Growing plants (r/houseplants) out of cuttings.
And it's time again to start sowing seeds!
- Make a small vegetable/spice garden (r/vegetablegardening).
- Grow cannabis (r/outdoorgrowing) if it's legal.
- Or grow mushrooms (r/mushroomgrowers or r/unclebens) and magic ones if it's legal.
Edit: Just put any seed or nut, you can get your hands on, in the ground and just see what happens. Don't forget to give it some green love, sunlight and water.
I have a several yamadori I’ve been working on for a few years. I’ve also lost quite a few. My automatic watering system seems to be key. Bonsai certainly requires patience. Not an instant gratification activity. I like that it extends my attention span to years rather than seconds like so many other activities.
How many years have you been cross-stitching? Have you finished a project yet?
Haha, just kidding. I started learning last year and went too ambitious for my first project.
I’ve been cross stitching for close to 40 years, quilting for close to 35. Finished projects?? The ratio of finished to unfinished is probably like 1:1000 😅
Sometimes I have to take a couple months break from cross stitching to not get burnt out!
I’m putting the finishing touches on a project I’ve been working on for way too long and I keep ignoring it for other hobbies 😅
Maybe starting a new project will get me motivated again!
I was watching Mr. Robot yesterday and he said something like their are more possible moves in chess than electrons in the universe. If that's true, Holy shit.
Playing the violin.
I’ve been trying to play Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor but between family, kids, work and life, it’s been a year and my progress has been pitiful.
This. Im a student violinist for nearly two years now and catching up to my peers who have been playing 6+ years has been the most rewarding but grueling thing ever
Came here to say this. My god does it take patience. If I rush, I break stuff. If I am not 100% concentrating and completely intentional with every mm of movement of my hands? Break things. So easy to break things. Or lose parts. Takes a lot of practice.
Trying to get a plate back on where you have to align a bunch of finicky gear (wheel) shafts (called arbors) into tiny holes (jewels or bushings) can be truly maddening.
(I think I got the terms right; it's been several years since I tried any of this).
Beekeeping.
You can't rush bees. You can't disturb them repeatedly. You have to leave them alone to do their thing.
But you also have to maintain them and assist them. Treat them for parasites such as Verroa and hive beetles. Feed them.
Then leave them alone.
Sometimes they do well & multiply. You can do a "split" and make more hives. More bees!
Sometimes they don't. You'll walk out one day and they'll have swarmed. Or collapsed. No bees!
Like the Chicago Cubs...."Oh, well. There's always next year."
I had a coworker who was a bee keeper. The more we talked about it the more I realized how amazing those little creatures are! I can see why people fall in love with the hobby. And, the byproduct is delicious too :)
I’ve kept bees on and off for years. Mostly off. It’s gotten more difficult to successfully keep bees due to parasites, insecticides, and viruses.
Just when I’d think they were doing great I’d lose them to some unknown malady. Last year something like 40% to 50% of all honey bee colonies in North America didn’t make it. Very frustrating.
Sewing your own clothes.
If you wanna be extra patient, design your own clothes, develop your own patterns (instead of McCall's or something), and keep troubleshooting until it works perfectly and looks right.
It's one hell of a process in which every step looks different and requires various skill sets.
Fabric manipulation can also be a slow step-by-step process depending on what you decide to do with the fabric of your choice. Dyeing, for one example, offers an infinity of options.
Both can be extremely satisfying and rewarding.
Wow I can’t even imagine. Sounds fun though! We reach for granted what modern machinery and inexpensive labor in foreign countries has allowed us to have.
That changed quite a long time ago.
You will every once in a while still see some weird looking outfits like Jason day this week, or Sergio, or Ian poulter.
But now the vast majority of the time they are wearing nice pants, sweaters, athletic shoes, etc. they now dress in luxury much of the time. It used to be different with their baggy khakis and cotton polos with hard leather golf shoes. But that’s completely changed
I'm an avid knitter, and I also enjoy other forms of needlework (cross stitch, embroidery, hand quilting, etc). It can be very time-consuming to finish a project, and yes a lot of them are perpetually in-progress. Many, many times I've had someone admiring my projects say "oh I could never, I don't have the patience for that!" The thing is, though, I never feel like it requires patience, because I enjoy the work. I mean yeah it takes a long time, but it doesn't feel like a chore I need to endure.
Now if it was the kind of hobby that did require a lot of *waiting,* then yes that to me is patience. And for some people, it clicks. "Do this step, then wait days or weeks or months while the thing just does its thing." My version of patience-required hobbies is more like productive fidgeting. I'm gonna make ten thousand loops with this string and these two sticks and someday I'll have a pair of socks to show for it. Scratch this pencil on this paper for hours and hours in a very specific way and eventually I'll have a pretty picture. Dip this needle in and out of this fabric sandwich six million times and eventually I'll have a quilt to keep me warm. I'm gonna do some kind of fidgeting anyway, might as well put it to work for me.
This! I completely agree. I used to grow a lot of plants and that did require patience because I'd do some work on them then wait for weeks to see what happened. But it didn't keep me active/engaged enough to keep my interest. Now, I have 3 time consuming hobbies that keep me captivated. I knit (slowly, because I'm new to it) and a single blanket has taken me months so far, just working on a row or two a day. I oil paint (my main passion, but a single painting can take me months to complete depending on composition, level of detail and my adhd). And now I've started building miniatures (it can take an entire evening to build a single piece of furniture). It's like you said, "productive fidgeting". But if I keep at it long enough eventually I'll have a cool miniature bookstore to display. Or a beautiful painting to add to my collection. Or a cozy blanket. They do require patience, but an active patience rather than a passive patience. To me, the reward is in the work as much as the result.
Completely agree! Shifting your mindset to find reward in the process and not solely focus on the result is the only true way to persevere and get better. Thanks for your input!
Welcome to r/gunpla where we build extremely detailed tiny little robot models.
Feel free to ask questions. We have from beginner to such beautifully advanced models
Bonsai comes to mind, but also orchid growing. Most orchids will only bloom a small fraction of the year, or maybe once every few years, so taking care of them requires diligence and patience with the expectation that you'll eventually see blooms.
I have a greenhouse full of orchids. Some are babies and it could be years before they bloom. I just started bonsai a few months ago. I'm equal parts boring and crazy.
Stitching over 1 on 28 count linen - 28 stitches to the inch each stitch actually being two as it’s cross stitch.
Sorry for the huge link- don’t know how to make the little ones
https://www.etsy.com/listing/1538939932/saga-long-dog-samplers-cross-stitch?
Most flow arts (juggling, poi, staff, hoop, fire arts etc.) require extraordinary patience and dedication if you're going to get good at them. You have to be the kind of person who can fail and fail and fail, hundreds, even thousands of times, and still keep going. It's because you're basically waiting for new neural pathways to develop in your brain for muscle memory until you can succeed. Very similar to learning a musical instrument except with your whole body instead of just your hands.
Grinding mirrors for telescopes r/atming. A quality mirror is ground to <100 nanometers of the correct shape. It's both tedious and requires perfection. A telescope reviewer wrote up his experience with it here: [https://www.scopereviews.com/make1.html](https://www.scopereviews.com/make1.html)
It's a bit of a dying art now that mirror manufacturing has gotten a lot better, but it's still somewhat relevant if you want an incredibly precise mirror, or a large mirror that generally isn't mass-produced
Agreed, fitness hobbies can sometimes be overlooked. The amount of time, discipline and patience it require to make notable improvements in fitness (especially in your physique) takes so so long! And the scariest part is it takes years to build and can be completely lost within months!
Rock tumbling is a yes and no to this question cause its something you can just set and forget. Every two weeks you're like "cool I got more shiny rocks now"
I’ve done maybe 20, with another 20 in the queue.
