The popular book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance", explores this topic in more details, for those interested in the topic.
I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
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Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#12Yes, if you get there early (like in a good school) then your view is complete and you're still happy to later tone the things down and chill on the job.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#13Sounds like engineering class, where every kid in the room is “that kid who is good in math”. My kid just got into the the local youth symphony (tough competition), and as I explain to her, every kid in that symphony is probably 1st chair in their school, and now one of you will be last chair. You can be smarter than 99% of the people around you, and there are still 60M people in the world smarter than you. Maybe you…
This is a good realistic perspective. Another great way to look at it positively: surrounding yourself with people better than you is a perfect opportunity to “up your game”. I played a lot of basketball in my youth but was never more than a mediocre player. it wasn’t till my late 20s playing street ball in Oakland that I got a lot better. Those first few weeks were really hard, understanding just how far I was from the other players.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#14One trick is to find two things you are reasonably gifted at and you're more likely to be remarkable if you work in the area where those two things meet. For example, if you're an 80th %ile programmer and 80th %ile automotive mechanic, there is surely a niche that connects the two where you would perhaps be 95 %ile merely by how unusual it is to being good at both things.
I'm having a hard time imagining that from your example. For example I have several successful project cars, I've built a custom wheel balancer from an accelerometer, and am currently programming the fuel injection and spark on a car from scratch yet I don't know if a career in that would really make me any more income than my current Software Engineering manager role.
The parent comment said there would be a niche for you, not (necessarily) that it would be lucrative. You might be more valued there (in the "we're lucky we found this guy" way if not the cash way).
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#15In many ways, this was my story growing up until I got really into soccer.
I started playing late, but loved the game, so clawed my way up through practicing in much of my spare time, whether down by the field or in the street in front of my house.
Soccer pre-season conditioning also was probably the hardest thing I’d ever done, and left me in the best shape of my life. This instilled the feedback loop of effort = reward that was missing due to academics coming so easily.
If you have a gifted child, find a sport they enjoy and encourage the hell out of it.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#16Point being. Grit is what gets you places.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#17One of the first articles I remember reading on HN was back in 2009. The gist of the article was that you shouldn’t praise your kids for being smart, praise them when they work hard. Rewarding hard work will better serve them in the long run since being smart will plateau at some point.
I have a 9 and 11 year old and I still bristle a little bit when my mom says y’all are so smart.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#18The education system provides fairly clear and predictable paths to affirmation, success, and a sort of grade based people ranking system.
Life outside that system often very much does not.
Everyone has to come to terms with it at some point.
I can understand how for someone who school makes a strong impression on them it can be a real struggle without what was such a clear and predictable system.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#19this little extract is one that i identify with a lot: Christina Kimont, 38, speaks of a similar experience. “The fact that I can be immediately good at something has left me as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, so to speak, and left me rather adrift when it came to finding my life’s purpose.”
It's a kind of fear of missing out. If you spend all your time becoming keeping up with one tiny field, there'll be so much else that you know nothing about at all.
Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected
#20People blossom at different stages of their lives - sometimes it's physical/technical, other times it's emotional, but in any case sometimes these advantages/head starts end up evening out after the first 30 years for people. To tell some anecdotes of people living at the pinnacle of piano:
There is a pianist called Aimi Kobayashi who was a real piano prodigy - she was performing big concertos by the age of 9.
Here is her playing a musically mature recital of Chopin Impromptu No. 1 (Op. 29) when she was 11 - she sounds like a pro already[0]
People who were following her were expecting her to take the world by storm as a world-beating titan in the world of piano but she somewhat "plateaued" (relative to her peers at the top) in her teenage years.
Meanwhile Yuja Wang is an absolutely huge pianist (I note that her BBC Proms this year sold out almost instantly) but accounts of her career/development tell of her being mostly middle of the pack and unremarkable during her teenage years. No one in their right mind would question her technical prowess today though.
Yuja doing Shostakovich 1 [1]