I Grew Up Gifted, but My Life Didn’t Turn Out the Way I Expected | Hacker News Reader

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

cbc.ca

453 pointspseudolus408 comments

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 family, spent learning and pondering lots of different things rather than focused specialization, spent achieving enough to live well but not make the Forbes rich list or a Nobel prize are considered external failures to live up to potential. But it is a happy life and in the end that is all that matters. It isn’t easy to tune that out and be thankful for what you have but it is vital to my sanity.

I have children now who are very smart and capable. If they want to conquer the world that’s great. But what I really try to reinforce is that they should find a life that makes them happy and try to ignore the sentiment that they MUST be a Supreme Court justice or a unicorn CEO if that isn’t what their soul tells them.

It's great that you encourage this attitude in your kids.

I had a similar high-achieving story until I experienced some mental health issues during my PhD. I came out the other side realising that what made me happy wasn't a high-octane, top-of-my-field job, but a bunch of other stuff that I went for instead. I mainly feel lucky that I was well-placed to do that, even if some might say I'd wasted some potential.

Glad you figured things out - but I’m very curious about what you switched to.

I switched from computational simulation stuff to software engineering (big company, but not FAANG), since I found that the coding was much more rewarding than running the code. I think academia is a great career, but that it is better suited to other people.

I like my 9-to-5(ish) job coding up software that people actually use. I also like that when I go home, I don't have the emotional baggage of worrying about work.

Another similar story here. Got all the way to end of post-doc until I realized I was doing it all for external reasons (immigrant from culture that pushes academics very hard). I definitely won't be pushing my kid the same way. Sometimes I wonder if it is possible to swing the pendulum too much the other way? But I hope to strike a happy medium.

Yes it is possible to push it too far the other way. The immigrant culture that pushes academics very hard simply needs to be amended to add on the part of life that is fun. I pushed my kids hard, encouraged them to have fun and enjoy life, and now they do that on their own. They make their own goals, set out plans to achieve them, getting parental help along the way, but also encouraged them to have fun.

For example, my daughter recently asked if she should stay home to study for exams that are about 3 weeks away instead of going on a school trip to a different city. I told her to study her ass off precisely so that she could go without any guilt.

She did, and she feels much more rounded and fulfilled.

Don't think that what your parents did was so wrong it needs to be corrected. Think of what was missing and what you can do about it.

Do you mind giving an example or two of how you push or pushed your kids in a positive way?

I didn't say I pushed them in a positive way :) Sometimes they need their heads pounded figuratively.

But generally, I talk to them about their goals and ask them if they really want them. Usually the answer is yes.

Then I say something like "Are you willing to give up some play time with fortnite (or equivalent)" to achieve your goal? Usually the answer is yes.

Then I ask them how they will know they are getting closer to their goals. Usually they'll say something that makes no sense (because they're kids) and so we'll google characteristics of getting towards said goal.

Then I'll ask them what do they think they should do on a weekly basis so that in 1 month, 6 months, 1 year, they will be at the level they should be in that time. They usually have a good answer based on aforementioned googling.

Then I ask them when they plan to make the time for this. Usually they have a good answer for this since they manage their own schedule.

Then, my job is just to remind them if they forget and if they are not keeping up, ask them if their goals have changed or why they are not keeping up with their plans. This is the part where sometimes I need to pound them on their heads figuratively.

How old are your kids? My worry is that if I do this with my future kids they'll simply tell me what I want to hear since they won't have developed a clear understanding of what they want in life and what's possible to do in life.

16 and 11. I think the 11 year old maybe only started picking it up in the last year or so, but after they picked up a hobby they really liked.

just knowing that you care & realising that they have the agency to choose what it is they want out of life is already a plus.

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.

"we all shimmer from the same inexplicable source"

Just thought I'd say I love this description.

It may sound ridiculous (you're going to laugh), but when I find myself stressing over superficial things, it helps me to think of the song "The Grand Illusion" by Styx. To me, no words better sum up the odd complexity that has emerged from humanity. It's my mantra. My wife's mantra is equally ridiculous and true: "it just doesn't matter" from Bill Murray's monologue in Meatballs. Maybe one of these mantras will help you.

I have to also note that in my ~20yrs of corporate experience, the kinder you are, in concert with being as blunt and truthful as possible, the more people will trust and value your input.

I think these traits emerge if you repeat mantra's like the ones above to yourself multiple times a day - when skimming through your emails in the morning (I often just delete or archive all but 1 or 2), when in a meeting that's going in circles or getting heated (I often just smile and leave), when you're running late for work, when you're worried about taking time off, when your air conditioner brakes or you get into a minor fender bender, or $200K of you're employee owned shares are suddenly nullified. It's all a grand illusion, and it just doesn't matter.

Here's another one: It's all part of the human experience.

This is not one to tell others when they struggle, same as yours, but it can help me from time to time.

This is awesome. Indeed, according to the mystical traditions, enlightenment is about realizing that it is all a grand illusion. (Though I would add, that in addition to "it just doesn't matter" it also matters very, very much!)

If it doesn't matter, why go to the job at all?

Some of us like to eat.

So it DOES matter, after all. Screw up enough at job and your ability to eat goes away.

So, here's the point - as a baseline, if you have a fishing pole or can read a book about which plants are edible and which are not, you are not going to starve. Everything else is icing on the cake. Of course your actions matter, but there is a sea of minutiae that people tend to spend time on that simply doesn't matter in the grand scheme of the universe.

You will screw up. There are people smarter than you. Do your best to contribute and be honest about what you know and don't know, and you will be highly valued by your peers.

Enlightenment is just the realisation of to know who you are and know what you have to do instead of thinking you know who you are and thinking you know what you have to do.

Its nice to be important, but it's more important to be nice.

The world needs more good people. The world doesn't need more smart people.

We need people who are both.

Being 'good' in a non-smart way is not actually being very good at all.

That's bullshit, you can be good regardless of your place in life, regardless of what you do or don't have.

That is bullshit, and not at all what I'm trying to say.

More good people, more smart people, but much less people overall.

Why not?

It isn't like smart would mean more motivation or anything. I do think it would have benefits like not being as able to be ripped off or fooled by mostly simple math. I think it'd mean we'd have more knowledgeable nurses and fewer folks that believe medical woo.

I'd even argue that being good fails if you aren't smart. "Schools just need to get back to the 3 R's - readin', writing', and 'rithmatic" isn't all ill-intentioned, after all, and is (in part) a complaint that kids aren't ready for the world, but their solution shows ignorance to what the schools teach, why it is taught, and things like that.

I feel like your comment is implying a very specific type of "smart" person...

Perhaps a better way to put it is that smarts without wisdom and/or ethics can cause some serious damage?

I imagine smart people have done more good for the world than good people. The big lasting improvements to our lives have almost exclusively come from technology and when you look back at technology the vast majority of it was created by smart people(a lot of whom were good too). Vaccines, antibiotics, and farming technology have probably saved more people than every charity that has ever existed combined.

Good != charity. Good people voluntarily enlisted in war to fight tyrants. Or sacrificed to give decent upbringing to their kids, often against extreme hardships, so that they don't become degenerates or criminals. Etc etc.

I don't know much good on average wars do. For every good person fighting a tyrant, there's a good person fighting for the tyrant.

Wars are bad (assuming they are usually started by "the bad guys" - an unreasonable aggressor). But, in order to stop the bad guys from taking over the world, the good guys need to sacrifice their lives.

Personally, my goals are to have an interesting job (i.e. using a modern tech stack), have the resources to pursue my hobbies, and have the autonomy to be eccentric if I want to.

However, meeting those goals require a lot of money. This is especially the case since interesting tech jobs, access to niche resources, and tolerance of alternative lifestyles are all associated with living in a large city.

Therefore, I find myself in a situation where making a lot of money isn't my goal, but I feel that I have to do it if I want to achieve my goals.

Therefore, I find myself in a situation where making a lot of money isn't my goal, but I feel that I have to do it if I want to achieve my goals.

Can't you work remotely? There are a lot of smaller cities (at least in Europe) that have a great vibe, are welcoming to all kinds of people, and do not have extreme housing costs.

I live in such a city, a large chunk of the population are students, so there is a vibrant social and nightlife. But the city is too small to have a lot of 'big city problems'.

I'm working remotely but living like a nomad. A month at most in different villages across India. I now miss the city life, and am also considering moving to Europe, perhaps a small city in Germany. Can you share more about these smaller cities? What was your criteria for choosing the city you are in presently?

Smaller cities present issues in Germany (and Europe as a whole) for a multitude of reasons, for example healthcare[0], reliable bandwidth, older populations[1], etc.

Choosing a small city with a train station, however, can dramatically improve your access to most of these things as the trains typically imply population, which typically begets services such as internet, pharmacies, etc.

So honestly my first recommendation is filtering small cities by that.

0: https://www.thelocal.de/20181221/germans-turn-to-medibus-as-...

1: https://www.handelsblatt.com/today/politics/divided-nation-g...

Smaller cities present issues in Germany (and Europe as a whole) for a multitude of reasons, for example healthcare[0], reliable bandwidth, older populations[1], etc.