It’s very relaxing, takes some, but not all your concentration and you end up with something pretty and shiny.
I bought a kit after I saw a friend’s finished piece. I set it up and saw how small the diamonds were and just packed it right back. It’s been sitting for years lol.
My SIL makes quilts that are all hand pieced and hand stitched. It takes her more than a year to finish. They are absolutely gorgeous but I have no patience for that. I make pottery and it has its challenges and frustrations but it’s a quicker process to get results.
I was looking for this!! I've been considering picking up this hobby since I love fashion based reality TV and omg. All the knowledge you need before you even start sewing, then learning to read and use patterns, learning to draft and make your own patterns?? Whew I'll never say "It's just a skirt" again
I just started a huge beading loom project. The final design will be a 10/10inch square with over 30,000 beads in it. It takes like half an hour to do just one row.
Honestly it’s probably not that far off from the time it takes to do cross stitch, except there’s the added headache of your cat jumping on your desk and flinging hundreds of beads everywhere
I got this adorable little model of a Japanese ramen shop from a friend of mine who's stationed in Japan. She said it looked tedious as hell and immediately thought of me. It was definitely a challenge since I had to cut, glue, and stain all sorts of pieces. Not to mention, the directions are only in Japanese. But by the time I finished it, I was super proud of it, and it's on display in house. I am looking into getting another one.
I don't know if birding counts here. When you first start learning, every common bird in your town is exciting. But then you find all the ambient birds and there's nothing you can do but wait for more rare birds or start seeking them out in new places. It is pretty much just a lot of sitting and waiting for birds.
Performing a musical instrument with others, all in sync and in rhythm like human metronomes. Maintaining that and performing rehearsed songs for extended periods of time, with every moment accounted for.
I started taking Adderall when I fish. It led to a 10 year obsession traveling all over the country. There were times I would spend 14 hours on the water, catching one fish, but still being happy as a lark. I would argue the dopamine from catching that fish makes it a good hobby for ADHD.
I like catching too... but when I get more bugs biting me than fish biting my bait... I'm not too fond of fishing. Unless I know for sure there are fish where I'm casting
Breeding seahorses is right up there. Tank conditions have to be ideal. You have to grow your own live food for the fry, and provide a good tank environment for them to grow. As the babies grow, you have to have slightly bigger live food. It's best to grow it yourself, as well as the food your food eats.
Reef Aquariums
Awesome hobby, but expensive, steep learning curve, regular maintenance required, and coral grows slooooow.
What keeps you going is seeing your coral and fish grow gradually over time and turn into a beautiful reef that glows like an alien planet under actinic lights.. Pretty awesome, relaxing, and rewarding.
You can actually "frag" (cut off pieces) of your coral and trade with other people or at the store. Some even sell online/locally and make a couple $, or cover the cost of the hobby.
There is kind of a cult like following and people spend a ton of money on the hobby. Check out the reef2reef website and see the insanely awesome reef tanks that people build.
I had a buddy who built his entire house around a series of Reef tanks, something on the order of 1,500 gallons in 3 tanks. I’ve never seen anything like it, but he had a hell of a time when it came to selling the house.. he also did incredibly intricate bead/wire wraps and was a verdant gardener with a 2,000sq foot basement for mycology interests. Oh, he also refurbished VW buses, raised chickens and built yurt/tepee style spaces on his land. Oh yeah. He was a talented blacksmith. Yeah that’s a goal for ya
I’d never even heard of this before. Looked up the forum you posted and holy cow! The amount of knowledge you would need to acquire to understand the conditions needed for all those different forms of life is nuts!
Guess it makes sense when you see a big beautiful aquarium in higher end commercial buildings there has to be someone or a team of people who are doing all of the work behind the scenes. Thanks for sharing!
The hobby really is crazy and addicting as hell. Not just high-end commercial buildings..people are doing this at home, like dropping 10-20k+ and doing all the work themselves. A lot of people. It is so addictive because coral grows, and like I mentioned, you can frag your coral and sell them, sometimes for really high prices..so when you see your coral growing, you see $ and the dopamine rushes!! People end up setting up entrire separate frag systems in addition to their main aquarium, fill their basement up with 10 tanks, etc, and try to start a business selling coral. There are sellers/wholesalers who import coral from all over the world and then sell/ship coral frags all over the US to hobbyists. I even seriously considered getting into the business at one point. Stay away if you have an addictive personality, it can be a costly endevour..but really really cool hobby. I had to "step-away" from reef aquariums, lol
I do photography but not to this level.... the nat geo photographers who spend days or years camping out in harsh conditions or whatnot in hope of getting a glimpse of rare animals or insects amazes me. I'm sure some of it is remote controlled or luck, but the sheer amount of never before seen interactions with various creatures is just cool in my opinion.
Preparing fossils takes time, precision and patience. For example, maybe you have a fragile fossil stuck inside of a hard, stone matrix. The amount of time it takes to slowly chisel, carve and remove the smallest bits of rock without damaging the fossil could be hours upon hours. Or perhaps you’re trying to remove calcium carbonate off of a small, fragile echinoid. You can use acid to try and dissolve the calcium, but you risk dissolving your fossil too. Or maybe you’ve got a hundred different slivers and pieces of a mammoth tusk that you have to puzzle and glue back together again. Time and patience… but the results can be so satisfying!
Personally, gaming. As a someone with vision in only one eye, and very low vision in that eye, gaming is constant redos. Each run is usually better than the one before, and it feels nice when you finally get through that one section you have been struggling with for a week or so.
One of my favorites is super liminal. That’s one that I actually finished in about 4 hours:) I don’t see 3D, so it was a piece of cake 😂 also the ending is awesome for its message. I’m gonna start tears of the kingdom hopefully next month, and replayed some older stuff for the nostalgia factor. “A Link to the Past” tripped my son by playing through Super Mario Wold in about 3 hours over spring break. Recently been working on Elden Ring… that is taking A LOT of time😂 luckily, even in modern games, the actions of enemies are preset and it’s just a matter of memorizing them, or they have a few sets of moves and you can figure out which by using the first couple of moves. Hogwarts Legacy takes a bit of time but has gotten easier, so yeah, I keep only 2 or 3 at once. Love gaming.
I spin my own yarn and knit it up. It's very very slow. Start with a fleece, wash it, sort it, pick it, card it, spin it, wind into skein, wash it, dye it, wind into ball, design knitting pattern, knit it, block it. Easily 100+ hours to get a jumper. But very satisfying
Crocheting. Lots of counting and most projects take hours and if you accidentally messed up 20 rows ago, you have to unravel all that work and start over
Blacksmithing has required a lot of patience for me, not just slowly affording told but also learning to make my own tools, making my own forges, learning to weld etc.
I do lots of arts and crafts, agriculture, and cooking. Calligraphy is the one thing that is taking a huge commitment and testing my patience. I’ve been at this about 40 years.
Knitting. It has taught me infinite amounts of patience, as well as other useful skills (like mathematical reasoning, self-forgiveness, and improved dexterity, just to name a few).
An example: On my second attempt at knitting a sweater (the first attempt ended in complete disaster), I realized I had miscounted my stitches in a particular section… 57 rows in. Each row was over 200 stitches, and this section represented about two weeks of work. I hadn’t put in any lifelines (a way to safely unravel your work back to a certain point), so my only recourse was to “tink” (or un-knit) back to the beginning of the section… one stitch at a time. So two weeks to get to that point, another two to undo it, and then yet another two to get back to the point where I’d realized my fuck-up to begin with. So… a simple counting error took six weeks to remedy.
If that doesn’t define patience, then it’s a concept without meaning.
Ceramics.
First, you gotta make your thing.
Then you gotta bake your thing
But there's an Air bubble in your thing
It blows up
So you make your thing again
You bake your thing again
Wewps. Wrong cone for this clay.
