoyment and socializing. There’s almost no money in the industry as well as compared to running or other hobbies&#x2F;sports. Most dances are funded by passion - not through capitalism.

Darts.

Programming and Painting

Shuffleboard?

Cooking.

Skydiving

30 is pretty old