When it comes to learning how to do anything in life, we tend to have two options. You either study what other people have come up with, which is what most of us do, or you come up with a method on your own. At some point, everything we could learn or do was new. Someone had to be the originator, so maybe it’s not so weird to think that even a few celebrities have devised their own techniques and ways of doing things out there.
10. Chuck Norris Has His Own Fighting Style
If you’re a fan of martial arts, you have a wide array of styles and methods to get into. Thanks to ’80s movies we all know karate, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s tae kwon do, judo, krav maga, muay thai, aikido, kung fu and dozens more. Aikido dates back to the 1920s while Shaolin monks began developing their kung fu fighting style over 1,000 years ago. So the tradition is old but constantly evolving. So much so that even world renowned actor and early internet meme Chuck Norris developed his own martial arts style as well.
Norris developed a variation on tae kwon do he calls Chun Kuk Do or the Chuck Norris System. It merges traditional tae kwon do with a handful of other styles, including Tang Soo Do, Jiu-Jitsu and karate. The formal organization that teaches the art, the United Fighting Arts Federation, was founded in 1990, though Norris had been developing not just the fighting style but a philosophy to go along with it for many years beforehand.
Like other styles, there is a ranking system based around colored belts. The highest rank is black belt, itself broken into 10 degrees. Only four people have a 10th degree black belt, including Chuck Norris himself. There are about 100 schools teaching the method around the world.
Norris is not the only actor to have created his own fighting style, of course. Bruce Lee famously created Jeet Kune Do while Jackie Chan developed what is known as a drunken fighting style for his Drunken Master films. Even Keanu Reeves has been credited with developing a new style of Gun-Fu, a method derived from Hong Kong action movies that blends traditional fighting with gunplay, for his John Wick films.
9. Nic Cage Invented an Acting Style
Few actors can match Nic Cage for energy on screen in a movie. And off screen, few have managed to match his almost mythical presence. He’s gone from Oscar winner to meme to a cult hero whose legacy is a frenetic mix of engaging, baffling, and unforgettable films. Even if you don’t like him, you have to admit there are few people like him in Hollywood.
Part of what makes Nicolas Cage so enigmatic is how he approaches his craft. After all, how many actors can lay claim to their own acting style? Cage describes his own acting as something called Nouveau Shamanic. Just don’t ask him what that means.
Cage says he once read a book called “The Way of the Actor” which helped him realize that early medicine men and shamans were actors of a sort. He’s also described it as a way to augment imagination in order to produce a performance that doesn’t seem like it’s fake. In other words, he approaches acting as though trying to will the lie of his performance into the truth. To make you believe it almost by making himself believe it.
8. Hank Williams III Invented a Musical Subgenre
Inventing new musical genres isn’t the easiest thing in the world these days. Most music is going to end up falling into a subgenre, but that can still be something unique. Take, for example, cattle core, the musical subgenre attributed to Hank Williams III, grandson of the legendary Hank Williams.
According to Williams, cattle core is what you get when you mix three exceptionally unlikely styles in one place. Country music is where it starts, which seems to make sense for someone named Hank Williams, but then it combines heavy metal. That’s an unusual but not unheard of combination, to be sure. But the icing on the cake is cattle auctioneering. Put the three together and you get Hank Williams III’s 3 Bar Ranch and songs that definitely are an acquired taste.
7. Jimi Hendrix Invented His Own Timing
Speaking of musicians, Jimi Hendrix is continually proving himself to be a musical innovator long after his death. In this case, it comes to the way he used timing. Most of us who have even a basic understanding of music understand timing as keeping the beat. It allows for synchronization in the way the music plays out. A metronome is one of the easiest ways to understand timing and it’s how many people learn to play piano and guitar, using the device to manage their timing.
All that flies out the window when you listen to Jimi Hendrix. While not every song will strictly follow a perfectly regulated beat, Hendrix managed to make an incredibly relaxed playing style that can jump up and down in terms of timing, speed and rhythm. From a precision standpoint, a music teacher would fault Hendrix’s playing as being poor and straying too far from what should be established timing. But does anyone ever say that about Hendrix? The man’s considered one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Instead, what Hendrix does is make his rhythm more organic. Basically, there was imperfection that made it so perfect and it can actually sound better to our ears because it’s not so rigid.
6. Terrence Howard Invented Suspect Math
Way back when the MCU first started up, Terrence Howard was in Iron Man as Tony Stark’s good friend and future War Machine James Rhodes. After that first movie, Howard was replaced with Don Cheadle. But what happened to Howard? He said Robert Downey Jr. pushed him out by taking a pay raise at the cost of Howard’s own payday. Rumors at the time said Howard expected the same pay as Downey Jr., so who knows for sure? Especially when we also know that Terrence Howard invented his own math, and it’s a little suspect.