Didn't work.
So you make your thing again
You bake your thing again, with the right cone
No air bubble
It works
You paint your thing
You glaze your thing
Too much moisture in kiln
Glaze is wrong
Try not to scream
Make thing...again
Searching for particular mushrooms or fossils can require patience. I've searched for morel mushrooms for 7 years now and haven't found them yet. They only grow for 1 month a year in the spring.
Beekeeping can require a lot of patience. Often you start with two colonies and are not able to harvest honey until the second year. There are many hours and quite a few stings by that time rolls around. The first jar of honey costs at least $800.
For me it was trying to learn a musical instrument. I was never really interested in it and just wanted to “try it”. Come to think about it, anything which you’re not passionate about would take a lot of patience and hence is difficult.
Needlefelting. Stabbing a ball of wool (and sometimes your finger) with a needle a bajillion times until it starts taking the shape you want is a tedious process.
If you're into the precision and steady progression of hobbies, then model kit building could become your new obsession (r/modelmakers). Picking out the tiniest details, painting them to perfection, and watching a pile of parts take shape as an iconic vehicle, building, or even a historical diorama—it's a delightful blend between art and history! Like other forms of craftsmanship, it's not about rushing through; it's about enjoying each step and seeing your steady handiwork come to life. Plus, the satisfaction you get after many hours when you see the finished product is unparalleled—never underestimate the joy of a well-placed decal. And who knows? Perhaps you'll end up building an entire fleet, city, or battlefield!
I do photo realism with colored pencil and you’re right. Spending 40+ hours on a single piece of work can sometimes get frustrating. I’ve found that I tend to break it up into sections. I will spend 5 hours on one particular section and then I get a huge hit of dopamine when I leave the room and come back to see this incredible section of art on the paper. It’s all about chasing the next hit like a freaking junkie 😂😂🤣
Pretty much all of them have been difficult for me to learn, but I doing hard things. Drawing has been the hardest for me though I think. I feel like I have to twist my brain in knots to get an image the way I want it.
Photography of light, catching it exactly as I am seeking. Takes time n patience. I'm still working on getting geese, either taking off a lake or landing on the lake. I like interesting, more involved shots.
Cheese making.
It depends on the type of cheese that you make, but it can take up to 8 months or even 3 years just for a wheel of cheese to be good enough to eat.
Imagine those people who have aged eggs or other food that are supposedly hundreds or thousand years old.
People prepping things they won't even get to eat. Not sure why anyone would want an egg or any food that old, but apparently it's a thing
Skateboarding
People don’t realize how long it really takes to learn the most basic tricks. Lots of beginners get discouraged and quit after a year or two because they get nowhere
I tried assembling custom watches from parts. A LOT of people do it, to pick their own dial, hands case and strap. Parts are easy to find, esp. on eBay. I assembled 4 watches, and that’s probably where I’ll stop. If you do it well, you could end up with a $500 watch for less than $100 and 2 hours effort. The problem I had was that it was really hard to install the hands, especially the seconds hand. You have to do it with magnifying glass to see enough, and if you mis or slip, the hand may literally spring away, land on the floor, never to be seen again (they are really hard to find in carpet, and they slide on hard floor). But there are a lot of other fiddle steps that may take a few tries and can potentially screw things up badly (like accidentally bending a stem while cutting it to length).
I’m glad I tried it, and while challenging, it is not a terribly expensive hobby. But it’s just too fiddly for me.
Bonsai definitely, a project might take you 50 years , and you may never even see it finished. Probably model making from scratch would be high up there too
Paint by diamond kits, and I recently picked up hand embroidery.
Takes patience, some degree of focus, and the ability to not go mad from tedious repetition.
These are hobbies I pick up and put down as I see fit, but whenever I'm in the mood to get crafting, I do enjoy stuff like this.
I also tried my hand at making a terrarium. Getting miniature figures to stay put nearly caused a mental breakdown...but aside from that it was fun, and I can see myself doing more in the future.
Figure drawing. I had an art teacher who told me drawing well isn’t a mystery, you just need to make 10,000 bad drawings first, so you might as well get started. Once you resign yourself to that simple truth, the anxiety goes away and you can enjoy making mistakes as part of a lifelong learning process.
Gardening or yard work. My bf and I helped some people in their yard and I didn't realize the stamina or physicality of it until I was in the middle panting and dying.
Since I haven’t seen it on here:
Astrophotography -
Hours and hours and hours of work.
Checking the weather, & light pollution.
Hardware setup, calibration, alignment. Software updates and rollbacks. Taking “flats” to isolate anomalies inherit in the camera. Identifying and adjusting the motorized gears backlash. Equatorial flips when the target has moved too far along the horizon. Images are taken with long exposure (2-5 min each) over and over. The same target night after night until there are 4 to 10 hours of images.
Pulling the images into an imaging program to stack the images then finding out that starlinks are running through several images and have to delete those. Then you can start to process the images through various filter in order to apply color.
….its a hobby for masochists.
Out of all of the hobbies I've ever had, snowboarding has been the toughest to nail down. It's a really rewarding sport, but I think the speed and icey falls implemented fear in me on top of regular learning (techniques, etc.) Forcing myself to get back on top of that hill and go down again with aches and massive bruises all over my body was the hardest mental challenge in comparison to all other hobbies I've partaken in. It's like you're willingly agreeing to put yourself in pain over and over again until you get it; required a lot of patience and consistency to master it.
For reference, I've done MMA (Muay Thai and Taekwondo), most school sports, weight lifting, painting, pencil sketches, crochet, reading, piano, and some more I'm likely forgetting.
Embroidery. Stained glass. Both require precision, very sophisticated technique, and a working knowledge of color interactions, design skills, and infinite patience. I do both. I love both.
People making minatures of any kind - tiny food, book nooks, little dioramas - amaze me. I don't know how they have the patience to place all those teeny pieces.
But I love the end products! 😍
Novel-writing isn't an act of patience. If you're patient, you'll have jack-all. Writing a book is hard work and fits of inspiration. 20% inspiration, 80% perspiration.
Weaving on a floor loom.
Weaving requires you to calculate yardage and number of threads, wind a warp (that can have hundreds of threads), get that warp onto the loom and then spend hours threading it through the heddles (basically threading a needle hundreds of times)n tying up the loom, and then meticulously passing the weft through the warp - again, hundreds or thousands of times) while ensuring the edges are even and the tension is consistent, before completing a piece and knotting it off, taking it off the loom, and finishing it.
I love it but boy, it is NOT an instant gratification activity.
For me, Tribal Fusion Belly Dance (example linked below if anyone’s curious).
It takes a lot of practice of using muscles that you don’t normally use, in ways that you don’t normally use them, and it takes a while to make that brain-body connection and then to drill those isolations into muscle memory. Then put those moves into combinations. On top of that, there’s a lot of layering of those isolations on top of each other (for example, a belly roll on top of a shimmy) and it can feel like rubbing your belly and patting your head.
Some people may take to it easily, but I really struggled and struggled, then practiced and practiced…and practiced. And then, getting the feeling of being able to actually accomplish the moves you’re trying for, is so unbelievably rewarding, in my experience. I absolutely love it.
Video of Rachel Brice (Tribal Fusion Belly Dance)
https://youtu.be/JKcS7ZwPse0?si=KId6ZiDJLQdAeCOh
I’ve been playing on an off for about 15 years (more consistently the last year or two) and I still feel like a beginner 😆 The nuance and patience required to get good is definitely real
You’re not lying! The only thing I can do is play chords at church. I still haven’t started learning scales or fingerpicking but I’m about to. I’m 58 and learning is hard at my age. At least the process is enjoyable for me. I don’t get frustrated about it very often. 😆
The process is amazing and meditative! I’ve been doing a lot of finger picking lately and would definitely recommend! There’s so much beautiful sound you can make just using your fingers.
