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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

#111

Post by paulcole »

amelius wrote: post #107
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

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 th…

Thanks for sharing, but why do you refer to your sibling as "they"?

Anonymity most likely.

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

#112

Post by RandomBacon »

amelius wrote: post #107
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

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 th…

Thanks for sharing, but why do you refer to your sibling as "they"?

It might make more sense if OP had more than one sibling and forgot to pluralize, but since that was done more than once, OP could have a sibling that doesn't want to be defined as either male or female, hence "sibling" and not "brother" or "sister". (At least that's what I got from watching the TV series, Billions.)

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

#113

Post by 50 »

lorepieri wrote: post #93
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".

I like what you said about enlightenment. On a similar note, I tend to say, there is no such thing as those enlightened and those veiled in ignorance, we all shimmer from the same inexplicable source. But otherwise, I read this yesterday (and even submitted it onto this site), you might find it interesting: http://merton.org/ITMS/Seasonal/11/11-4Kronenberg.pdf

I like the last bit: What I am saying is this: the score is not what matters. Life does not have to be regarded as some game in which scores are kept and somebody wins. If you are too intent on winning, you will never enjoy playing. If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

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

#114

Post by paganel »

yomly wrote: post #39
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…

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…

I’m on my phone while riding the public bus so can’t really easily look for a reference, but I remember the same Ronaldo saying that there was an even more talented footballer than him while he was an youngster at Sporting Lisbon but that that player didn’t play anywhere higher than the Portuguese Second League because he was lacking in work ethic. I very rarely heard Ronaldo say about someone else that he was better than him.

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

#115

Post by Gigablah »

amelius wrote: post #107
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

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 th…

Thanks for sharing, but why do you refer to your sibling as "they"?

Possibly a way to avoid revealing gender, for privacy.

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

#116

Post by aerophilic »

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…

It’s a valid concern. I worry about this a lot.

My wife had a much different upbringing than me, and as a consequence, is “blind” to certain realities.

When I tell her things about how most people find “x” hard, she just doesn’t “get it”. She just sees that there are so many people who find “x” easy, and she looks “up” and sees all the things she finds hard.

Not sure how to “teach” this to my kids, other than having them stay with family that weren’t as fortunate as me while growing up. Show them how hard it is when you don’t have all the advantages (we thus far) have been able to give them.

One thing that I know I can do is make sure they learn the value of “hard labor”, as I did helping my Dad doing construction over the years. It sucked at the time, but I know what it truly means to be physically exhausted at the end of the day for long stretches because you has been carrying 2x4s, cement bags, and digging holes all day.

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

#117

Post by criddell »

harryh wrote: post #85
S_A_P wrote: post #17

One 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.

Be careful relying on studies in this area. The "growth mindset", like much of psychology over the last several decades, is subject to the replication crisis. At the very least, the size of the effect is almost certainly quite small.

I think the point is that intelligence is a tool. By itself it doesn't get you terribly far (assuming you want to get somewhere). You need to apply it to something diligently. In other words, intelligence is necessary but not sufficient.

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

#118

Post by godzillabrennus »

amelius wrote: post #107
godzillabrennus wrote: post #91

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 th…

Thanks for sharing, but why do you refer to your sibling as "they"?

My siblings gender is Female.

Why does it matter? Did that change your perception of the story?

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

#119

Post by mounds »

I'm somewhat confused by the author, more so because even as a 'gifted' student, the other 'gifted' students often took to things faster.

Not one gifted student was particularly alike.

Another example: all gifted students in our third grade were put to a chess tournament. Some students fell out fast, while others were more apt to understand the complexities of the various piece interactions. In the end the two top students would be considered 'unlikely to succeed' in the current and following academic years, one with behavioral problems, and the other an ADHD mess.

They're doing fine nowadays.

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

#120

Post by nostalgk »

lukevp wrote: post #95
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…

At my high school, you could either take Pre-Calc or Trig, and Pre-Calc was essentially a watered down calculus class. Pre-Calc was considered the class you were supposed to take if you were going to university, and it was the first class I ever failed.
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