As he stated in an interview, Howard does not believe one times one equal one. He thinks that’s impossible and it must equal two. The reason for this is “one times one equals two because the square root of four is two, so what’s the square root of two? Should be one, but we’re told it’s two, and that cannot be.”
Now, the square root of two isn’t two, but that’s neither here nor there. It sounds like he’s joking, but the man is very serious that he does not believe one time one equals one thanks to a clear and fundamental misunderstanding of what the “times” part of the equation means. It must equal two. He developed his own language of symbols naturally called Terryology to go along with this and truly believes we will soon stop teaching children this one times one equals one nonsense.
5. Stanley Unwin Invented His Own Language
Modern audiences may not be all that familiar with Stanley Unwin, but the British comedian was beloved for many years prior to his death in 2002. One of the things that made him such a standout was the almost baffling ease with which he could speak quickly in clearly in utter gibberish.
Unwin developed what was essentially a language known as Unwinese. It had a perfect flow and cadence and to someone not paying attention would likely sound like normal, everyday conversation. But listen closely and you’d hear the man was mixing up nonsense with out of place words but with a delivery that sold it as genuine, meaningful speech.
You can still find many videos in which he gives or even conducts interviews in character that are oddly easy to follow, even when half the words have no meaning.
4. Diamond Dallas Page Invented His Own Yoga
The post-wrestling careers of many professional wrestlers can be as surprising as their on-screen characters. Stars like Dwayne Johnson, John Cena and Dave Bautista have gone on to Hollywood stardom, while others like Jesse Ventura and Glenn “Kane” Jacobs went into politics. And Diamond Dallas Page? He invented his own style of yoga.
Also known as DDP, it’s fitting that Page’s yoga is called DDP Yoga. Endorsed by the likes of musician/horror director Rob Zombie, DDP Yoga is a form of “intense” yoga that focuses on building strength and burning calories while improving flexibility. So yoga, but intense.
There are traditional yoga poses along with sports rehab therapy and calisthenics designed to give you a workout that is not hard on the joints. The program has over 300 workouts and many positive reviews.
3. Zareefa Jan, an Illiterate Poet, Invented Her Own Alphabet to Write Poetry
When it comes to inspirational stories, you won’t find many better than Zareefa Jan’s. Now in her late 60s, Jan lives in India and she never learned to read or write. That didn’t stop her from having the heart of a poet, however. So what does a poet with no ability to write poems do? She wrote them anyway.
Unable to write in her native tongue, or any other, Jan created a language on her own that allowed her to put her thoughts on paper. Jan said she had discovered her need to create poetry shortly after getting married when she went to fetch some water and was simply overcome and found herself in a trance-like state. She came to and had a poem he needed to share.
What she created was a language of circles. Though her children had learned to read and write, they spoke English And Urdu while her poems came to her in Kashmiri, a little-spoken language no one else in the family knew. So she took to making her own symbols to archive her thoughts and, though they may look like nothing but repeated circles to others, Jan claims to be able to read them still having essentially created her own alphabet.
People have accused her of lying and that the circles can’t possibly have meaning. She simply remembers the poems and recites them that way. That said, her family and others in the community believe she has done as she claims, with another poet pointing out he had never heard of another poet being able to remember and recite their entire collection before.
2. The Queen Accidentally Invented a New Dog Breed
These days the Royal Family doesn’t get in the news for many positive things. Maybe the Queen just needs to get back to basics, like celebrating jubilees or accidentally inventing new dog breeds. Those are the kinds of stories people love.
The Queen is famous for her small army of corgi dogs and, if the internet is any indication, people love corgis. But it’s a lesser known fact that not all of the Queen’s corgis are actually corgis. Some of the dogs the Queen has had over the years were a breed she’s responsible for introducing to the world – the slightly less majestic dorgi.
Once upon a time, Princess Margaret had her own dog named Pipkin. Pipkin was a dachshund, better known as a wiener dog, though the Queen has probably never used that term. One day Pipkin met one of the Queen’s corgis and nature being nature, the two produced a litter of pudgy little beasts that everyone agreed were delightful. So they kept breeding them. It’s not an officially recognized breed, according to the American Kennel Club, because they only recognize purebreds, but they have become popular over the years.
1. Tony Iommi is Widely Credited with Inventing Heavy Metal Music
We said earlier it’s hard to create a new genre of music and that’s true. But that’s today, and every genre had to start somewhere. Heavy metal, for instance, started with legendary guitarist Tony Iommi after he lost his fingertips.
Iommi was working in a factory in 1965 when a machine crushed his fingers and took the tip of two of them. He was just getting into music in a serious way and was worried the accident would ruin his future. So, with homemade fingertips, he began tweaking his approach to guitar playing to see what he could do. He used lighter strings and relied more heavily on power chords while dropping his tuning. The result was what he called “aggressive, raw and fat.” He’d go on to bring that sound to the band Black Sabbath and give rise to the entire genre of heavy metal.