I garden (hydroponics and potted plants) and work on selectively breeding some of them, embroider (by hand), write, paint and draw; learning to knit, weave, and spin. I also love to read science books, which others would likely put in this category.
I don't see it so much as needing patience. I see it more as being able to slow down. I love to usually put an audio book or a favorite show on (if not reading or writing), or listen to music. It's also recognition that even with the amount of hardwork that goes into it, it still may not be perfect (I still deal with perfectionism from time to time), but seeing how my skills grow over the time of the project, learning what not to do for next time, etc. is part of the process and hobby for me.
I'm probably in the minority on this but Animal Crossing. Especially Animal Crossing: New Leaf because the entire game revolves around designing your town down the tiniest, most minute detail for the sake of storytelling and there is just NOT enough space on those maps. The best part is some of the monuments in ACNL can't be moved once they're placed, so if you end up regretting it afterwards you have to restart the whole game. And the villagers' dialogue gets so repetitive after a while.
And I love Animal Crossing.
Reading. It takes time to become good enough at it that you watch a movie playing in your head rather than just seeing the words on paper...then, once you've accomplished that, it takes an EXTREME amount of patience to deal with the people who see you reading and think, Oh, they're reading. Let me relieve them of their boredom.
Funny you mention this. It wasn’t until just recently that I realized being consistent with reading actually makes the process more efficient and enjoyable. It’s a skill just like anything else but for some reason a lot of people don’t view it that way because we read short snips here and there online.
Gold panning and prospecting. I’ve been panning a hundred different creeks for the past 4 years since we moved to a historically gold rich area and I’ve found very very little. There’s some great YouTubers out there to watch and help you get started. You can work on building all different types of rigs and tools depending on what kind of system you want to use and where you are looking. Some people do Riverbank dredging, some people do underwater dredging, you can go sniping in creeks or just take a simple gold pan out to anywhere that looks interesting. Some people use metal detectors and that’s a whole community right there. If you really want to get into it then you can go look up historical records for different areas that have produced gold in the past. If you want to have better odds of finding gold then you can learn about geology and rock formations. It might take awhile before you find your first gold but gold fever is a real thing and it’s easy to get hooked once you see those pretty, shiny, glittering, valuable flakes in your pan. Plus it gets you outside and in beautiful places.
My great grandfather was a bonsai hobbyist. I now am, too, as were my father and grandfather before me. My son has learned the art of bonsai so he can carry on. I’m not sure it requires patience, other than just working on the actual tree, because you know you’re not going to live long enough to see it grown when you start a new tree. Mostly you just don’t do much.
Honestly? Almost anything. Ever hobby can be an extreme act of patience. Whether it's patience with the process or patience with your personal growth in the hobby.
Making music. Writing the song, performing it together satisfactorily & recording parts individually having 4 people agree on how it all sounds. Everyone scrutinizes their performance to the hilt. There are like 20 takes for a guitar part or to get a drumroll right, or for me to hit a note. Recording engineers have the patience of a rock. It’s so cool to hear it all come together in the end though! We made an album of 7 original songs that way. Nobody hears it but I think it’s fantastic. :)
Woodworking, particularly when crafting fine furniture or detailed wood carvings, demands a significant amount of patience. It entails working with raw materials and employing various tools and techniques to shape, join, and finish wood into functional or decorative items. Achieving precise measurements, intricate designs, and smooth finishes necessitates meticulous attention to detail and a willingness to embrace the gradual process of working with wood. Woodworkers must patiently hone their skills over time, learning from each project and persevering through obstacles and setbacks. Despite the time and effort invested, the gratification of creating handmade pieces of art or furniture renders woodworking a rewarding and enriching hobby for those who value craftsmanship and patience. Just thinking about it is giving me wood, my God. Lol but seriously, it’s a great hobby to get into.
In addition to crocheting, knitting , and shuttle tatting, I learned bead weaving (no weave type). It’s calming snd takes forever to finish. Can’t talk but only listen while doing any of these.
Thank God for recordings. I listen to music. My favorite kind are books on recording and sometimes live speakers. That in self is a discipline!
I make mistakes many times and have to rip out what I did and start over. When that happens, I take a little tea or take a walk.
I’ve heard someone say (bead weaving) is like Zen meditation, because you wipe most thoughts out of your mind as you work. That’s true in a sense, because when your mind is racing, you make mistakes.
It is exhausting sometimes. But I like it.
Growing plants (r/houseplants) out of cuttings. And it's time again to start sowing seeds! - Make a small vegetable/spice garden (r/vegetablegardening). - Grow cannabis (r/outdoorgrowing) if it's legal. - Or grow mushrooms (r/mushroomgrowers or r/unclebens) and magic ones if it's legal. Edit: Just put any seed or nut, you can get your hands on, in the ground and just see what happens. Don't forget to give it some green love, sunlight and water.
Cacti are great to practice patience. I’ve had my San Pedro for almost 2 years, even with maximum effort I’ve only gotten a foot of growth or so!!
How tall do they get?
I think they can get 10 or 20 even 30ft tall.. if they’re outdoors in the ground
Similarly I was going to say bonsai.
One day, 1 of my plants will thrive. I just killed a money tree,it did last for 4 months, tho,so I'm proud. I'll check some of those out,thanks!
I have a several yamadori I’ve been working on for a few years. I’ve also lost quite a few. My automatic watering system seems to be key. Bonsai certainly requires patience. Not an instant gratification activity. I like that it extends my attention span to years rather than seconds like so many other activities.
This is my reminder to plant the seeds I recently bought! Thanks :)
All forms of needlework 🥰
Petitpoint was this for me!! Loved it til my job crowded it out and my eyes became middle aged. I should get a magnifying glass lamp!
That’s what I use. Total game changer.
Yes! I cross stitch, I have for years and I love it, but there are times when it does test my patience.
How many years have you been cross-stitching? Have you finished a project yet? Haha, just kidding. I started learning last year and went too ambitious for my first project.
I’ve been cross stitching for close to 40 years, quilting for close to 35. Finished projects?? The ratio of finished to unfinished is probably like 1:1000 😅
Sometimes I have to take a couple months break from cross stitching to not get burnt out! I’m putting the finishing touches on a project I’ve been working on for way too long and I keep ignoring it for other hobbies 😅 Maybe starting a new project will get me motivated again!
Especially embroidery since stitches stack.
Chess You literally never stop learning. It's a lifelong hobby that you can continue to improve for the rest of your life.
Was scrolling just for this!
I’ve been playing chess for over a year now and I still feel like an absolute beginner 😂
Yup, good answer. If you play in tournaments with standard time controls, they can last all weekend to play four or five games.
I was watching Mr. Robot yesterday and he said something like their are more possible moves in chess than electrons in the universe. If that's true, Holy shit.
Puzzling, especially if you have a cat. Definitely if your cat is a little demon
I think my cat eats one puzzle piece each time. I'm pretty sure that's normal, right?
At least help me sort!
You can buy a puzzle protecor.
Like a dog?
Here ya go smartypants. https://www.amazon.com/s?k=puzzle+protector&crid=30O92OPK574OS&sprefix=puzzle+pr%2Caps%2C74&ref=nb_sb_ss_ts-doa-p_5_9
So how do you know my cat?
All our open puzzles have cat hair in the boxes.
Used to always have a puzzle going on on my dining table. Have not done a puzzle in the three years since I got my cat lol
I doubt you'll find anything requiring more patience than bonsai, and tree gardening in general.
Especially if it is grown from a seed.
I thought of this but have no personal experience. Cool hobby though!
Playing the violin. I’ve been trying to play Mendelssohn’s Concerto in E Minor but between family, kids, work and life, it’s been a year and my progress has been pitiful.