Well, Nentershausen is very small ;). We had weekends with friends in Nentershausen for a couple of years. It's a village, not a city.

I was more thinking along the lines of (random Dutch/German university cities): Heidelberg, Tübingen, Ulm, Erlangen, Nürnberg, Nijmegen, Groningen, Leiden, etc.

I've had good experience in the outskirts of Berlin.

It's a big city but it's so spread out that living in one of the outlying districts can be like living in a small town near a big city (in many ways Berlin feels more like an agglomeration of many smaller cities than e.g. Vienna).

It's also (still) a relatively affordable city, especially outside the central districts.

If you need any information or help about Germany, you can contact me if you want (see profile).

What was your criteria for choosing the city you are in presently?

We lived in Tübingen (Germany) for five years. But the city was just a tad too small for my taste. There are only few stores (outside tourism-focused stores) and it there is fairly little to do in terms of concerts, etc. It is part of the Stuttgart metropolitan area, so there are a lot of work opportunities. I loved the scenery of Southern Germany, but Germany is too hierarchical, conservative, and old-fashioned for my taste (of course, there are exceptions, such as Berlin). It's really a drag that you can't do groceries on a Sunday, people expect you to pay with cash everywhere, internet connections are somewhat mediocre, etc. Oh, and there is almost no biking infrastructure in cities (outside cities it's quite ok). That said, a lot our our friends/colleagues there like Tübingen/Stuttgart area.

We moved back to Groningen, The Netherlands (where I studied + did my PhD and my wife did her PhD). It may be somewhat remote for some people. But I love it, there are multiple concert venues (including the legendary Vera), there are plenty of tech-related activities. We have fiber to home. We can shop on Sundays (handy when you work throughout the week). Bicycles are the primary form of transportation. Our 5yo daughter clearly enjoys school here more (used to be in Kindergarten in Germany). The largest downside of Groningen is that there is not a lot of challenging local work (outside the university).

If my wasn't offered a job in Groningen, we would have considered Nijmegen, perhaps Utrecht (+ nearby towns) or Leiden. I have worked several months in Amsterdam, but it is too busy for me ;).

> It's really a drag that you can't do groceries on a Sunday,

In America I can buy groceries any day of the week, but as someone who often works odd hours, I find it a drag that almost none are open past 10 or 11pm. The buses don't run after midnight~1am, either, so if I need a dozen eggs at 3am, I have to get in my car and drive.

I feel that's not the sort of behavior that a city with aspirations should be encouraging. If you want interesting things happening in your city, you need people working at all hours to make it happen, and many will be on wages that don't support living downtown. You don't want every worker driving a car. It's simply not scalable.

> people expect you to pay with cash everywhere

I'm the opposite. I only pay by card or check for regular pre-planned purchases (like rent, or insurance). It's well established that people buy less when they pay with cash! I'm disappointed by all the trendy new shops that are card-only.

Huh. Here in Michigan I live in a city of 30,000 people, with my usual grocery store open 24 hours a day and about five minutes' drive away.

"In America ... I find it a drag that almost none are open past 10 or 11pm"

I used to live in Atlanta and there was a 24-hour Kroger right across the street from my townhome. One night at 2am, I bought a gas grill at that Kroger on a whim. Good times.

Now I live in Silicon Valley and there are quite a few 24-hour grocery stores according to google map.

I've actually been thinking about doing something similar in India. How has it been going for you?

How eccentric do you want to be? What exactly are your hobbies? This doesn't seem very hard to pull off with a pretty middle-of-the-road tech job and living pretty much anyplace, but maybe I'm suffering from a failure of imagination.

> Personally, my goals are to have an interesting job (i.e. using a modern tech stack)

I always wonder why using a modern tech is interesting? Let's say there's a job where you're using J2EE 1.4 or some other outdated technology from the early 2000s. The thing is, I remember when that technology was hot shit and people considered working on it very interesting. So, it looks like, over the course of time, doing the very same task, with the same day-to-day activities, went from interesting to uninteresting?

I think it's mostly job security. I've worked on many technologies that I really enjoyed despite the flaws that every tech has (Flash for example) that have 0 jobs 10 years later.

On the other hand, if you are a COBOL expert today, you will be in high demand and will make enormous amounts of money.

For a while! Probably a better position for a 55 year old developer to be in than a 25 year old one.

Oh yeah, I agree with that - but that's not job being "interesting", that's just job security.

I wrote my comment because I felt some disingenuity in the OP saying that jobs with modern tech stacks are interesting for him. It means that he's either genuinely intersted in following the tech frameworks threadmill, and jobs with modern tech stack allow him to do that - or, he's lying to himself that he's intersting in it, to make getting up for work every day a little bit easier.

I think it's a heuristic signal. Old tech stacks are usually used in old projects that solve old problems.

I doubt the OP would mind building a J2EE project from scratch to solve a novel problem. But nobody does that -- usually if there is a J2EE job, it's maintenance, which can be less interesting. And if there is a novel problem, it will likely be solved with the current status quo ("modern") technology.

Sorry for the delayed reply. I had missed your guys' posts.

For me it's couple of things:

My experience has been that newer languages and frameworks tend to be more user friendly. In particular, I tend to enjoy the abstraction and design aspects of programming more than the nuts and bolts technology aspects. So, for example, I find the low level aspects (e.g. memory management) of C annoying and I appreciate that React lets me use all of the abstractions that a programming language provides to define UI.

I tend to like functional programming techniques and dislike object oriented ones. FP techniques seem to be popular with the current generation of tech while the previous generation seems to have been dominated by OO. Of course that's not true in every domain and could change in the future.

This is a stereotype, but I tend to associate older tech stacks with companies that are more conservative, less innovative/more established, and/or less technology focused.

Finally, like you guys have mentioned, newer tech is associated with less maintenance work and greater future job prospects; even if that's just signaling as opposed to being inherent to the technologies themselves.

I’m so glad I had parents who encouraged in me what you are encouraging in your children.

I was accepted to a very prestigious university, and as my friends, their parents, and other adults (including some family) found out, there was mostly encouragement to just go there. The attitude was, “why wouldn’t I want to go there? Just think of the opportunity!” They we’re shocked I was thinking of attending a state school instead of automatically saying yes to the prestigious one.

My parents were much more practical, pointing out how much it would cost - even after the scholarships I’d be given - and how much debt I’d have at the end of 4 years.

They pointed out how difficult it can be to go a long ways away for college sometimes, and how young adults of that age can struggle, especially in the first year. I saw that happen to many friends and acquaintances; leaving to a school far away, only to move back much closer to home after a year or two.

One friend who wasn’t strongly encouraging me to go to the prestigious school? Someone who was in a grad program at that prestigious school. He was confident I’d succeed and be happy at either a smaller, state university, or the big name one. When I chose the state school, this friend - who had been pretty neutral up to then - said he was very impressed and happy that I went the way that I did.

All the people who hadn’t had that experience seemed pretty hesitantly approving of my choice to go to the state school. “Oh, you chose that one? ... well, good for you!”

I later ended up working at the same company as many people from more prestigious schools, and graduating from the state school with no debt let me be a co-founder of a company much earlier in my life than if I had tens of thousands of college debt. I’m totally happy with my choice.

The whole prestigious school thing means little imo.

After you meet a few dunces from a top school and the rare genius who went to CC, you really stop caring.

College is what you make it. If you aren't networking a top school, I don't see the purpose, we all learn math.

I would argue that as University education has scaled up and become commoditized, the value of a generic degree as a signaling function has decreased, and that in response the value of matriculation to a top school has only increased. Schools are just brands and become an extension of the personal brands of their students and alums. Unless you're studying a hard science or similar, I'd bet that the value of lower ranked schools will become obsolete sooner.

To add a little additional context: the prestigious school I was accepted to wasn't exactly highly known for the field I was going into, and with the reality of grade inflation at top-tier schools, I figured I might get a better, or at least more hard-nosed, you-better-work kind of experience at the state school.

I'll never be able to truly compare the two, but I know at my state school that I learned a lot, improved my ability to learn, and gained a lot in perseverance, not to mention made some great friends.

My friends generally did not have parents who worked at top Wall Street firms, were nationally-elected politicians, or were celebrities, and my friends generally were not going to work at the most high-paying, time-demanding, possibly-quality-of-life-shrinking companies/jobs. That's okay, because I don't want to do 80 or 100 hour work weeks, and I don't want the people around me encouraging that, because I want to experience a lot more to life than those kinds of work experiences. Nothing wrong with people who want that, but this route worked well for me.

Part of why it worked for me is because I was privileged enough to have parents who helped me understand myself and what I wanted out of life.

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 from $NetflixOfEducation as equal to an engineering degree from MIT on a resume... then it's all over. I believe this will certainly happen at some point, it's just a matter of when.

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 $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal. Of course there are other filters too. Previous employers is an important one. You can create comprehensive professional examinations like they do in medicine, where a passing grade is a major achievement. But these don't scale well because the more they scale the easier it is to cheat, especially if the risks of getting caught cheating are minor (i.e. there aren't previous barriers that must be overcome via investment of time in other institutions first).

