I see a lot of people talk about how they used to be gifted, and then squandered their potential into mediocrity. Apparently, gifted adults tend to make . From there, they pretty much approach the world with a ‘I’m so much smarter than everyone else, without anything to show for it, or any skills commensurate with the opinion of themselves’.
As a former gifted kid myself, I think there’s a couple reasons why I get frustrated with people using the term. A large part of which involves being frustrated with those who see themselves like me trying to gain social clout. I think there’s this assumption that often goes unspoken that increased intelligence equals increased competence, and that this applies broadly, so being a gifted kid means that you deserve a thunderous round of applause regardless of how your life turns out. Instead, I think being gifted often comes with a couple semi-crippling downsides. Let’s talk about them, and then why I think this discourse somewhat frustrates me.
The first downside that I think is rather obvious is that picking things up extremely quickly often comes with a lack of social skills, often appearing to be ADHD or Autism. I think this comes from the observation that the person in question is not relating to challenges in ways that others are. A large part of schooling seems to be overcoming these challenges over time, and to teach others resilience, and the importance of not being dissuaded. Yet, what schooling teaching to the lower end of median seems to get wrong is that if a challenge is able to be completed in the time that it takes others to read the instructions, it can be mind-numbing to engage with your peers who aren’t seeing the answer similar to you.
The consequence of this is twofold, both of which I think are bad. First, I think this can be isolating in that gifted people struggle to relate to other people, preventing deep relationships. The second being that the skills related to improving and overcoming struggle are not built. Most skills take time to build, and the time horizons for approaching challenging material needs to be longer to prevent children from ‘skimming’ through.
Solutions aren’t obvious to solve this. There’s not many places that G-loading takes place, other than the upper echelons of college/PHD programs/industry science. So, creating an environment where gifted people can socialize/struggle on problems isn’t easy. Also, with the push to decrease the relevance of standardized tests in all things American life, you’re probably going to reduce the tools that push gifted people upward.
As someone starting my career, here’s a couple things I think I need to value more in order to thrive.
- Choose Jobs that have a intense learning curve or require a lot of continuous learning.
- Choose Jobs that allow you to work at your own pace, and speed up correspondingly.
- A lot of the jobs that ‘require crazy hours’ are jobs that involve people being good at working hard, but not at working smart.
- Network aggressively in order to find things and people that you like. People you like will often be doing things you like doing.
Isadore Johnson's Website 