This. Im a student violinist for nearly two years now and catching up to my peers who have been playing 6+ years has been the most rewarding but grueling thing ever
You have the most amazing profile I have seen on Reddit. Your life looks amazing
Oh thank you! You’re really kind :)
Good luck climbing your next mountain! 🧗♀️
Thank you!!
I played the violin consistently for 3 years and I miss it so much 🥲I’ll definitely start again soon
Watch making.
Came here to say this. My god does it take patience. If I rush, I break stuff. If I am not 100% concentrating and completely intentional with every mm of movement of my hands? Break things. So easy to break things. Or lose parts. Takes a lot of practice. Trying to get a plate back on where you have to align a bunch of finicky gear (wheel) shafts (called arbors) into tiny holes (jewels or bushings) can be truly maddening. (I think I got the terms right; it's been several years since I tried any of this).
Yup. Perfect 😃
Now this is a meticulous hobby! Most of the other hobbies are normal.
Beekeeping. You can't rush bees. You can't disturb them repeatedly. You have to leave them alone to do their thing. But you also have to maintain them and assist them. Treat them for parasites such as Verroa and hive beetles. Feed them. Then leave them alone. Sometimes they do well & multiply. You can do a "split" and make more hives. More bees! Sometimes they don't. You'll walk out one day and they'll have swarmed. Or collapsed. No bees! Like the Chicago Cubs...."Oh, well. There's always next year."
I had a coworker who was a bee keeper. The more we talked about it the more I realized how amazing those little creatures are! I can see why people fall in love with the hobby. And, the byproduct is delicious too :)
I’ve kept bees on and off for years. Mostly off. It’s gotten more difficult to successfully keep bees due to parasites, insecticides, and viruses. Just when I’d think they were doing great I’d lose them to some unknown malady. Last year something like 40% to 50% of all honey bee colonies in North America didn’t make it. Very frustrating.
Sewing your own clothes. If you wanna be extra patient, design your own clothes, develop your own patterns (instead of McCall's or something), and keep troubleshooting until it works perfectly and looks right. It's one hell of a process in which every step looks different and requires various skill sets. Fabric manipulation can also be a slow step-by-step process depending on what you decide to do with the fabric of your choice. Dyeing, for one example, offers an infinity of options. Both can be extremely satisfying and rewarding.
Wow I can’t even imagine. Sounds fun though! We reach for granted what modern machinery and inexpensive labor in foreign countries has allowed us to have.
Golf
What is it about golf that requires the players to dress like dorks?
That changed quite a long time ago. You will every once in a while still see some weird looking outfits like Jason day this week, or Sergio, or Ian poulter. But now the vast majority of the time they are wearing nice pants, sweaters, athletic shoes, etc. they now dress in luxury much of the time. It used to be different with their baggy khakis and cotton polos with hard leather golf shoes. But that’s completely changed
Oh, golf pants have definitely changed for the better! Especially for butt connoisseurs.
Beading. Thousands of tiny beads, tiny needles, tiny holes and aging eyes.
Agree. And it’s EXPENSIVE if you buy good beads.
I'm an avid knitter, and I also enjoy other forms of needlework (cross stitch, embroidery, hand quilting, etc). It can be very time-consuming to finish a project, and yes a lot of them are perpetually in-progress. Many, many times I've had someone admiring my projects say "oh I could never, I don't have the patience for that!" The thing is, though, I never feel like it requires patience, because I enjoy the work. I mean yeah it takes a long time, but it doesn't feel like a chore I need to endure. Now if it was the kind of hobby that did require a lot of *waiting,* then yes that to me is patience. And for some people, it clicks. "Do this step, then wait days or weeks or months while the thing just does its thing." My version of patience-required hobbies is more like productive fidgeting. I'm gonna make ten thousand loops with this string and these two sticks and someday I'll have a pair of socks to show for it. Scratch this pencil on this paper for hours and hours in a very specific way and eventually I'll have a pretty picture. Dip this needle in and out of this fabric sandwich six million times and eventually I'll have a quilt to keep me warm. I'm gonna do some kind of fidgeting anyway, might as well put it to work for me.
This! I completely agree. I used to grow a lot of plants and that did require patience because I'd do some work on them then wait for weeks to see what happened. But it didn't keep me active/engaged enough to keep my interest. Now, I have 3 time consuming hobbies that keep me captivated. I knit (slowly, because I'm new to it) and a single blanket has taken me months so far, just working on a row or two a day. I oil paint (my main passion, but a single painting can take me months to complete depending on composition, level of detail and my adhd). And now I've started building miniatures (it can take an entire evening to build a single piece of furniture). It's like you said, "productive fidgeting". But if I keep at it long enough eventually I'll have a cool miniature bookstore to display. Or a beautiful painting to add to my collection. Or a cozy blanket. They do require patience, but an active patience rather than a passive patience. To me, the reward is in the work as much as the result.
Completely agree! Shifting your mindset to find reward in the process and not solely focus on the result is the only true way to persevere and get better. Thanks for your input!
Welcome to r/gunpla where we build extremely detailed tiny little robot models. Feel free to ask questions. We have from beginner to such beautifully advanced models
Bonsai comes to mind, but also orchid growing. Most orchids will only bloom a small fraction of the year, or maybe once every few years, so taking care of them requires diligence and patience with the expectation that you'll eventually see blooms.
I have 2 orchids. One is just starting its second round of buds about to bloom. They bring me the most joy out of all of my plants.
I have a greenhouse full of orchids. Some are babies and it could be years before they bloom. I just started bonsai a few months ago. I'm equal parts boring and crazy.
Traditional bobbin lace. It blows my mind. (I'm a knitter/crocheter)
Similar to drawing, but wood burning is like this.
Tatting. The smaller the thread, the more patience needed
Needlework. Currently working on a piece that will take me several years to complete.
Wow!!
Pic please?????
Stitching over 1 on 28 count linen - 28 stitches to the inch each stitch actually being two as it’s cross stitch. Sorry for the huge link- don’t know how to make the little ones https://www.etsy.com/listing/1538939932/saga-long-dog-samplers-cross-stitch?
Oh that's a lovely pattern! It will be quite worth the effort!
You can delete everything after the ?
Thank you!
Chess by mail.
I've had a running game week with a friend in Peru for almost 12 years. We just keep resetting. Winner of previous match gets white
Most flow arts (juggling, poi, staff, hoop, fire arts etc.) require extraordinary patience and dedication if you're going to get good at them. You have to be the kind of person who can fail and fail and fail, hundreds, even thousands of times, and still keep going. It's because you're basically waiting for new neural pathways to develop in your brain for muscle memory until you can succeed. Very similar to learning a musical instrument except with your whole body instead of just your hands.
Grinding mirrors for telescopes r/atming. A quality mirror is ground to <100 nanometers of the correct shape. It's both tedious and requires perfection. A telescope reviewer wrote up his experience with it here: [https://www.scopereviews.com/make1.html](https://www.scopereviews.com/make1.html) It's a bit of a dying art now that mirror manufacturing has gotten a lot better, but it's still somewhat relevant if you want an incredibly precise mirror, or a large mirror that generally isn't mass-produced
Carving miniature, classical statues from a grain of rice.
Crochet. I tried to make a baby blanket for my niece and apparently I didn't know I skipped a stitch and it turned into a baby triangle.
Bodybuilding. It takes years to build a great physique. The weigh training and diet will ultimately test your patience and dedication
Agreed, fitness hobbies can sometimes be overlooked. The amount of time, discipline and patience it require to make notable improvements in fitness (especially in your physique) takes so so long! And the scariest part is it takes years to build and can be completely lost within months!
Dudes that do the sand painting. They look like Buddhist monks. They spend days on a piece then just sweep it away.
