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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

#411

Post by humanrebar »

toyg wrote: post #398
humanrebar wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's ask short order cooks if they are fulfilled by their work environments. They'll probably complain about coworkers, the hours, and say their feet hurt. That's not to say teachers don't have the feelings they might have, but it's a pretty privileged position to be in to expect your work to fulfill you in some deep way.

My point is that a lot (most?) educators wouldn’t consider “being an educator” as a fabulous achievement - it’s a job, and a pretty stressful and financially unrewarding one at that, particularly for people with a significant amount of academic qualifications. So the parent poster going “what is she complainin’ for, she’s an educator!”, imho, is pretty out of order by most objective parameters.

I already understood your point. But I disagree that people, even university educated ones, are owed a stress free, lucrative, or personally fulfilling job.

It's a great thing to have, but it's a privilege to have one. And it's privileged thinking to expect one.

Lots of kids have parents who work as hard or harder for less money and respect. Of course people can complain about the treatment of teachers. Just don't be surprised if short order cooks aren't particularly moved.

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

#412

Post by leonroy »

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…

> You should throw out all the games.

This resonates a lot. I used to be a huge gamer, but as I moved along my career I had less time and less mental bandwidth to game.

In a pique of nostalgia I tried one last hurrah recently and built a gaming PC (documented here https://www.leonroy.com/blog/2018/10/teeny-tiny-workstation/ ) but even with a machine which 20 something me would’ve drooled over I find I no longer have the patience to play something like the new Assassin’s Creed, Breath of the Wild or Witcher 3. It leaves me a little sad because gaming brought past me a lot of joy but after sinking 80+ hours into a game you question whether that time would have been better spent doing an online course or heck spending an extra hour each evening exercising instead of twiddling thumbs on my controller.

Same goes for TV IMHO - I ask myself what was the last TV show which affected my outlook or moved me in some way and heck The Wire maybe, Battlestar Galactica perhaps? I’ve watched all of Dexter, Chuck, Game of Thrones, Greys Anatomy, Castle, the list goes on and not one of them feels like they had a measurable improvement on my life. I do wonder when we go too far the other way though.

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

#413

Post by ordu »

Retra wrote: post #380
ordu wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you are smart, you will know. The point is not to hide smartness, the point is not to allow your child to came to an idea that to fail to be smart means that parents would be disappointed and would love him less. If you praise your child on being smart, that he/she will come to such a stupid idea. It doesn't mean they would be able to express this idea in words, it means that their mind would operate in such a w…

That depends on the child. It's not the case that every child would rather know they are loved than that they are intelligent. Love doesn't create any fewer unwanted obligations than intelligence does.

Parental love and fear to disappoint parents in a force that drives child to internalize values and to prioritize them. What that values are depends on parents, it could be compassion, love, greed, competitiveness, hard work, intelligence, beauty, knowledge, it could be anything. It is good because it is the only known way to a person to form. It is a way for parents to pass their values to a child. Child seeks love from his/her parents and avoids rejection, using any tools he/she have. Then tools become values and motives and get an ability to drive behavior by themselves, even without any parent nearby.

But the trouble is, if between those values there are personal traits that cannot be possible altered by a child, then he/she is trapped. If parent constantly shown to a girl that he loves her when she is pretty and rejects her when he is not so pretty, and then she compared herself with models and found that she is not so pretty as them, than she would be unable to meet standards of her parent without a plastic surgery. If parent shown signs of rejection to his child (just a visible disappointment might be enough) when he failed to be smart enough, than child face a risk to grow not smart enough to meet standards of his parent, and he would have no way to meet them: he couldn't be smarter than he is.

Love of parents should be unconditional. It solves the most of problems of such a kind. But if you wish to praise your child, praise for something that is really an achievement, for something that is under control of a child, not for something that he got from a birth and couldn't control. Not for intelligence, but for a hard work. Not for beauty, but for... I don't know... for love, compassion or care.

From a behaviorist point of view, when you praise your child for something that not under his control, you are replicating a famous Skinner's experiment with a random reinforcement[1]. If you are punishing child (for example, showing signs of disappointment) for his failure to be smart (i.e. for the reasons that were not under his control), then you'd replicate learned helplessness[2]. In reality it is more complicated, because child would face as rewards so punishments, but in a short it would make no good for a child.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23377456_Superstiti...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

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

#414

Post by S_A_P »

mcguire wrote: post #159
AllegedAlec wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's what Pratchett said: “If you trust in yourself... and believe in your dreams... and follow your star... you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy.”

On the other hand, those who work hard and aren't lazy aren't having any fun either.

There are absolutely times where hard work is a grind and not fun or all that rewarding. However I have had experiences where hard work is so fun and fulfilling that I almost hesitate to call it work. Being a consultant has given me both sides of the spectrum.

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

#415

Post by mixmastamyk »

m0zg wrote: post #389
mixmastamyk wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you're "addicted" it is hard to get perspective. Not sure about your situation or feasibility, but banning the activity for 30 days might clear the fog. There are blogs about journalists giving up Twitter temporarily for example. Another angle might be explaining the difference between a creator and consumer.

His answer to that is he completely refuses to do anything at all in that case. Grades be damned. Now what?

Still healthier I think. Boredom was a motivator in the old days. Military school might be an option too, haha.

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

#417

Post by m0zg »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #415
m0zg wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His answer to that is he completely refuses to do anything at all in that case. Grades be damned. Now what?

Still healthier I think. Boredom was a motivator in the old days. Military school might be an option too, haha.

That's the trouble with armchair parenting advice. "Haha".

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

#418

Post by mixmastamyk »

m0zg wrote: post #417
mixmastamyk wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still healthier I think. Boredom was a motivator in the old days. Military school might be an option too, haha.

That's the trouble with armchair parenting advice. "Haha".

Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

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

#419

Post by derangedHorse »

nugget wrote: post #306
Consultant32452 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think education is going to radically change in the next decade or so. Online education is going to come up to par with the greatest of institutions. The missing link is the actual credential. The signal of the end of education as we knew it in the past is when a wealthy/powerful person comes out and endorses one of these things in a real way. For example, if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert fro…

Generally I agree with your view, but there are real hiring problems that have to be solved first. >if Elon Musk comes out and says SpaceX considers a cert from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over. If 50 developers apply for a job and 3 of them are from MIT and 47 are from lesser known schools, using the MIT signal as a filter is efficient. If $NetflixOfEdu…

As someone who's had the opportunity to go through a pile of 100+ resumes and have met people who have gone to Ivy League (or other top technical schools like Stanford, UC Berkeley, MIT, etc) I definitely do not put too much weight on education (even for new grads). As a software engineer I'd rather put weight on their projects and accomplishments. I've seen a lot of students from prestigious schools with high GPAs who completely bomb the in person interviews.

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

#420

Post by augustl »

dwild wrote: post #321
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…

> do something productive for 30 minutes I love that part. I may try that some time. 30 minutes could also be a good breaking point where it's worth it to keep doing that productive thing instead of doing something else.

For sure!

It's very important that I actually make sure I'm happy if I manage to get 30 minutes in though. It's important that I'm able to trust myself. If every session turn into a 45 minute session and I start feeling inadequate because I "just got 30 minutes in today", then I'm back on a downwards moving spiral again.. More than 30 minutes is great, but so is 30 minutes. Way better than my default mode, which is wasting 100% of my time :)

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