The Trouble with Bright Kids

You initial stab at college sounds strikingly like mine. After my ridiculously bad run through High School, I made the mistake of going straight on to college and bombed out within the first year.

It took me 3-4 years, working out in the world at crap jobs, to motivate me to go back. It's never too late to head back in. I worked full-time all through university and after 10 years earned up to my M.S. but I did it debt free, and getting promotions/better jobs as I slowly, agonizingly, climbed up the education ladder was a powerful motivator (I also met my wife in school, and made many great friends).

Same story here. I was always the "bright kid" in school (and I got beat up quite often because of this : ) My environment (aunts, grand mothers, parents, teachers, friends, other pupils), always made sure that I knew this in some form or another. I was "smart" and excelled in all school classes, without effort.

One teacher once found personal gratification by grilling me for 1 hour in front of the class room: He set up an advanced math problem 4 years my senior and ridiculed me until I started to cry. "See, even you don't know everything". This happened when I was 11 years old. Yay for education professionals!

Now, as you said, there is always going to be a wall ahead. My parents have no college background so I was pretty much left alone after I finished high school. I enrolled with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Computer Science and bombed HARD. I was shy, I didn't know how to make friends, I failed at simnple administrative tasks required when growing up, couldn't support myself financially and on top of that the course material obviously wasn't going to be a walk in the park.

To this day I struggle with "boring" work and procrastination.

I had to finish up high school, and simply get out in the real world. I worked odd jobs, shitty manual labor and such for a bit. When that got old (or I got tired of being outside) I found a job doing tech support. After a couple years of that I came away with two things

a) I had trouble doing tech support initially because communicating effectively with people is hard. I learned more skills related to handling people during that job than I have anywhere else, and it's the most valuable skill I've ever learned.

b) I absolutely hated doing tech support. I applied for some other, better jobs, and couldn't get them. Doing support couldn't pay my bills, and I finally found myself in a situation where I knew that the best way forward for me was to just go to school and get it over with. I took a couple remedial classes at the local community college to get over my fears from K-12, simple things like Algebra. But I took those classes also to learn how to study. If learned to grind. And I also learned that even when I thought I knew something, I learned I hadn't mastered it. If a teacher assigned 20 problems, I'd do 40, and invariably I'd find one or two I couldn't solve, or had trouble with.

I had to teach myself work ethic. Tell myself I was working hard, not that I was smart. After all, if I was so smart I wouldn't be 4 years out of High School taking Algebra classes at a Community College would I?

I generally avoided distractions, I had friends I studied with, but I didn't put a whole lot into the relationships. I eventually found people who were also interested in studying and working hard and we became a regular study group throughout most of my undergrad. That helped satiate my desire for human interaction, without becoming a drag on my time or a distraction away from school. I met my wife through that group. But we got together knowing we'd support each other through our schooling and study. So it wasn't like the relationship was a huge distraction like it can often become. (We studied extra together instead of going on dates, cheaper and more useful in the long run).

It wasn't easy. I still have work ethic issues that crop up. But I know how to spot them and work on working them out. Turns out these days, working in a more managerial position, most of the work is mindless grindwork, filling out paperwork, attending meetings, that sort of thing. But if I hand't taught myself to do it, I never would have made it.

The thing is, I knew I was smart, so I considered everything I couldn't do, even grindwork, as something I knew I could figure out. I took everything as a challenge to my intellect, and that's seen me through pretty well.

I didn't drop boring things. I taught myself how to do them. Take history for example, in HS I found it excruciatingly boring. Later in college I challenged myself to take it again and ace it. All that stuff I thought was boring, I learned to see it as interesting. As an evolving system. Piecing bits of history together, seeing the evolution of tax systems, or military patterns, or whatever.

Eventually, I got to the point where I could afford to travel a bit. And here's where the awesome part comes in. When I went to Athens, I could visualize Hadrian walking through his arch down to the temple of Zeus. Or in Florence, walk the exact same streets as Michelangelo and see exactly where Savonarola was burned to death.

In Rhodes I could see the approach the armies of Salah ah-Din had to make to assault the fortress of the Knights of St. John. It wasn't just a wall, or a bunch of bricks, it was a living, breathing piece of history. And knowing the history of it, I felt connected to it.

And now that I know that history can be so enlightening, I seek it out where I don't know it. In Korea I learned about King Sejong the Great and why he's great, and suddenly I find I'm interested in linguistics and invented writing systems (great site btw http://www.omniglot.com/). And I find connections between things everywhere!

It's just history, but other things in life suddenly have a vibrancy and flavor I never saw, because I never knew how to see.

Anecdotes here and elsewhere (e.g. my own bright children) show they actually shy away from tasks they are not immediately good at! Because it contradicts what they've been told (Wow! you sure are smart!) they develop a 'sour grapes' attitude toward anything novel.