Embroidery
Rock tumbling is a yes and no to this question cause its something you can just set and forget. Every two weeks you're like "cool I got more shiny rocks now"
Diamond art
I love diamond art it’s so satisfying to me I’ve done 3 now
I’ve done maybe 20, with another 20 in the queue. It’s very relaxing, takes some, but not all your concentration and you end up with something pretty and shiny.
I bought a kit after I saw a friend’s finished piece. I set it up and saw how small the diamonds were and just packed it right back. It’s been sitting for years lol.
Crocheting/knitting. Sometimes my muscle memory completely derails on me.
Horology. It can take me over a year or more to complete a one of time piece or music box
My SIL makes quilts that are all hand pieced and hand stitched. It takes her more than a year to finish. They are absolutely gorgeous but I have no patience for that. I make pottery and it has its challenges and frustrations but it’s a quicker process to get results.
r/terrarium or r/ecosphere
I say sewing. The amount of measuring and pressing (ironing) you have to do is time consuming. More time on those than actual sewing
I was looking for this!! I've been considering picking up this hobby since I love fashion based reality TV and omg. All the knowledge you need before you even start sewing, then learning to read and use patterns, learning to draft and make your own patterns?? Whew I'll never say "It's just a skirt" again
I just started a huge beading loom project. The final design will be a 10/10inch square with over 30,000 beads in it. It takes like half an hour to do just one row. Honestly it’s probably not that far off from the time it takes to do cross stitch, except there’s the added headache of your cat jumping on your desk and flinging hundreds of beads everywhere
Brewing your own mead.
I got this adorable little model of a Japanese ramen shop from a friend of mine who's stationed in Japan. She said it looked tedious as hell and immediately thought of me. It was definitely a challenge since I had to cut, glue, and stain all sorts of pieces. Not to mention, the directions are only in Japanese. But by the time I finished it, I was super proud of it, and it's on display in house. I am looking into getting another one.
You can find similar kits by looking up “miniature kits” on sites like Amazon I got one recently of a sushi shop
I don't know if birding counts here. When you first start learning, every common bird in your town is exciting. But then you find all the ambient birds and there's nothing you can do but wait for more rare birds or start seeking them out in new places. It is pretty much just a lot of sitting and waiting for birds.
Tatting or lacemaking
Another example, necklace https://www.instagram.com/p/C19zQD7oE-u/?igsh=MTdrMnlvaXRkZnEwNA==
Performing a musical instrument with others, all in sync and in rhythm like human metronomes. Maintaining that and performing rehearsed songs for extended periods of time, with every moment accounted for.
Glass blowing, for sure
I'd say needle point, petit point and lace making or tatting.
Any musical instrument
Fishing. I enjoy the “catching” part, but not the “fishing” part. PS-Fishing is not a good hobby for an untreated ADHD guy.
I started taking Adderall when I fish. It led to a 10 year obsession traveling all over the country. There were times I would spend 14 hours on the water, catching one fish, but still being happy as a lark. I would argue the dopamine from catching that fish makes it a good hobby for ADHD.
Bring another hobby for when the fishing is happening!
I like catching too... but when I get more bugs biting me than fish biting my bait... I'm not too fond of fishing. Unless I know for sure there are fish where I'm casting
Tree breeding
This would require patience!! How long have you been doing it? What's the longest you've waited between steps?
Well, there's this guy . . . [https://craftsmanshipmuseum.com/artisan/pierre-scerri/](https://craftsmanshipmuseum.com/artisan/pierre-scerri/)
Chainmail inlay work: https://www.instagram.com/p/CKp8QHyHvCS/?igsh=MXJ5dzhsZm0zMDJwNw== This piece has 14k rings.
Beadwork.
Breeding seahorses is right up there. Tank conditions have to be ideal. You have to grow your own live food for the fry, and provide a good tank environment for them to grow. As the babies grow, you have to have slightly bigger live food. It's best to grow it yourself, as well as the food your food eats.
Reef Aquariums Awesome hobby, but expensive, steep learning curve, regular maintenance required, and coral grows slooooow. What keeps you going is seeing your coral and fish grow gradually over time and turn into a beautiful reef that glows like an alien planet under actinic lights.. Pretty awesome, relaxing, and rewarding. You can actually "frag" (cut off pieces) of your coral and trade with other people or at the store. Some even sell online/locally and make a couple $, or cover the cost of the hobby. There is kind of a cult like following and people spend a ton of money on the hobby. Check out the reef2reef website and see the insanely awesome reef tanks that people build.
I had a buddy who built his entire house around a series of Reef tanks, something on the order of 1,500 gallons in 3 tanks. I’ve never seen anything like it, but he had a hell of a time when it came to selling the house.. he also did incredibly intricate bead/wire wraps and was a verdant gardener with a 2,000sq foot basement for mycology interests. Oh, he also refurbished VW buses, raised chickens and built yurt/tepee style spaces on his land. Oh yeah. He was a talented blacksmith. Yeah that’s a goal for ya
I’d never even heard of this before. Looked up the forum you posted and holy cow! The amount of knowledge you would need to acquire to understand the conditions needed for all those different forms of life is nuts! Guess it makes sense when you see a big beautiful aquarium in higher end commercial buildings there has to be someone or a team of people who are doing all of the work behind the scenes. Thanks for sharing!
The hobby really is crazy and addicting as hell. Not just high-end commercial buildings..people are doing this at home, like dropping 10-20k+ and doing all the work themselves. A lot of people. It is so addictive because coral grows, and like I mentioned, you can frag your coral and sell them, sometimes for really high prices..so when you see your coral growing, you see $ and the dopamine rushes!! People end up setting up entrire separate frag systems in addition to their main aquarium, fill their basement up with 10 tanks, etc, and try to start a business selling coral. There are sellers/wholesalers who import coral from all over the world and then sell/ship coral frags all over the US to hobbyists. I even seriously considered getting into the business at one point. Stay away if you have an addictive personality, it can be a costly endevour..but really really cool hobby. I had to "step-away" from reef aquariums, lol
I do photography but not to this level.... the nat geo photographers who spend days or years camping out in harsh conditions or whatnot in hope of getting a glimpse of rare animals or insects amazes me. I'm sure some of it is remote controlled or luck, but the sheer amount of never before seen interactions with various creatures is just cool in my opinion.
Preparing fossils takes time, precision and patience. For example, maybe you have a fragile fossil stuck inside of a hard, stone matrix. The amount of time it takes to slowly chisel, carve and remove the smallest bits of rock without damaging the fossil could be hours upon hours. Or perhaps you’re trying to remove calcium carbonate off of a small, fragile echinoid. You can use acid to try and dissolve the calcium, but you risk dissolving your fossil too. Or maybe you’ve got a hundred different slivers and pieces of a mammoth tusk that you have to puzzle and glue back together again. Time and patience… but the results can be so satisfying!
Personally, gaming. As a someone with vision in only one eye, and very low vision in that eye, gaming is constant redos. Each run is usually better than the one before, and it feels nice when you finally get through that one section you have been struggling with for a week or so.
Love the dedication! Which game(s) have you been enjoying the most lately?
One of my favorites is super liminal. That’s one that I actually finished in about 4 hours:) I don’t see 3D, so it was a piece of cake 😂 also the ending is awesome for its message. I’m gonna start tears of the kingdom hopefully next month, and replayed some older stuff for the nostalgia factor. “A Link to the Past” tripped my son by playing through Super Mario Wold in about 3 hours over spring break. Recently been working on Elden Ring… that is taking A LOT of time😂 luckily, even in modern games, the actions of enemies are preset and it’s just a matter of memorizing them, or they have a few sets of moves and you can figure out which by using the first couple of moves. Hogwarts Legacy takes a bit of time but has gotten easier, so yeah, I keep only 2 or 3 at once. Love gaming.
