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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

#51

Post by AllegedAlec »

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.

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.”

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

#52

Post by augustl »

easymodex wrote: post #27

This is very familiar to me. In college I often procrastinated until 3 days before an exam and only then opened the books. I didn't have the best grades because I made a conscious effort to get through with as little work as possible. I felt good about it as other classmates were studying for weeks before. Unfortunately I spent a lot of that free time playing video games. It was fun but i could've achieved way more.…

> 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 gravitational force gaming has on me to do good..

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

#54

Post by chrisweekly »

vfc1 wrote: post #37

Probably the simplest would be to not designate a child as gifted. It marks them as different, which can act almost like a social stigma. Just let them grow up at their own rhythm, and see what happens. If they are good at school, they can always take online video courses on things that they enjoy. For example, have them take as many courses as they want on https://brilliant.org or Coursera on any topic they like. Le…

Good comment - and thanks for the Brilliant.org tip, was new to me and looks awesome.

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

#55

Post by DC-3 »

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…

> UK political aide Alastair Campbell

For the international HN audience, this is the real-life figure on whom Malcolm Tucker (The Thick of It, In the Loop) is loosely based.

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

#56

Post by barry-cotter »

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 Google, or they never meet those people and think everyone is like them. People who have no contact with other social and educational strata have comically off estimations of how other people live, the educational equivalent of asking someone with work problems why they don’t take time off and live off their investments for a bit.

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

#58

Post by imtringued »

polote wrote: post #10

Most of articles speaking about gifted people talk about gifted people being sad and not having a good life when in reality gifted people are in average more successful. Explanation is easy, to be diagnosed as gifted you need to consult a doctor, and you will consult a doctor only if you think you have issues. So gifted people are most of the time not even aware they are gifted.

Okay but what does that have to do with the article?

Just by reading the title you should know that the author was diagnosed as gifted during childhood and the problems only started manifesting in early adulthood. Your hypothesis doesn't apply here.

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

#59

Post by titzer »

It took me years to realize that dreams are just dreams unless you work at them. And working at big dreams--the kind of career-arc dreams, are not supported well by all-nighters and heroic hackfests. They are constructed by daily drips of work in just the right direction. Keep plodding along, building up the creation in little steps. Hiking and climbing mountains are good instructors. You don't run at a mountain, you'll only get tired. Plan your route and then take the steps as they come. Don't take stupid risks. And usually you will summit!

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

#60

Post by haihaibye »

The person somewhat cruelly judging her life is using a formula of:

Life score = actual potential - genetic potential

Ie she had high genetic potential but failed to live up to it. It seems she has had a gifted kid.

She sounds like she's given up on this metric but were she to have another gifted kid, and nurture the two to success making the world better, she would meet her metrics.

Have a particularly awesome kid, or lots and she can easily win big. Perhaps her genes are telling her this by giving her a sense of ennui?

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