The other dynamic of top schools is the networking effect. There is real value in concentrating thousands of the "best and brightest" together in one place and bouncing them off each other. It doesn't scale, which is both a problem (for qualified people who are excluded for whatever reason) and a benefit (for those who participate, there is value in the scarcity).

> If $NetflixOfEducation is too accessible and half of the applicants have it, then it loses its value as a hiring signal.

Only for companies who hire for signals.

For companies that hire for throughput this does not hold.

I actually think it's a bit more complicated than that. For a large company trying to fill a ton of openings, I think where you went to college is actually an even more important filtering criteria (ie an Ivy League degree is almost an automatic pass from resume to phone screen), but the list of colleges that get a near automatic pass is larger.

What do you mean by "throughput" and how do you measure it ahead of an interview? Given 50 resumes for an open position, how do you select whom to interview? Does your process scale to many dozens or hundreds of open positions per year?

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.

People have been saying this about most new technology for a long time. Between the printing press and the television this isn't new. The University abides.

As a hiring manager, I don't agree with this. Frankly, although I always look for a person's education history, the only time this actually matters is if it allows me to make small talk with them during introductions.

Additionally, a person with a hard science BS from a small college may well have received a far superior education than someone graduating from a top tier university in the same discipline. It makes a huge difference for many students how engaged their professors are in teaching, vs research.

This isn't accurate, for instance the data structures/algorithms courses at top schools are significantly more attuned to how industry hiring works than mediocre schools like the one I went to, where you need a lot of external practice in order to be able to pass interviews.

I suppose it depends on what industry, and also where you're hoping to get hired?

My undergrad courses might not have gotten me totally ready for an interview at a FAANG company (though it's been over a decade since I graduated!), but that also wasn't a goal of mine.

And my undergrad courses did totally prepare me for a few interviews at very highly-respected companies, complete with job offers, without needing a lot of external practice.

Do companies use school pedigree for filtering? Yes. Are there other ways to stand out from the crowd? Yes.

I’m not talking about filtering. I’m talking about succeeding in interviews.

> If you aren't networking a top school, I don't see the purpose, we all learn math.

Indeed. Additionally --- not sure if this is true for all fields --- the stuff taught on the college level is basic enough so that passable level of teaching is fine, as better teaching is marginally useful for good students. Things change a bit on the doctoral level, where the topics diverge more and it's important to go to a good direction early on --- however, not sure how much this differentiates universities inside the US.

I always am bothered by these stories because they seem to imply the person matters more than the school.

I had mediocre grades and stats (#2 in class, 1500/1600) but I didn’t get into a prestigious school and went to my state school. The fact that I couldn’t even get into a top school appears to bode pretty poorly for my future if this is the criteria!

Which part of my story bothered you, and what criteria?

If we're talking whether someone will be generally happy and successful in life regardless of where they attend school, yes, I 100% think a person very much does matter more than any school they may attend.

And if we're talking whether someone is more "worthwhile", or will have a better life, if they get accepted into a prestigious school, I don't think that at all.

I think some circumstances I had no influence over, including going to high school in a less-populous state that likely had many fewer people even applying to prestigious schools, probably had a big part in me getting accepted.

> The fact that I couldn’t even get into a top school appears to bode pretty poorly for my future if this is the criteria!

What is the criteria you think would bode poorly for you? If you're a hard worker, spend lots of time to learn your chosen career skills, and spend lots of time becoming a clear and empathetic communicator, I think you can be very successful in your chosen career path, regardless of your GPA or standardized test scores from high school.

Could you please stop posting so much on the topics of schools, elites, and elite schools on HN? It's excessive:

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:akhilcacharya%20school&sort...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:akhilcacharya%20elite&sort=...

I get how strongly you feel, but it goes against the spirit of the site when people keep posting so repetitively about one particular issue that they feel strongly about. HN threads are supposed to be driven by curiosity, which is a quite different motivation.

OK, fair enough, but it lends itself to the topic, which also posted about at a pretty significant rate.

Which “very prestigious school” doesn’t have financial aid? Any elite school will be much cheaper than a state school (possibly free) if you don’t have very wealthy parents.

You can have "not wealthy parents" and still not get approval for financial aid if you're over a certain threshold. And plenty of people get into prestigious schools but don't have the grades/accolades to get a merit scholarship.

And with the cost of schools only rising, the impact on families that might appear "well off" only increases too. So people get loans. And maybe that loan will be worth it and the networking you do will pay for it. Or maybe it won't.

I would argue that for many people, unless it's not just an elite school but THE elite school, it probably doesn't pay off.

> Any elite school will be much cheaper than a state school (possibly free) if you don’t have very wealthy parents.

This was not at all true in my situation.

Over ten years later, I imagine some things are different, and I know some very rich schools have shifted certain policies since then.

Excellent points.

> not make the Forbes rich list or a Nobel prize

...not to mention that many scientists gave up opportunities to go after Nobel prizes to focus instead on more meaningful topics of research.

In a somewhat similar vein, learning & practicing “deliberate gratitude” saved my sanity.

Taking a mindfulness class was what introduced me to the concept, but regular practice of gratitude helped save my mind (and perhaps my life!).

I completely agree. I think a good life is balanced and not being the best for the sake of being the best.

I'm interested in Ivy League universities admissions though. From their point of view I think they want the best of the best

I wonder if they try to filter out the people who are smart but would rather enjoy life than change the world.

I've always thought this was the ideal form of parenting. Relax expectations on the children, let them find their own path.

I've recently changed my mind and I think offloading the discovery of purpose onto children creates more pressure on them than a moderate pressure to conform to society's existing expectations. What's worse than being unhappy and being told you have no reason to be unhappy?

If they discover on their own that they don't care about society's rules and living off in the woods and growing their own food is the key to happiness, so be it. But to assume everyone will be able to develop that path to happiness is optimizing for the edge case. Most people need guard rails for life and to live within a social construct that defines success and failure for them.

What if "being happy" for them means watching Youtube all day and playing computer games?

That's what I'm struggling with with my 15 year old. This is currently affecting his GPA to the point where it'd limit his college options to community college, and maybe not even that (since you do have to work even there to not fail).

I simply can't convince him that this is not a good use of his time, and he will regret it profoundly later in life.

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.

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

Ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

If you are happy, you can probably consider yourself successful. If you are 'successful', it is by no means a given that you are happy.

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.

Can you find this article and post it please? I have to show it to someone

It sounds a lot like Carol Dweck's book Mindset, or one of the many articles about having a growth rather than fixed mindset.

I think this article is about the study about that topic which started it all:

https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/14/science/praise-children-f...

Thanks for the link.

''Praising children's intelligence, far from boosting their self-esteem, encourages them to embrace self-defeating behaviors such as worrying about failure and avoiding risks,''

This is arguably good advice regarding 5th graders. For adult software engineers, however, go ahead and praise them for being smart, since worrying about software failure and avoiding software risks is great.

Try searching for the "Pygmalion Effect on children ", it covers the general principle. (I suggest ignoring the Wikipedia article as it is very narrowly focused.)

I read the Grit book and it talked about having high expectations. I had never heard of this Pygmalion effect before. Thank you for sharing. Here is the article I just found on it

https://www.wisdomtimes.com/blog/the-pygmalion-effect-at-hom...

If you can suggest a better one, I would be grateful.

Here are some articles from 2009 that mention Alfie Kohn, who wrote "Punished by Rewards."

https://www.leanblog.org/2009/01/leanblog-podcast-57-alfie-k...

http://www.blog.montessoriforeveryone.com/are-kids-punished-...

This article also looks like a likely candidate for the OP: https://www.parentingscience.com/praise-and-intelligence.htm...

Kohn goes a long way further. Don't praise your children just for "working" hard either -- that's just encouraging them to seek your external validation.

Instead, help nurture your children's own curiosity, interest, and experience in the things that they do.

Stop treating them like lab rats to be conditioned with praise, because we know exactly what happens when that praise inevitably ceases.

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.”

This has truly bit me in the ass. I was 'gifted' and never had to study in high school, or college really. But I was also lazy and it makes learning new things so much more difficult, at least without a structured school curriculum (I do think I might have adult ADHD too, but that's not what this is), despite wanting to make a career change. It's frustrating at times being stuck in that rutt. Oh, well, looks like a new masters for me next year.

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

I would disagree completely. Good work is its own reward, as is the respect that comes with it after years of doing the right thing. Its not something you flirt with, its intergity.

Dare I say you're both right and missing each others point?

Doing a good job at everything you do personally and professionally is (like you say) integrity and drives self-respect.

At the same time, the work you're doing can be menial/meaningless to you and thus may take time from tasks that have greater meaning, or it may even be mentally unhealthy (stress) or impact your relationships (long hours) that is sometimes required TO do a good job.

Not everything we do in life is going to matter, I'm not arguing we need to have meaning in everything. However there is a point I think where people do need some sort of personal meaning/connection to some of what they're doing. For many people its family, others charity, volunteering or working in fields where they are passionate and connected to or any/all of the above/other.

Too often people take the admirable approach of trying to do the best job they can at everything, and burn themselves out on tasks and jobs that don't provide them personal benefit in their lives otherwise in my opinion, its a cultural issue that seems to be getting worse.