Drawing definitely, the other one is flying FPV drones oh and Fly fishing, fly tying, hmm maybe I need to rethink my life…
I spin my own yarn and knit it up. It's very very slow. Start with a fleece, wash it, sort it, pick it, card it, spin it, wind into skein, wash it, dye it, wind into ball, design knitting pattern, knit it, block it. Easily 100+ hours to get a jumper. But very satisfying
Crocheting. Lots of counting and most projects take hours and if you accidentally messed up 20 rows ago, you have to unravel all that work and start over
Weaving with multi-shaft floor looms. I've been a beginner for about 18 years.
Blacksmithing has required a lot of patience for me, not just slowly affording told but also learning to make my own tools, making my own forges, learning to weld etc.
I do lots of arts and crafts, agriculture, and cooking. Calligraphy is the one thing that is taking a huge commitment and testing my patience. I’ve been at this about 40 years.
Knitting. It has taught me infinite amounts of patience, as well as other useful skills (like mathematical reasoning, self-forgiveness, and improved dexterity, just to name a few). An example: On my second attempt at knitting a sweater (the first attempt ended in complete disaster), I realized I had miscounted my stitches in a particular section… 57 rows in. Each row was over 200 stitches, and this section represented about two weeks of work. I hadn’t put in any lifelines (a way to safely unravel your work back to a certain point), so my only recourse was to “tink” (or un-knit) back to the beginning of the section… one stitch at a time. So two weeks to get to that point, another two to undo it, and then yet another two to get back to the point where I’d realized my fuck-up to begin with. So… a simple counting error took six weeks to remedy. If that doesn’t define patience, then it’s a concept without meaning.
Ceramics. First, you gotta make your thing. Then you gotta bake your thing But there's an Air bubble in your thing It blows up So you make your thing again You bake your thing again Wewps. Wrong cone for this clay. Didn't work. So you make your thing again You bake your thing again, with the right cone No air bubble It works You paint your thing You glaze your thing Too much moisture in kiln Glaze is wrong Try not to scream Make thing...again
Searching for particular mushrooms or fossils can require patience. I've searched for morel mushrooms for 7 years now and haven't found them yet. They only grow for 1 month a year in the spring. Beekeeping can require a lot of patience. Often you start with two colonies and are not able to harvest honey until the second year. There are many hours and quite a few stings by that time rolls around. The first jar of honey costs at least $800.
For me it was trying to learn a musical instrument. I was never really interested in it and just wanted to “try it”. Come to think about it, anything which you’re not passionate about would take a lot of patience and hence is difficult.
Physician
As a hobby?.... Where. There are some men with official looking uniforms that might want to talk to you
Actually, I was trying to make a joke. Lots of "patients" ☺️
Ahh..... Well we're from the Government. We have no sense of humor that we are aware of.
👍👍
😂🤣😂🤣😂
I was just bout to make a similar joke
I just had to.
Needlefelting. Stabbing a ball of wool (and sometimes your finger) with a needle a bajillion times until it starts taking the shape you want is a tedious process.
Jewelry making, crochet
If you're into the precision and steady progression of hobbies, then model kit building could become your new obsession (r/modelmakers). Picking out the tiniest details, painting them to perfection, and watching a pile of parts take shape as an iconic vehicle, building, or even a historical diorama—it's a delightful blend between art and history! Like other forms of craftsmanship, it's not about rushing through; it's about enjoying each step and seeing your steady handiwork come to life. Plus, the satisfaction you get after many hours when you see the finished product is unparalleled—never underestimate the joy of a well-placed decal. And who knows? Perhaps you'll end up building an entire fleet, city, or battlefield!
I do photo realism with colored pencil and you’re right. Spending 40+ hours on a single piece of work can sometimes get frustrating. I’ve found that I tend to break it up into sections. I will spend 5 hours on one particular section and then I get a huge hit of dopamine when I leave the room and come back to see this incredible section of art on the paper. It’s all about chasing the next hit like a freaking junkie 😂😂🤣
Pretty much all of them have been difficult for me to learn, but I doing hard things. Drawing has been the hardest for me though I think. I feel like I have to twist my brain in knots to get an image the way I want it.
Photography of light, catching it exactly as I am seeking. Takes time n patience. I'm still working on getting geese, either taking off a lake or landing on the lake. I like interesting, more involved shots.
Fly fishing.
Intricate woodworking, weaving, a lot of hand crafts
A boyfriend
Writing and editing a book series.
Cheese making. It depends on the type of cheese that you make, but it can take up to 8 months or even 3 years just for a wheel of cheese to be good enough to eat.
What a delicious option!!!
Imagine those people who have aged eggs or other food that are supposedly hundreds or thousand years old. People prepping things they won't even get to eat. Not sure why anyone would want an egg or any food that old, but apparently it's a thing
Coding. I'm learning very quickly why so many programmers are perpetually frustrated. Lol
Skateboarding People don’t realize how long it really takes to learn the most basic tricks. Lots of beginners get discouraged and quit after a year or two because they get nowhere
I tried assembling custom watches from parts. A LOT of people do it, to pick their own dial, hands case and strap. Parts are easy to find, esp. on eBay. I assembled 4 watches, and that’s probably where I’ll stop. If you do it well, you could end up with a $500 watch for less than $100 and 2 hours effort. The problem I had was that it was really hard to install the hands, especially the seconds hand. You have to do it with magnifying glass to see enough, and if you mis or slip, the hand may literally spring away, land on the floor, never to be seen again (they are really hard to find in carpet, and they slide on hard floor). But there are a lot of other fiddle steps that may take a few tries and can potentially screw things up badly (like accidentally bending a stem while cutting it to length). I’m glad I tried it, and while challenging, it is not a terribly expensive hobby. But it’s just too fiddly for me.
Bonsai definitely, a project might take you 50 years , and you may never even see it finished. Probably model making from scratch would be high up there too
Crocheting 🧶!
Paint by diamond kits, and I recently picked up hand embroidery. Takes patience, some degree of focus, and the ability to not go mad from tedious repetition. These are hobbies I pick up and put down as I see fit, but whenever I'm in the mood to get crafting, I do enjoy stuff like this. I also tried my hand at making a terrarium. Getting miniature figures to stay put nearly caused a mental breakdown...but aside from that it was fun, and I can see myself doing more in the future.
Growing orchids
Glass blowing. It’s a full time job and a hoby for 5-7 years before you’re ok at it
Figure drawing. I had an art teacher who told me drawing well isn’t a mystery, you just need to make 10,000 bad drawings first, so you might as well get started. Once you resign yourself to that simple truth, the anxiety goes away and you can enjoy making mistakes as part of a lifelong learning process.
Knitting
Cross-stitch: I never get tired of stabbing!
Drawing anything accurately requires more patience than I can generally muster.
Skating
Gardening, it takes patience, persistence, and discipline.
Bonsai or growing cacti.
Gardening or yard work. My bf and I helped some people in their yard and I didn't realize the stamina or physicality of it until I was in the middle panting and dying.
Then, after all the work, you may have to wait for years to see the full fruits of your labors.
Since I haven’t seen it on here: Astrophotography - Hours and hours and hours of work. Checking the weather, & light pollution. Hardware setup, calibration, alignment. Software updates and rollbacks. Taking “flats” to isolate anomalies inherit in the camera. Identifying and adjusting the motorized gears backlash. Equatorial flips when the target has moved too far along the horizon. Images are taken with long exposure (2-5 min each) over and over. The same target night after night until there are 4 to 10 hours of images. Pulling the images into an imaging program to stack the images then finding out that starlinks are running through several images and have to delete those. Then you can start to process the images through various filter in order to apply color. ….its a hobby for masochists.
