[hinkley]

For some people this starts in childhood. People see a sibling excelling in an area and decide to cultivate other traits instead, so they are not living in their shadow.

I discovered at a young age that I am a parrot - that I find it fairly straightforward to repeat back complex sound patterns to people. There are a couple families of language in SE Asia and Africa that trip me up, but other than that my coordination is unusual. It made parts of music and foreign language classes a non-event, which made more time to perfect other parts.

What I didn't know until much later is that my brother also has this trait, but he got tired of being "hinkley's younger brother", and he completely burnt out on music (although that was due to pressure from our parents) and foreign language by high school. I had a sense of this by the time he was picking a foreign language in HS, and I gently encouraged him to try a different language. He didn't. Our teacher always found the parrot trait highly fascinating, to the point of bringing it up in class. It turned out this had only happened a couple times in his career and here were two brothers back to back. I kind of laughed it off, while my brother found it pretty cringe-worthy and he eventually dropped the class.