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.

It does not necessarily have to do anything with laziness. The further you get the fiercer your competition. Most people around here were probably the best in elementary school and high school, perhaps even university. But if you go further up the intelligence or economic ladder, you will compare yourself to peers who are at the same step or next step. And the competition is much fiercer. You are 'competing' with people who are at least as intelligent or more intelligent. You are competing with people who have an even stronger work ethic. And then there is a certain factor of luck whether you'll be successful or not. I struggled with this for quite a while, because I always compared myself to (especially better) peers, and it makes you feel like a failure.

I have learned to accept more who and where I am and to enjoy it. Though it can still be hard at times (that's ego).

This forum in particular attracts a certain type of ‘lazy intellectual’: people that value thought and introspection above constant action. They were the type of children that easily mastered early school subjects without working, but are so fascinated by ideas that mere action bores them. I think it’s important to recognize the advantages and limitations of this mindset. I’ve considered the possibility that it is similar to any other obsessive/addictive disorder, and perhaps we’d be more successful in life if we treated it this way.

Interestingly thats exactly how I thought about the cohort on very early reddit too.

On the pop-psych Jungian scale they (we) would represent the INTP type.

Apply your own logic on yourself. Have you consideed that the arbitrary demand for constant action could itself be a mental disorder?

I used the first person plural specifically because I was applying this logic to myself. I also used third-person in an attempt to de-personalize the observation, but really it's a first-person account.

I've always liked :-

> Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working. - Picasso

Yeah like Edison (and Tesla).

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.

That's why it's fucked up to translate these studies into advice saying "don't compliment your kids intelligence".

Kids will value what you compliment. If you compliment their smarts, they will simply work towards always being "the smartest guy in the room", and making everyone else in that room constantly aware of this in the most obnoxious way they can come up with. If you compliment their work they'll strive to get recognition for that instead, which is a way more functional attitude in the longer run!

Intelligence is like physical beauty. It probably wouldn't be terribly productive to tell your kids all the time how beautiful they are even though attractive people tend to be more successful in life.

Why not compliment both so they know it's an important combination and to take advantage of natural gifts? Breaking rocks is hard work but that is not how I'd want my gifted child spending their time. I'm not saying kids should be showered with compliments either but if my kid genuinely surprises me with their wit I'm not going to be such a stiff piece of shit to think I'm doing them a favor by not complimentin them.

I you watch the TED talk by Angela Duckworth, author of Grit book, she says one thing where they still really have not figured out how to teach resilience to kids.

I was speaking to a high school teacher last week, and they use these grit scores and all the tips mentioned in the grit book. But at the end of the day, they still do not have a sure fire method to teach it or the growth mindset.

Years ago I spoke to a retired mathematics professor on this subject. I remember he pointed out that Évariste_Galois was an interesting case in home education. There was not too much written on this, but he was taught by his mother the classics. What he accomplished at such a young age is still be used today in all sorts of fields.

Kids who went to Sudbury Schools (no curriculum, democratic free schools) report developing high resilience. In these schools kids do what they like: read, videogames, singing, whatever, without any academic pressure or expectations. They try stuff and fail. They have to think about what they actually want to do, rather than looking to the teacher to tell them what to do.

A great book with a similar perspective is Summerhill by A. S. Neil.

We do Sudbury inspired home schooling. My daughter learned to read "late" by most standards (at age 9), but once she decided to it only took her a few weeks to be at the same level as her friends who go to public school. She also learned to read 3 languages at once while her friends can only still speak just one language (part of our home schooling has been language immersion). I feel proud of what she knows, but most proud of her motivation and determination to learn what she wants to.

I am not sure there is one sure fire way to teach kids. Each one is an individual. What works on one child may fail horribly in another. I think that is what we ultimately try to ignore. We want to simplify everything and say we need x or y. When in reality its that this kid needs x and that child y. But doing that is more work, people are lazy. Always looking for instant gratification. I know I have fallen victim to that myself.

What, precisely are you cautioning against? Merely against folks who excessively bristle at "you're so smart?" Or are you cautioning against the growth mindset in general?

I only happened upon the growth mindset in the past year or so, and it's changed (or is changing) my life. I don't see how it's not possible that it's not profoundly true. That doesn't mean that you have to use one author's books or terminologies, but the point of it is a relatively profound truth. It resonates so strongly with me, and explains so many things about my anxieties and emotions, as it apparently does with others. And there's nobody pushing the opposite.

Hard work in itself isn't necessarily valuable. Smart work is.

It's vital to learn early on that you have to put in the work if you want to achieve anything at all. Merely being gifted or naturally good at something certainly is not enough.

However, I'd say it's just as important to understand the purpose behind any kind of work and to be able to question how things are usually done.

Achieving the same or better results with less work is what will set you apart.

I challenge the distinction between hard work and smart work. You cannot be smart without hard work. Amassing knowledge and mental ability requires years of effort and work. It is easier for gifted/clever people, but not inherent.

gifted =/= smart

I'd read that as 'pick your battles well'. You can work hard at things and get nowhere, you can work hard at other things and make a ton of progress, and these things can sometimes be estimated beforehand.

You can keep churning out spaghetti code (hopefully the uncooked kind) or you can learn and apply better methods, for example.

If you're working in a bubble self reflection is definitely important. If you have colleagues hopefully they will help you.

When people are too much hung on hard work, they do stupid innefective things. Like, studying that much that you sleep deprive yourself, long crunch in work, sleeping under table in work as proof of commitment etc. Training so much that you get injury from it.

Are you sure? Doesn't work have value under any scenario, if only a residual educational value: a lesson for you and/or others? That would reduce "hard" and/or "smart" to multipliers of that value.

I would make a small change: hard work isn't sufficiently valuable. Smart work without hard work doesn't achieve nearly as much.

On the flip side, you have to challenge them and give them the opportunity to work hard. I think schools get lazy with gifted kids. Gifted kids deserve to be challenged and put to the limits of their abilities the same as non-gifted children, but schools just don't do that. Tracking children by ability in the US has been labeled elitist. Funding often isn't there for enrichment programs. Parents are expected to provide enrichment for these kids outside of school, but it's not always possible either financially or time-wise.

I'm just going to keep posting this when the subject comes up...

"A 20-year longitudinal study has traced the academic, social, and emotional development of 60 young Australians with IQs of 160 and above. Significant differences have been noted in the young people’s educational status and direction, life satisfaction, social relationships, and self-esteem as a function of the degree of academic acceleration their schools permitted them in childhood and adolescence. The considerable majority of young people who have been radically accelerated, or who accelerated by 2 years, report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school."

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf

Acceleration has its benefits, but the ideal solution would be to accelerate the educational aspects for the child without accelerating the social side.

I'd rank the options (from most ideal to least) as

1. Gifted kid with other gifted kids, with individualized coursework (ex: Davidson Academy in Reno, Nevada)

2. Gifted kid with other gifted kids, with standardized but accelerated coursework (ex: a g&t magnet program)

3. Gifted kid in general population, with individualized coursework

4. Gifted kid accelerated several grades ahead

5. Gifted kid remains in general population at normal grade level for age

And 3, 4 and 5 are really toss-ups depending on the personality of the child

I was transferred from a poorer middle school and my HS admin prevented me from going into the accelerated classes. I had a bad time in university and have not been able to return.

It hurts me every day. I hope it will get better, but I do not see it happening in this life.

No-child-left-behind really screwed the gifted programs. All the money went to get the marginal kids to pass the tests.

I was in the first big wave of gifted programs in the mid-80s. My teachers had doctorates. There were 10-15 kids in my classes. We did lots of off the wall stuff.

Now, my child is in the same boat, but her class size is 30-35, and the curriculum isn’t particularly special.

That’s also how you’d raise a plough horse.

The toughest thing in life for a smart person to figure out is often what’s worth working hard at and what they truly want.

It seems as rare to find a person who has gone through the steps to decide if they truly want and value the outcome they’re working towards as it is to find a smart person who doesn’t apply themselves fully when they’re actually interested in, value, and want to accomplish or do something.

Intelligence is a blunt instrument and should be taught to be used with the same consideration and care as you would any other potentially dangerous tool or device.

I would argue it doesn't matter what you expend effort on as long as you're expending effort. IMO the only true rule in life is that you only value things you expend effort on. Beyond being able to afford the basic necessities it's all semantics. For example if efficiency interests you then working smarter could be your thing, but you'll still need to find more challenges to work on so that you're always expending effort. By all means, do this, but if your goal is to eliminate or reduce overall future effort you're fooling yourself if you think this will achieve some higher state of happiness.

The greater the effort the more rewarding it is, regardless of whether others would consider it rewarding or smart effort.

Once you internalize this it's basically the secret to life and you can throw out all of those self-improvement rags. Of course it's still a struggle in that you'll forget it constantly and have to correct course.

I resonate with the bristling too and the struggle to determine when to appreciate is a daily affair due to the kids' diverse activities. My six year old experimented with somersaulting on rings today, barely did anything to start with and then worked it to routine in just a day during a holiday break when he articulated a series of variations at the end. Hard work at play! I don't even know whether to say anything. Don't want to spoil it.

