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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

#91

Post by godzillabrennus »

They called me gifted as a kid. Tested at a genius level IQ (not that it matters).

I barely passed high school. I started my first company while in it.

I dropped out of my engineering programming. I was teaching other students about computers and was running a business on the side.

I am not someone who follows the rules well.

My sibling is the polar opposite, they have three Ivy League degrees. They were top 3% of their class. They follow rules well.

I’ve been entrepreneuring for a commensurate period of time and overall look back very fondly on what I’ve accomplished and the trajectory of where my career is heading. Even the winter I had to eat peanut butter and whatever I could get for free to survive is something I don’t regret, it was a wake up call for me to take more off the table to survive bad times than to reinvest everything in growth.

My sibling has expressed to others that they wonder if they chose the wrong path. I do not wonder these things. My life feels right.

Do what you love and it’ll never feel like work.

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

#92

Post by brlewis »

david-gpu wrote: post #44
duxup wrote: post #18

The 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.

> The 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. Work does. There are salaries, titles, a hierarchical structure. Plenty of people get sucked into the cycle of wanting "just a little more" salary, recognition, promotions, reports. Not very different from a videogame addictio…

In school everyone gets the same assignments and has to take the same test. At work there's a subjective element to performance, where everyone has different assignments, and everybody has different ideas about how hard everybody else's assignments are. In school you don't have to report all the things you've done and how valuable and difficult they are.

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

#93

Post by lorepieri »

jshaqaw wrote: post #36

Part of the issue here is defining what it means to “achieve”. I was a gifted child and graduated at the top of my fancy Ivy League university. Did I go on to conquer the world? No. And many days I stress and feel bad about that. But that’s mostly when I allow myself to judge myself by the external validation system of society. Society values a big bank account or fancy awards which is fine. A happy life spent with f…

Well said. Some people talk about enlightenment. To me, that is nothing else than fully realising that what really matters has actually been at our reach all the time. It's just that it is so difficult to filter out the external pressure to "achieve more".

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

#94

Post by toyg »

caser wrote: post #15

In 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 = re…

Sport is a double-edged sword. I was shit at calcio but in Italy it's the only true religion, so I got to play it anyway. I built my role on hard work and tactical awareness, rose to team captain, then... my ankles just checked out when I was 18. My mood never fully recovered, I think. Nothing really compares. Outside a football pitch I'm the laziest person ever; the sort of hard-work mentality one gets on the pitch does not really translate to white-collar jobs, and I know I'll never find again the sort of high I could get when scoring or tackling.

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

#95

Post by lukevp »

nostalgk wrote: post #67

I really think the gifted program, at least as it was implemented in my schools, is a complete sham. After being able to easily pass multiplication tables and multiple choice tests in 5th grade, I was placed into 8th grade math; pre-algebra. I took pre-algebra 3 times in middle school, never once taking any of the fundamental math classes below it, and as a result never developed the important math skills I needed, s…

This happened to me too. I went to college with a high enough SAT score that I skipped straight to Calculus 1. I took Cal 2 and 3 and Differential Equations and managed to pass them all despite very little comprehension of the material. These classes were my lowest grades overall. I never took precalc or trigonometry so I missed the foundational concepts. Right before I graduated, I needed a few hours to round out my math minor, and I took Trigonometry, and all of Calculus suddenly made sense. I really wish I had not been allowed to skip Trig or Pre Cal!

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

#96

Post by madengr »

bradleyjg wrote: post #38
duxup wrote: post #18

The 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.

I have a hypothesis that at least in the US smart people that want to continue with the same sort of “do the work you are assigned and be rewarded” become doctors. There are entrepreneurial paths in medicine but an excellent student that wants to can go from medical school to a residency, followship, and then a hospital position and earn enough to be in the 1% without ever needing to fight for it in the office politi…

That path will barely get you to 1% income, and definitely not in all areas. Just another working stiff.

The Dr. who runs the LASIK place near me drives a Lambo, and he probably has 10 Drs working for him.

It’s rare to strike it rich on your own labor.

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

#97

Post by nickpsecurity »

The Outsiders was the first thing I read about how, contrary to popular belief, the gifted might have a curse instead of a blessing:

http://prometheussociety.org/wp/articles/the-outsiders/

https://web.archive.org/web/20190531123431/http://prometheus...

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

#98

Post by mounds »

H1Supreme wrote: post #69
david-gpu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The 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. Work does. There are salaries, titles, a hierarchical structure. Plenty of people get sucked into the cycle of wanting "just a little more" salary, recognition, promotions, reports. Not very different from a videogame addictio…

Yes, but salaries, titles, etc. do not necessarily correlate with performance. Nepotism, "CEO is friends with my dad", and other factors completely unrelated to performance are often the source of those things. Good grades, generally speaking, are immune to any such influence.

Have you heard about the US college admissions scandal? Surely academia must be flawless, pristine in regard for the moral high ground based on your assumption, and surely they don't have all the pitfalls that every other walk of life has.

Homework has been known to be done by others students, or parents even. In higher academia, how many people on a project really lean in to contribute? Maybe 2 out of 5.

Graduate school may be slightly more immune to this, but the barrier to entry is also much much higher monetarily for most.

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

#99

Post by 0815test »

barry-cotter wrote: post #56
aerophilic wrote: post #33

This reminds me of a parenting philosophy we employ with our kids: We don’t tell them they are smart. Instead, we tell them they must have worked hard at something (Assuming it was worthy of praise). We got this from the book Nature Shock, a book that talks about “counter intuitive” examples of how you can impart lessons on your kids more effectively. Basically by praising hard work rather than brilliance, you are te…

At some point they’ll leave your care and enter some other environments. If they don’t understand that other people find school and intellectual work far more difficult and less rewarding than they do there are two different failure modes possible. They can really piss people off by suggesting they do things they perceive as a deliberate insult, like telling a coal miner they they should retrain and get a job at Goog…

> telling a coal miner

Or a journalist. Guess what, your four-year college degree didn't do you any good, they should have taught you the skills that have actually been current in the real world for the last 20 to 40 years. Whoops.

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