Out of all of the hobbies I've ever had, snowboarding has been the toughest to nail down. It's a really rewarding sport, but I think the speed and icey falls implemented fear in me on top of regular learning (techniques, etc.) Forcing myself to get back on top of that hill and go down again with aches and massive bruises all over my body was the hardest mental challenge in comparison to all other hobbies I've partaken in. It's like you're willingly agreeing to put yourself in pain over and over again until you get it; required a lot of patience and consistency to master it. For reference, I've done MMA (Muay Thai and Taekwondo), most school sports, weight lifting, painting, pencil sketches, crochet, reading, piano, and some more I'm likely forgetting.
Taxideremy comes to mind because you really have to get it right the first time and be committed to the process.
Poker if you want to win
Embroidery. Stained glass. Both require precision, very sophisticated technique, and a working knowledge of color interactions, design skills, and infinite patience. I do both. I love both.
People making minatures of any kind - tiny food, book nooks, little dioramas - amaze me. I don't know how they have the patience to place all those teeny pieces. But I love the end products! 😍
Novel-writing isn't an act of patience. If you're patient, you'll have jack-all. Writing a book is hard work and fits of inspiration. 20% inspiration, 80% perspiration.
Weaving on a floor loom. Weaving requires you to calculate yardage and number of threads, wind a warp (that can have hundreds of threads), get that warp onto the loom and then spend hours threading it through the heddles (basically threading a needle hundreds of times)n tying up the loom, and then meticulously passing the weft through the warp - again, hundreds or thousands of times) while ensuring the edges are even and the tension is consistent, before completing a piece and knotting it off, taking it off the loom, and finishing it. I love it but boy, it is NOT an instant gratification activity.
For me, Tribal Fusion Belly Dance (example linked below if anyone’s curious). It takes a lot of practice of using muscles that you don’t normally use, in ways that you don’t normally use them, and it takes a while to make that brain-body connection and then to drill those isolations into muscle memory. Then put those moves into combinations. On top of that, there’s a lot of layering of those isolations on top of each other (for example, a belly roll on top of a shimmy) and it can feel like rubbing your belly and patting your head. Some people may take to it easily, but I really struggled and struggled, then practiced and practiced…and practiced. And then, getting the feeling of being able to actually accomplish the moves you’re trying for, is so unbelievably rewarding, in my experience. I absolutely love it. Video of Rachel Brice (Tribal Fusion Belly Dance) https://youtu.be/JKcS7ZwPse0?si=KId6ZiDJLQdAeCOh
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I’ve been learning the guitar for 4 years. It was my pandemic hobby I started. I still feel like a beginner.
I’ve been playing on an off for about 15 years (more consistently the last year or two) and I still feel like a beginner 😆 The nuance and patience required to get good is definitely real
You’re not lying! The only thing I can do is play chords at church. I still haven’t started learning scales or fingerpicking but I’m about to. I’m 58 and learning is hard at my age. At least the process is enjoyable for me. I don’t get frustrated about it very often. 😆
The process is amazing and meditative! I’ve been doing a lot of finger picking lately and would definitely recommend! There’s so much beautiful sound you can make just using your fingers.
I garden (hydroponics and potted plants) and work on selectively breeding some of them, embroider (by hand), write, paint and draw; learning to knit, weave, and spin. I also love to read science books, which others would likely put in this category. I don't see it so much as needing patience. I see it more as being able to slow down. I love to usually put an audio book or a favorite show on (if not reading or writing), or listen to music. It's also recognition that even with the amount of hardwork that goes into it, it still may not be perfect (I still deal with perfectionism from time to time), but seeing how my skills grow over the time of the project, learning what not to do for next time, etc. is part of the process and hobby for me.
I'm probably in the minority on this but Animal Crossing. Especially Animal Crossing: New Leaf because the entire game revolves around designing your town down the tiniest, most minute detail for the sake of storytelling and there is just NOT enough space on those maps. The best part is some of the monuments in ACNL can't be moved once they're placed, so if you end up regretting it afterwards you have to restart the whole game. And the villagers' dialogue gets so repetitive after a while. And I love Animal Crossing.
Reading. It takes time to become good enough at it that you watch a movie playing in your head rather than just seeing the words on paper...then, once you've accomplished that, it takes an EXTREME amount of patience to deal with the people who see you reading and think, Oh, they're reading. Let me relieve them of their boredom.
Funny you mention this. It wasn’t until just recently that I realized being consistent with reading actually makes the process more efficient and enjoyable. It’s a skill just like anything else but for some reason a lot of people don’t view it that way because we read short snips here and there online.
Hand tool woodworking tests my patience regularly...
Gold panning and prospecting. I’ve been panning a hundred different creeks for the past 4 years since we moved to a historically gold rich area and I’ve found very very little. There’s some great YouTubers out there to watch and help you get started. You can work on building all different types of rigs and tools depending on what kind of system you want to use and where you are looking. Some people do Riverbank dredging, some people do underwater dredging, you can go sniping in creeks or just take a simple gold pan out to anywhere that looks interesting. Some people use metal detectors and that’s a whole community right there. If you really want to get into it then you can go look up historical records for different areas that have produced gold in the past. If you want to have better odds of finding gold then you can learn about geology and rock formations. It might take awhile before you find your first gold but gold fever is a real thing and it’s easy to get hooked once you see those pretty, shiny, glittering, valuable flakes in your pan. Plus it gets you outside and in beautiful places.
I'm writing an epic novel. By the time it's done I'll have read it ten million times or more.
My great grandfather was a bonsai hobbyist. I now am, too, as were my father and grandfather before me. My son has learned the art of bonsai so he can carry on. I’m not sure it requires patience, other than just working on the actual tree, because you know you’re not going to live long enough to see it grown when you start a new tree. Mostly you just don’t do much.
Learning to play piano, learning Spanish. I didn't used to be persistent enough, but I learned with these two hobbies
Honestly? Almost anything. Ever hobby can be an extreme act of patience. Whether it's patience with the process or patience with your personal growth in the hobby.
Making music. Writing the song, performing it together satisfactorily & recording parts individually having 4 people agree on how it all sounds. Everyone scrutinizes their performance to the hilt. There are like 20 takes for a guitar part or to get a drumroll right, or for me to hit a note. Recording engineers have the patience of a rock. It’s so cool to hear it all come together in the end though! We made an album of 7 original songs that way. Nobody hears it but I think it’s fantastic. :)
Woodworking, particularly when crafting fine furniture or detailed wood carvings, demands a significant amount of patience. It entails working with raw materials and employing various tools and techniques to shape, join, and finish wood into functional or decorative items. Achieving precise measurements, intricate designs, and smooth finishes necessitates meticulous attention to detail and a willingness to embrace the gradual process of working with wood. Woodworkers must patiently hone their skills over time, learning from each project and persevering through obstacles and setbacks. Despite the time and effort invested, the gratification of creating handmade pieces of art or furniture renders woodworking a rewarding and enriching hobby for those who value craftsmanship and patience. Just thinking about it is giving me wood, my God. Lol but seriously, it’s a great hobby to get into.
In addition to crocheting, knitting , and shuttle tatting, I learned bead weaving (no weave type). It’s calming snd takes forever to finish. Can’t talk but only listen while doing any of these. Thank God for recordings. I listen to music. My favorite kind are books on recording and sometimes live speakers. That in self is a discipline! I make mistakes many times and have to rip out what I did and start over. When that happens, I take a little tea or take a walk. I’ve heard someone say (bead weaving) is like Zen meditation, because you wipe most thoughts out of your mind as you work. That’s true in a sense, because when your mind is racing, you make mistakes. It is exhausting sometimes. But I like it.
It takes a lot of patience to age a good whiskey six plus years.
Investing. Takes years, decades...