As for myself, I didn't consider myself gifted or intelligent though folks around me seemed to .. but mostly because they had no idea how much work I actually put in .. even just academically. So when I faced the same situation described in the article about facing peers also on top, I was rejoicing and enjoying it instead of despairing as seems to be a pattern. I attribute the main difference to an event that disconnected me from seeking external approval.

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 is her playing a musically mature recital of Chopin Impromptu No. 1 (Op. 29) when she was 11 - she sounds like a pro already[0]

People who were following her were expecting her to take the world by storm as a world-beating titan in the world of piano but she somewhat "plateaued" (relative to her peers at the top) in her teenage years.

Meanwhile Yuja Wang is an absolutely huge pianist (I note that her BBC Proms this year sold out almost instantly) but accounts of her career/development tell of her being mostly middle of the pack and unremarkable during her teenage years. No one in their right mind would question her technical prowess today though.

Yuja doing Shostakovich 1 [1]

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX57r1l5W3U

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo0yIuZTQKg

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 one of how talent alone isn't enough. A football prodigy who was allegedly more gifted than his peer Paul Pogba (4th most expensive player transfer in football history). When you watch him, it is self-evident that he has some gifts but he has bounced from team to team and his career has not really reflected his natural abilities.

EDIT: Alternatively, another story, an anecdote from UK political aide Alastair Campbell in his book "Winners and How They Succeed"[2] - he talks about how on a visit to the Manchester United training grounds a coach pointed to the two young football players Wayne Rooney and Cristiano Ronaldo (neither of whom were even 18 yet) and spotted that only one of the two would go on to reach the very top[3], citing a difference in work ethic:

>He said that Ronaldo never ever stopped believing he could improve, whereas Rooney 'thinks he'd made it.'

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/football/2015/oct/10/jamie-vardy...

[1]https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/09/25/the-complete-story-...

[2]https://www.amazon.co.uk/Winners-They-Succeed-Alastair-Campb...

[3]https://www.balls.ie/football/difference-between-rooney-and-...

Jamie Vardy with his famous pre-game rituals :) http://www.espn.com/soccer/leicester-city/story/2961756/jami...

Jamie Vardy the famous philosopher https://www.joe.co.uk/news/jamie-vardy-is-trying-to-get-his-...

> 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.

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.

Fabio Paim

https://thesefootballtimes.co/2018/02/22/the-roller-coaster-...

"Aurélio Pereira, the Sporting scout who discovered Quaresma, Ronaldo and Moutinho, once said of Paim: “Do you think Cristiano is good? Wait to see Fábio Paim.”"

I recall some clip from the Ronaldo movie where he takes the camera crew to his bedroom and points at his bed and says something along the lines of "this is my bed, it is very important - I spend almost 12 hours a day here:

I sleep for 7 hours, I get up in the morning, I train, I then sleep another 5 hours to recover, then get up and train some more"

The guy has virtually no life beyond training - and he optimises his schedule to squeeze even more training time out of every day.

Say what you like, but I find it to be a little bit inspiring to see someone at the top deciding to dedicate themselves to seeing just how much further they can push themselves just for the sake of being even better...

They must have had happy childhood and fulfilling life.

The life of a virtuoso musician is a curious one. The first 20-25 years of their lives is intensely stressful and gruelling. Practising their instrument for 10+ hours a day isn't uncommon, and their lives are usually dominated by chasing competition to competition trying to prove their worth relative to their contemporaries so that they can get signed by various agents and record labels (assuming that they are aiming to be a professional recitalist/recording artist).

Those that survive this track and don't grow disillusioned with their art are rewarded with a profession that will carry them for the rest of their lives, easily into their 80s or longer if they then branch into conducting (Neville Marriner was performing right until his death, aged 92). More importantly, these people typically love what they do, and their quality of life is amazing - they aren't wage slaves and maintenance of their skills can be as little as a couple of hours a day.

Is this path applicable to everyone? Almost certainly not, but it's definitely and interesting life path for the few who do make it!

Is that path accessible to everyone who practices 10 hours a day through their teens or is there survivorship bias involved? I've known a few very skilled musicians who had to have spouses or day jobs to put food on the table.

>Is that path accessible to everyone I don't think so, although I feel like it is sometimes constructive to believe it is (from a personal perspective).

From what I know, the 10 hours a day usually starts before teen years (it is common for musicians who reach virtuoso level to achieve "university-level" technical ability before they are 10 years old). For instance, amongst the musicians I've known, playing all Chopin Etudes or Grieg Concerto by 8 years old isn't particularly outstanding - these are easily Diploma level 2/3 works.

What I also know is that a lot of these musicians typically have a lot of financial backing - finding a good teacher and a good instrument is expensive! Unless you're a 1 in a 100-million talent, you probably won't find a sponsor as a child...

Lang Lang is probably one of the musicians I can name who wasn't particularly wealthy growing up...

On the subject of survivorship bias - almost certainly this reeks of bias, we never hear of the dropouts... Presumably those that stay healthy/positive wind up in session-gigs and education.

>I've known a few very skilled musicians

I can't say much about your friends, although my anecdotal intuition feels that virtuoso* musicians' success sits on a pareto distribution: those in the top 5-10 of their individual field are lavished in concerts, records and money. The 11-200 are probably reasonably comfortable and the 201 onwards start having to worry about making ends meet.

This is true for other skill-based professions - look at tennis players for instance, they struggle to break even on their livelihood if they're outside the top 200.

An observation a pianist once told me that scared her was that every few years there's a new star who wins the Chopin or Tchaikovsky competition who then robs the limelight. Adding to that, as musicians have a long career you have a long-tail/pyramid effect where the base is constantly growing, but the rewards are fixed if not shrinking.

*(where a major factor of their success is technical skill)

Another good example of this would be the starcraft player Jaedong, he failed the tournement that you needed to win your proffesional licence 9 times, had absolutely terrible records in training (winning 1 out 20/30 vs teammates) to becoming one of the most legendary players through pure perseverance

I don't think Starcraft players are great examples. Many of the most successful ones walked the "Royal Road," i.e. they won the OSL on their first try. I can't think of any player who was mediocre for years, and then became an all-time great. If anything, every Starcraft legend except Flash had a front-loaded career where they had the majority of their big wins at the start of their career, and then stuck around due to their brand name without ever recapturing their peak.

I enjoyed the book Old Masters and Young Geniuses which explored this subject in relationship to art and creativity.

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.

But in the end you have to ask yourself what actually matters to you in life. The end goal is to be happy. I knew I wanted to have kids and enjoy life with friends and have fun. I could have been one of the best in some field, but for what purpose? Scientific achievements are hard, im not ready to commit my life to working at some problem which I may or may not solve. It's not about what you achieve, it's about what you choose not to. Jack of all trades is a sensible choice even though it's sometimes frustrating.

> 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..

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 to even comprehend why we were firing him. He was falling asleep in meetings every day and the code he was turning in was not only sub-standard, but often just non-existent.

How did you know he was playing games? Did he say that was why he was staying up all night?

The way I know I made the right call to quit WoW was when I would come home in the days after, and was like 'Oh phew I don't have to play today'.

As a counterexample, I attribute much of my success to being a compulsive World of Warcraft player in my 20s.

True, founding and being the Guild Master of a hardcore raiding guild wasn't great for my ability to focus on my real job. Main Tanking and leading 40 players through endgame content 3-4 nights a week didn't do any favors for my social life.

But the skills I developed ended up transferring pretty well over to founding and running a remote web dev agency. In fact it turned out that managing paid employees over the Internet is easier than managing volunteers in many regards. When you screw up, your employees tend to go easy on you, because they like their paychecks and changing jobs is a lot harder than changing Warcraft guilds.

I was young and kind of a loser at the time and there was little chance anyone was going to give me anything important to manage. WoW gave me an opportunity to develop a valuable skill set at an early age.

You should throw out [addictive behavior X] is what you really mean. I'm 35 and have multiple hobbies and kids, gaming is one that I just limit to a few hours a week. Anything prohibiting you from fulfilling your responsibilities is a problem area.

Exactly, the dose makes the poison.

What a delightful turn of phrase!

If the purpose of life is to be as productive as possible, then throwing out video games (and any other form of entertainment) is obviously best. Most people will be more productive if they work more.

That being said, there are plenty of successful people who play video games. And there are plenty of addictions that are at least as time-consuming and no more productive (TV, alcohol, Hacker News). Everyone has to balance for themselves how much time they'll spend in unproductive pursuits.

I never really began to succeed until I stopped playing stupid games and became a man.

Nice work. You're so manly now.

Not as manly as I'm going to be when I throw out all of my games, and all of yours, too!

More than some.

I think he triggered some people because they know he is right, he has lived both sides unlike your common gaming addict with no real breaks in their activity for years.

That employee clearly has issues unrelated to video games.

It's not so black and white. There are plenty of successful people that "play stupid games" and are full grown men, likely with the same responsibilities you have, if not more.

> I stopped playing stupid games and became a man.

Lol...lot's of men play games, stupid or otherwise, and it doesn't make them less of a man. Responsible men (and women) just know how to moderate. You seem to not be feeling particularly manly (whatever that is) in general, so you should probably try to do whatever you enjoy in moderation, and you will feel better about yourself.

