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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

#71

Post by barry-cotter »

loopasam wrote: post #11

The popular book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance", explores this topic in more details, for those interested in the topic.

Isn’t the grit literature just Angela Duckworth rediscovering conscientiousness?

> Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature

> Grit has been presented as a higher-order personality trait that is highly predictive of both success and performance and distinct from other traits such as conscientiousness. This paper provides a meta-analytic review of the grit literature with a particular focus on the structure of grit and the relation between grit and performance, retention, conscientiousness, cognitive ability, and demographic variables. Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher-order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet. Keywords: grit; performance; meta-analysis; perseverance of effort; consistency of interest

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/000a/51e0d37b8a557318559e19...

> Predicting school success: Comparing Conscientiousness, Grit, and Emotion Regulation Ability

> The present paper examines validity of three proposed self-regulation predictors of school outcomes – Conscientiousness, Grit and Emotion Regulation Ability (ERA). In a sample of private high school students (N = 213) we measured these constructs along with indices of school success obtained from records (rule violating behavior, academic recognitions, honors, and GPA) and self-reported satisfaction with school. Regression analyses showed that after controlling for other Big Five traits, all school outcomes were significantly predicted by Conscientiousness and ERA, but not Grit. The discussion focuses on the impor- tance of broad personality traits (Conscientiousness; measure of typical performance) and self-regulation abilities (ERA; measure of maximal performance) in predicting school success.

http://ei.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IvcevicBracket...

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#72

Post by 0815test »

hyperdeficit wrote: post #28
taylodl wrote: post #3

This paragraph sums it up: "My first hint that this was a skewed view came in university. I very quickly learned that, while I may have been the “best” in all of my high school classes, I was now in a place where my peers had been the “best” in theirs as well — and in most cases, their best was better than mine. This realization automatically dulled some of my drive to succeed. I would never gain the admiration and a…

I relate to this and give a lot of credit to my father for teaching me work ethic that I never knew I would need at the time. School was easy and I never learned to work hard at academic work, but I sure worked hard finishing a basement, chopping wood, shoveling the driveway, and much more. I always hated doing that work, but I would see my dad just continue to power through any project no matter how difficult it got…

Being able to reach "flow" quickly when setting out to work on something is what matters, even more so than "work ethic" or "grit" alone. In the longer run, relying on the latter just sets you up for burnout and the stress of overwork; whereas the former is sustainable and even quite enjoyable.

Physical activities such as shoveling snow and chopping wood are good at inducing flow, whereas it can take some effort to reliably enter that state when doing something more abstract. I think this is why the Pomodoro method is so popular, it can be used to "gamify" all sorts of tasks since the regularly-scheduled breaks act as a physical marker of your achievement.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#74

Post by bitexploder »

One of the worst things you can do, as a parent, is tell your kid they are smart. I have two kids and one of them is obviously “gifted”. The other is still pretty far ahead. Smart is a bad word in my house. Gifted is not something that is ever uttered. We (as parents) work very hard to instill a sense of hard work, effort, and purpose into our kids lives. They do BJJ, a martial art that is very hard, even if you are very smart. The main purpose is to teach them there are things they aren’t good at and have to work at, and even small improvements in BJJ can feel like huge wins. My motivation and reason is very similar to the authors. Everyone always told me how smart I was, and wondered why I didn’t succeed academically. It’s because it was too easy and I was already “smart” so why bother? I started building software professionally at 19 and moved away from home. My first few years away from home were hard as I had to learn life skills like “focus” heh. Anyhow, that is my story time about kids and being smart. FWIW, my 7 year old came home one day recently and said “I think I am smart. I can read books the fourth graders do....” heh. I just told her “good, but it doesn’t matter. Just enjoy the books” she really thought I would be proud she is smart, and of course we are, but “smart” can set you up for a hard time finding fulfillment later on in life.

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#76

Post by toyg »

zip1234 wrote: post #45
yomly wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you prefer stories about sports people, the rags-to-riches story of Jamie Vardy is a personal favourite[0] Here is someone who never gave up despite apparently lacking the "talent" when young and yet went on to win the Premier League, be called up to play for his national team and beat the record of a world-class player (RvN) for scoring consecutive games in a row. Meanwhile the sad story of Ravel Morrison[1] is o…

Jamie Vardy with his famous pre-game rituals :) http://www.espn.com/soccer/leicester-city/story/2961756/jami...

Jamie Vardy the famous philosopher https://www.joe.co.uk/news/jamie-vardy-is-trying-to-get-his-...

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#78

Post by yomly »

loriverkutya wrote: post #40
yomly wrote: post #20

People 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 i…

They must have had happy childhood and fulfilling life.

The life of a virtuoso musician is a curious one. The first 20-25 years of their lives is intensely stressful and gruelling. Practising their instrument for 10+ hours a day isn't uncommon, and their lives are usually dominated by chasing competition to competition trying to prove their worth relative to their contemporaries so that they can get signed by various agents and record labels (assuming that they are aiming to be a professional recitalist/recording artist).

Those that survive this track and don't grow disillusioned with their art are rewarded with a profession that will carry them for the rest of their lives, easily into their 80s or longer if they then branch into conducting (Neville Marriner was performing right until his death, aged 92). More importantly, these people typically love what they do, and their quality of life is amazing - they aren't wage slaves and maintenance of their skills can be as little as a couple of hours a day.

Is this path applicable to everyone? Almost certainly not, but it's definitely and interesting life path for the few who do make it!

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#79

Post by whatshisface »

turk73 wrote: post #62
augustl wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately I spent a lot of that free time playing video games. It was fun but i could've achieved way more. I'm currently beta testing a new optimization - I'm only allowed to play WoW Classic after my todo-list is done. One if the items on the todo-list is "do something productive for 30 minutes" (and currently, there's no shortage of things to fill those 30 minutes with). Maybe I can use the extreme gravitati…

You should throw out all the games. I'm serious. I never really began to succeed until I stopped playing stupid games and became a man. Now I'm managing younger guys who can't put down the controller. Last fall I had to fire someone who was clearly staying up all night playing video games and was never prepared for work nor doing an adequate job at it. Sadly, his own sense of privilege prevented him from being able t…

How did you know he was playing games? Did he say that was why he was staying up all night?

Re: I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected

#80

Post by brlewis »

yoodenvranx wrote: post #32
Gikoskos wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you find this article and post it please? I have to show it to someone

I think this article is about the study about that topic which started it all: https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-f...

Thanks for the link.

''Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,''

This is arguably good advice regarding 5th graders. For adult software engineers, however, go ahead and praise them for being smart, since worrying about software failure and avoiding software risks is great.

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