>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.

I feel related to this comment and I think I know what you mean, and it's most likely that the other guys are misunderstanding you. And obviously, the guy "beta testing a new optimization to play and be productive" is having addiction issues.

What I relate to is that most of my life I just used games as a scape mechanism (of pretty much everything) and it was my default thing to do most of the day. Even when I was bored of playing, I just kept playing to pass time by and avoid doing anything worthy. I tried to leave them several times (unsuccesfully) because whenever I felt bad/sad/any negative emotion, I said to myself: "I'm just gonna play a little bit to get into a better mood", and guess what, before I knew I was all overconsumed again. At some point, I realized that if I wanted to progress in my life, I needed to go cold turkey on games, ALL KIND OF GAMES. I was mostly a PC gamer, but I know that console or phone games will drag me to the addiction again. So now I don't even consider gaming, it's completely forbidden for me (unless it's a social thing, with friends to hang out for example). I'm even considering doing the same with T.V., it's mostly wasted time.

So to sum it up, leave games all together if it doesn't help you progress in your life, can't achieve what you want to and are addicted to them; this will help you "become a man".

There is obviously a balance. If you get a lot of joy from gaming and still lead a productive life you should keep gaming. The "work all day everyday do nothing else!" mindset is destroying our society and causing depression/addiction. Too much of anything (yes even work) is simply not good for you. Balance is so important and yet it is almost like everyone has abandoned it for a radical mindset. It is like you cannot find reason anymore in the wild. Every one is "its all this" "NO! ITS ALL THAT" Things are complex and there are not universal generalities. Such things sound nice but they are fiction in a world of complex adaptive systems... Sorry for tangent this has bothered me for a while.

"Finding balance" might be a pipe dream and a trap when someone is struggling with addiction...

It's weird that this comment has been so controversial. It's like we've all forgotten that old wise saying - play stupid games, win stupid prizes!

I'm an old man (38) playing video games, and I'm fairly successful.

I've played games back in the day with at least one person who has become a billionaire in software.

Everyone is different, your way is not the only way.

Now if you're addicted and don't see yourself moving forward, then sure, adjust it. But you should do that if you're addicted to anything.

> 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.

I did the same, but it was because I have very low self control since a young age, and telling myself "OK this will be the last round I'll ay tonight" (of League of Legends, Super Smash, etc.) never, ever worked. The cumulative result of all that gaming means next to nothing for my career now, aside from being more calm when getting trolled. Not worth it.

> 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 :)

> I made a conscious effort to get through with as little work as possible

I did a lot of that, too - and although I was (and probably still am) a bit lazy, there was more to it than just laziness. I had in some way convinced myself that studying all the time was sort of "cheating" - I was too smart to be doing such mundane things as showing up for class, reading the material and working the exercises. I didn't come to my senses until my senior year of college - and even then, when I took the GRE I actually bought a test-prep book and read it and the whole time I felt like I was going to get "caught" and thrown out of the testing center for being too prepared.

I did the same thing. Got by without really trying. Never went to lectures, studied for a month before the exams. Got 1st class marks.

But I didn't do it because I was lazy or because I wanted an easy life. I did it because I was afraid of failure, utterly terrified.

For smart people who come from less than loving families, fear of failure is the hardest thing to overcome.

It's such a shame because what I really wanted to do was research... Dreaming up new ways of doing things, but I just didn't stand out enough to get the chance because I did no work.

Now I am a jack of all trades who knows a little about a huge range of things. But I could do so much more if I didn't have to build crud apps every day, uch, kill me now.

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 first two lines, wow—You very clearly wrote what I've struggled to think of how to convey. Thank you.

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 politics / networking / job hopping sense. There are few or no other professions where that’s true, certainly not any that are so large in terms of numbers.

As someone who is very close to two doctors, I can tell you that networking and elbows matters just about as much as any other career.

Second this, you need to be political to make partner in your practice or move up the ladder to manager/professor even as a Dr. unless you go into private practice or start your own thing

Absolutely. A couple that my wife and I are dear friends with are both in the medical profession. Nuclear medicine and pediatrics. They spent the first 8 years of their careers in NYC, establishing themselves / their careers. He's now in SoCal and she's in NorCal. They have 2 kids. They anticipate that they'll be split up for a couple of years in this manner because of their work situations. He's flying back and forth to be with his family. He's tried to get positions near their new home but he's either over-qualified or he's not getting bites.

They have to play networking and social games with their careers to a level that is well and truly beyond anything my wife and I have ever had to deal with as software engineers.

My wife and I have board game nights and that qualifies as networking. We're playing board games with folks from FAANG companies, triple A video game developers, interesting start-ups, etc... who I've met through this group. Our friends in the medical profession can't get away with something like that.

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.

My heart bleeds for “barely 1% working stiff”.

That sounds like a serious medical condition, you should contact your doctor.

Preferably one with a Lambo.

He might not earn an obscene amount of money: there was an article here recently about spending habits, and doctors seemed to be the worst.

A number of my friends are recent med school graduates, and from what they tell me that politics is very much a factor not just for advancement, but even things like placement in a medical specialty.

"Become doctors" is just saying that they graduated medical school; even C students become doctors, but the politicking really starts once you try to join a specific practice, like cardiology, emergency medicine, pediatrics, etc. Every speciality has its gatekeepers who they need to schmooze if they want that seal of approval.

It’s true that they need to get residencies and then fellowships but my understanding is that these processes are closer to “get admitted to medical school” then they are to “become partner at a law firm”. Could be wrong, but that’s my impression.

The majority of US doctors have huge student loan debts for many years, they either must go into a specialty to pay them off quickly, or remain middle-class for years as primary care, pediatrics, geriatrics, and many other needed specialties are under-remunerated.

This is a popular story, but really they stop taking on debt at about 30 and pay it off, easily, by 45.

Around here you can live a nice lifestyle for ~$40,000. Early career primary care physicians have a gross of something like $120,000...

Agreed.

Education has two complementary goals:

1. content curriculum (body of knowledge)

2. learning curriculum (how to learn)

The latter is more subtle, and IMHO doesn't receive the attention it deserves.

School absolutely fails on the second one. You are forced to study on someone else's schedule which is terrible for learning.

And don't get me started on group work (because it's 'pedagogically useful'). You get a team of 4-5, 2 hours and a task that can be done alone in ~10 minutes, 20 if you try and integrate the whole team.

And then you're in the real world, and you don't have enough people and time, and you need specialists for the different subtasks.. thanks, school.

But that's the reality of life and part of learning as well. Most of us don't get the luxury of doing things on our own schedule or terms. Usually the schedule is decided by someone else, like the customer or the boss or whoever is paying you.

Maybe the reason you don't have the luxury is because the school never gave you the luxury so you didn't have the opportunity to work out something to retain it.

all I am saying is, the ability to do something with constraints that are out of your control, is a skill that needs to be learned.

Sure but school constraints you too much. There needs to be a time when you can explore things, when should this time be if not during school.

I'd like to add a 3rd thing, which is learning how to start something and try to do whatever it takes to finish it with constraints decided by someone else. Most likely you will be doing the similar thing for your entire life after getting out of college like starting some project or a task at work and trying to finish it whether you like it or not.

> 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 addiction, where as soon as you level up you start feeling the desire if reaching the next step.

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.

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.

Succeeding at work is often way more nebulous than succeeding in school. School is entirely based on tests and homework with transparent grading systems and syllabi.

Work is so much more relationship-based. It's not just about doing what your told, but also about collaborating and communicating and leveraging a network, mentoring peers, and generally getting things done for which there is no clear path.

I always felt "leadership" was a meaningless buzzword in school (especially since it had no impact on grades), but now that I'm working I can see it's a real valuable skill and essential to motivating others to do good work.

Word certainly does for some people although being one of the "gifted" types at work seems to provide fewer chances to be that. Teacher's can give out As left and right and even if they give them to everyone, people feel pretty good about it.

Also the scale of affirmation at work can vary wildly.

Granted every workplace is different.

> Life outside that system often very much does not.

Unless you become a teacher. That might be why the system doesn't change - the people running it have never lived another way.

Yeah the folks who stay in the education systems often (not always) tend to like that sort of structure / participating in it. It feels a bit like a feedback loop.

Great comment. Reminds me of "The Organization Kid" but much pithier https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2001/04/the-org...

I think that the standards the author is judging herself by are messed up and harmful.

She is healthy, married, is raising a child, is an educator, presumably has a good standing within her community. She checks like 9 out of 10 boxes you can judge a human by and yet it's still not enough. What the hell?

Does everybody have to excel now? Everybody has to be a millionaire, own a company, be a scientist, athlete or an entertainer. How is are those standards sustainable? If everybody excels the nobody does. If everyone is a boss then nobody has employees.

What effect does this drive for perfectionism has on brains that evolved to be satisfied with having enough food, having shelter and basic social approval. No wonder the rates of depression are rising among young people.

> is an educator

> North America

Hardly a good box to tick, by most reports.

Your comment is grey and I don't think it should be.

People care so much about being "a good person" while also acknowledging corporate psychopathy and other "bad guys win" scenarios that are so normal to the human existence.

Meanwhile, if you ask an educator about their situation, I'm not sure they'd tick the box. The educators I know are fulfilled by their work, not their work environments.

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.

I've been there (hospitality) and agree with you; #learntocode resonated and here we are.

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.

This is a really good point I think a lot of people - not just young people - need to here. I've definitely had my own fight with anxiety over the past few years, mainly due to worry over whether or not I was doing enough. As stereotypical as it sounds, the ending of my last relationship really reframed my state of mind. Contentedness should be enough, and if we all got back to the mindset of being good members of the community making good contributions without killing ourselves with worry I think we all would be way better off for it.

One of the worst things you can do, as a parent, is tell your kid they are smart. I have two kids and one of them is obviously “gifted”. The other is still pretty far ahead. Smart is a bad word in my house. Gifted is not something that is ever uttered. We (as parents) work very hard to instill a sense of hard work, effort, and purpose into our kids lives. They do BJJ, a martial art that is very hard, even if you are very smart. The main purpose is to teach them there are things they aren’t good at and have to work at, and even small improvements in BJJ can feel like huge wins. My motivation and reason is very similar to the authors. Everyone always told me how smart I was, and wondered why I didn’t succeed academically. It’s because it was too easy and I was already “smart” so why bother? I started building software professionally at 19 and moved away from home. My first few years away from home were hard as I had to learn life skills like “focus” heh. Anyhow, that is my story time about kids and being smart. FWIW, my 7 year old came home one day recently and said “I think I am smart. I can read books the fourth graders do....” heh. I just told her “good, but it doesn’t matter. Just enjoy the books” she really thought I would be proud she is smart, and of course we are, but “smart” can set you up for a hard time finding fulfillment later on in life.

"I think I am smart." That's really cute!

I mean, it's pretty much impossible to hide smartness. If you are smart, you will know. I am not attractive, but I also heard that if you are very attractive, it's pretty much impossible not to realize that.

>If you are smart, you will know. I am not attractive, but I also heard that if you are very attractive, it's pretty much impossible not to realize that.

From my anecdotal experiences meeting people who were in that situation, it can definitely happen if your self-esteem is crushed early on in life.

> 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 way, that presumes that the idea is true.

Do you know how people feel when they fail to be "a good boy/girl"? To be good in a sense you had internalized before you turned 10. A person could feel the same if to be good means to be smart for him/her.

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

> One of the worst things you can do is tell your kid they are smart.

Well, don’t make them feel stupid, either - what I tell my son is that he’s smart, but I remind him that even if he’s smarter than 99% of all the people in the world, there are still 70 million people that are smarter than he is.

Speaking from my own experience, I think it's very important to have a balanced view of the fact that you are smart. i.e. you shouldn't be ignorant of it.

If you "play" competitively in any of the fields, being ignorant of your own strength is a big disadvantage in my opinion.

Yes. Being smart is like being tall. You might as well accept it and be honest about it.

And both are good for your life in direct and indirect ways. But neither guarantee much of anything. So some humility about intelligence is important.

How would you see using the knowledge that you are smart to your advantage in a given field? You still have to do the work? (my line of thinking is something like: You produce what you produce in your field. To me the effort you put in matters the most. Smart is a meta quality to your work)

Yes it is a meta quality, and that's why it's not irrelevant. For instance, when told something is "hard", you can calibrate yourself on what that means. You also get the correct sense of what's possible and what's not, in what amount of time. This helps a ton with planning and decision making.

Thanks for clarifying. I am not sure how important it is to know you are “smart” vs just doing what comes natural in a given situation. It’s just how you will work problems. But I do think there is something there, about being Meta-analytical. I think good leaders have this. The ability to be two feet above a battlefield. I am not convinced it’s completely even a “smart” thing so much as a distinct problem solving methodology that works well (which might just make you smart based on the observables). I am rambling, anyhow. This was a cool thread in general.

I wonder how would it be possible to teach young children to not value "being smart" and make that stick as they grown into rebel teenagers, deception is certainly not the way to go, as they will obviously notice it over time. Telling them "it doesn't matter" I don't think that's sticky enough, probably just being upfront and saying to them the reasons behind it, why it doesn't matter

They figure it out for themselves. No one has to tell you. It is a very difficult balancing act. I could write a long essay length document on my approach to this. My son is older, age 12, and he knows he is smart now, but, I think about it in concrete terms of how does this matter? He just /IS/ smart. He won't ever be dumb. But if I can't teach him how to work hard and apply his natural gifts and what he has learned what good is being smart? I think kids are really good at figuring it out and using it (intelligence) without a lot of guidance. Of course, we do things and I try to keep them challenged at home, but I also try to show them what hard work is and how to enjoy simple things. In the real world, people care more about what you can do than how smart you are. Of course we love it when smart people do great things, but... it just doesn't matter in practice. I think it is all about focusing on values and emphasizing things (like hard work) over smart.

I think "being smart" like anything else, has diminishing return. It should be we teach children that you can be very smart, but without work ethic/motivation/passion to go alone, you may not go half as far as you would imagine.

I was browsing reddit and noticed lots of people complaining about persisting injuries from practicing BJJ. Do they handle youth BJJ differently to protect from these types of risks?

For small kids they are just so ridiculously resilient and light. Injury rates before teenage years is very low in my experience. They also only go 2-3 times / week maximum and the coaches keep the training intensity moderated in the younger kid's classes. This matters a lot.

As an adult, I won't lie, BJJ hurts some times. Common injuries are finger/hand/foot/toe injuries. You will definitely get bumps and bruises, some times significant ones, but that is no factor usually. If you aren't in good shape you are at more risk. It kept me away from the practice for a long time, but... you modulate your own BJJ experience as an adult. Go less frequently and choose the right school, it is a journey like anything else. I personally have subluxated my ribs once (really only stopped me from doing BJJ, I could still run/lift), but it really hurt, and my fingers and toes definitely feel it some days, but nothing that required a doctor yet. The up side is... it is one of the most amazing things I have ever done. It keeps my ego in check. It is as intensely technical as you want it to be. It is like the merging of an ultimate nerd and fitness hobby into one martial art / sport.

It is a legit martial art. If you start training seriously, I think it requires a serious training focused on improving your strength and muscle mass for injury resistance as well.

The key moment for me when I first had an inkling that being smart wasn't enough on it's own came at my grade 11 math final exam.

I finished it in 45 minutes. No problem. Got an 88%. Felt awesome. Simon, the prototype of the "jock" football player, took the full 2.5 hours offered on the same exam. He got a 99%.

It bothered me for years because it went against everything I knew. I was smarter, so I deserved the better grade. I finished so much faster than him! If I'd spent the full 2.5 hours I'm sure I'd have gotten 100%... But I didn't do that.

It took until college before I finally came to understand: nobody cares how clever you are. There are no points for that in life. Points are for getting things done, for accomplishments.

(I should also mention that despite the jock stereotype of acting superior, etc, Simon was one of the nicest guys!)

My brother was always a better learner/student than me as well. He would study 10+ hours for an exam...or all night if that is what it took. I would cram 15 minutes before an exam. We both got similar grades. The difference is that he retained most of what he studied. A month later I didn't remember it. We adjusted our jobs similarly. Mine requires large amounts of information being take in and used quickly to solve problems...sometimes only once. He teaches difficult students a very difficult subject.

This kind of thinking is very foreign to me but apparently it is common? Getting 100% in exam never required any effort for me, so I never studied for exam. I always studied to understand, so I retained it all.

Yeah it's as if the exam is the goal rather than understanding the subject...

You forgot the humblebrag alert at the top.

It sounds like you learned that lesson at the correct time.

One trick is to find two things you are reasonably gifted at and you're more likely to be remarkable if you work in the area where those two things meet.

For example, if you're an 80th %ile programmer and 80th %ile automotive mechanic, there is surely a niche that connects the two where you would perhaps be 95 %ile merely by how unusual it is to being good at both things.

I'm having a hard time imagining that from your example. For example I have several successful project cars, I've built a custom wheel balancer from an accelerometer, and am currently programming the fuel injection and spark on a car from scratch yet I don't know if a career in that would really make me any more income than my current Software Engineering manager role.

The parent comment said there would be a niche for you, not (necessarily) that it would be lucrative. You might be more valued there (in the "we're lucky we found this guy" way if not the cash way).

Not only more valuable but more in control of his growth, a growth to a full potential

This echos some career advice from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. "Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things." He also goes on to say that "at least one of the skills in your mixture should involve communication, either written or verbal." The idea being that this should make it easier to leverage your other skill(s) in a work environment.

https://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2007/07/car...

I have a friend who became a successful science writer after reading this very same blog post. So that's at least one anecdotal data point in Adams' favor.

He uses himself as a prime example. He knows he's not the funniest guy in the world, nor the best artist. But by combining the two in Dilbert he's been very successful.

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 = reward that was missing due to academics coming so easily.

If you have a gifted child, find a sport they enjoy and encourage the hell out of it.

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.

There are a ton of other sports to practice -- and some are not competitive at all.

Keep looking, you will find a physical activity that will fulfil you. You might never get the same high as with football and that's OK. There are many other things to do!

This might be a stereotype, but certainly in my case, I hated team sports and strongly resented the way everyone presumed that I liked football cause I was a boy.

The advice to find something they enjoy that shows progress is great (I did that with theatre), but don't force them into anything, especially not team sports.

This worked for me; I was near the top of my class in a large urban high school, and breezed through academically (though we did have the benefit of cross-registering with the local university).

I became a long distance runner- cross country, track. This was immensely challenging, and our team was very diverse, ethnically and academically, giving an opportunity to break out of the "smart kid bubble" that a lot of "gifted" kids live in.

Then college and beer happened: I am no longer a long distance runner.

This paragraph sums it up:

"My first hint that this was a skewed view came in university. I very quickly learned that, while I may have been the “best” in all of my high school classes, I was now in a place where my peers had been the “best” in theirs as well — and in most cases, their best was better than mine. This realization automatically dulled some of my drive to succeed. I would never gain the admiration and accolades I had received my whole life up until this point, so where was the desire to try? Still, I managed to get by receiving relatively good grades without an extreme amount of effort."

I too was gifted. I too had problems in college upon realizing I wasn't the smartest guy in the room anymore - sometimes by a long shot. Fortunately I had a couple things to save me. One was an article pointing out that most of the millionaires, using being a millionaire as a proxy for success, were all average or "C" students in school. The article theorized it was due to the "smart" kids getting lazy because things came too easily for them. The other was I grew up in a lower class household and my father worked on the side on home improvement projects - kitchen, bathroom and family room remodels. I had to work with him since he often needed help. Unfortunately I had learned to apply a strong work ethic to work, but not to school. Once I made that adjustment everything turned out fine. I ended up graduating summa cum laude. Has my life turned out as I expected? No - and that's a good thing. But that's also another story!

I relate to this and give a lot of credit to my father for teaching me work ethic that I never knew I would need at the time. School was easy and I never learned to work hard at academic work, but I sure worked hard finishing a basement, chopping wood, shoveling the driveway, and much more. I always hated doing that work, but I would see my dad just continue to power through any project no matter how difficult it got. I would always find ways to take a break, but then I would see him continuing on and get right back in there and help him out.

After getting out of school and finding out that it actually does take time and grit to finish a project I have been grateful for the example that he set. It hasn't been easy learning to work hard at something, and I don't do nearly as well as he does at it, but I have gotten better over time.

Its because of this that my perspective has changed greatly around what makes a person succeed. I help teach people programming in my spare time and one thing I have noticed repeatedly is that the ones who do best over time are the ones who just keep at it even if it is difficult. Too often the "gifted" ones do great at the beginning, but once they encounter a topic that they don't naturally get then they might just give up because they feel it is too hard for them or that they will never get it.

Being able to reach "flow" quickly when setting out to work on something is what matters, even more so than "work ethic" or "grit" alone. In the longer run, relying on the latter just sets you up for burnout and the stress of overwork; whereas the former is sustainable and even quite enjoyable.

Physical activities such as shoveling snow and chopping wood are good at inducing flow, whereas it can take some effort to reliably enter that state when doing something more abstract. I think this is why the Pomodoro method is so popular, it can be used to "gamify" all sorts of tasks since the regularly-scheduled breaks act as a physical marker of your achievement.

That's a good point and brings up something I still struggle with - "flow." I'd never heard it put that way but that gives me another tool to help me up my game. Thanks!

I would disagree with the article. I think the 'laziness' comes from a more well tuned intuition for value. Smart people don't make money because they're smart. Sometimes all smart people want to do is indulge in things that don't necessarily bring value to anyone. However, if you have a knack for seeing the value in something (or a lack of value) I think you'll be more likely to succeed. If you think about it, since grades don't come from a linear expulsion of effort, aiming to get high grades when you don't know what you're ROI is going to be does sound dumb.

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.

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

Anonymity most likely.

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.)

Possibly a way to avoid revealing gender, for privacy.

My siblings gender is Female.

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

It was just a detail that seemed a little impersonal which is strange in a personal story; could be me, but in any case don't worry about it.

It doesn't matter, but the singular they confused me as well. It took me a second to realize 'they' is your sibling and not some other people entirely.

Yeah, before I read amelius's comment (i.e. after first reading your story) I thought you had multiple siblings.

As someone who also follows the rules well like your sibling (but isn't gifted), the more time passes the more I understand it to be a serious character flaw.

Why/how did you come to that conclusion? I'm surprised to see that self-reflection and conclusion of following rules is a character flaw.

yeah me too. fascinated for the answer.

As someonbe who obsessively did/does the same. It might be that most who do such things have a detrimental quality that makes them need to live up to social pressures. While obviously blending in is good. It can become unhealthy quickly if you feel the need to constantly portray perfection equanimity in everything you do. In my case "perfection" can prevent "greatness" They may seem like orthogonal qualities but they are probably rooted closer to each other than most would consider.

First of all my statement should be taken with a huge grain of salt. I make no claims towards any sort of universal observation about human nature, but rather a set of general principles that I believe to be worth examining.

- Breaking rules can help you grow as a person. Anecdotally, the people from my youth who ended up being the happiest adults were those who tested the boundaries early on and fit the "lovable rogue" archetype. This experimentation gave them leeway to understand themselves better and their mischievous but life-affirming behavior made them paradoxically more appreciated and valued by others than youths who never rocked the boat. The latter are left unsure that they will still be loved in case they stop conforming to expectations.[0]

- Many valued traits and rules in the modern world aren't that valuable. To echo Taleb's green lumber story [1], you can spend your time gaining accolades and achievements such as medals on a debating team or knowledge of trivia and then wonder why someone you secretly judge to be inferior to you is doing much better. The reality is that your judgment was based on peripheral metrics that instilled a false sense of superiority, even if those actions may have helped you a bit in some indirect way. What matters are the core traits that help you provide value to others and secure your position in the world. Unfortunately for rule followers, there is an inundation of not-so-useful rules and contests that cloud your judgment. For instance, some people end up in graduate school with no clear interest or purpose because it gives them the illusion that they are being productive and moving forward according to commonly accepted metrics. Or more commonly, you have people taking cold showers or waking up at 4:00 am because they learned that's what the 30 under 30 fellow they just read about does.

- As a corollary to this, to be a healthy adult you need to exercise critical thinking and reason from first principles pretty damn often. The most captivating people do seem to have an intuitive understanding of what is essential to a good life and what isn't. They are prepared to examine rules and make bold choices as to whether to follow them or not. Paradoxically, understanding of when you should in fact coöperate with the system allows them to do so more smoothly when the need arises.[2]

In the modern world, rules aren't always to the individual's interest. Some people go on a box-ticking spree like godzillabrennus' sibling and end up feeling empty handed. But the entities that draw up those boxes always had their own interests in mind, whether or not the boxes' design was the result of direct action or organic development. The rules can change themselves in an instant, or be completely irrelevant if some other factor changes. In our world, you end up with VCs and billionaires telling underpaid employees to stop moaning, internalize hustle porn and work themselves to death for rewards that will in all likelihood never come. Some of these folks end up spending their hard earned salary on Veblen goods [3] that are simultaneously too expensive to their freedom and too cheap to even give them the status they seek.

- Directly linked to that is the notion of ressentiment. [4] To some limited extent, our moral rules can be interpreted as a tool to comfort the weak. If you are too keen to follow the rules, you end up with a ton of ressentiment because you often find yourself trapped in peripheral pursuits. You neglect to fulfill important needs out of a stronger need to conform. You die having never really lived.

If you look at people like Trump, they are essentially modern-day Diogenes whether they realize it or not. Their behavior strips away the abstract and peripheral metrics (being classy, having a certain demeanor etc.), leaving only the raw power balance. This creates extreme anger and frustration because a person might look at such an individual and judge him to be inferior according to some ressentiment-based rules but then be unable to reconcile that impression with their obvious relative lack of power and importance.

Rule breakers are more aware of the power balance and what society actually rewards and generally tend to pursue that without fear. That doesn't mean they end up being sociopaths (although obviously you have your fair share of those), in fact it can lead them to being better people because they take on traits that others genuinely value. They let go of resentment because they lead a life-affirming existence, whereas many instinctive rule followers find themselves building up a degree of resentment that poisons their character over time. Rule breakers can help others more easily because they are themselves in a stronger psychological position and have more of their needs met.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DTIzzf6ncg [1] https://fs.blog/2016/11/green-lumber-fallacy/ [2] https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veblen_good [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ressentiment

Thanks for taking the time to answer and for such a great response. Impressed by your observation skills and high introspection which made you arrive at this conclusion.

I think it's good to be able to follow the rules effectively and efficiently, and use that to your advantage, but not make rule following an end unto itself. Just like the opposite, bucking all rules all the time, is also not so great.

"Blending in" can make it possible to achieve other goals and lead a fulfilling life in a pretty stable and maintainable manner. And being able to break free when the need calls for it is also very important. As an extreme example, if you are living in Nazi Germany it is the morally right thing to appear to "blend in" while actually bucking the rules and saving Jews.

This is bad advice in general. For every person who happens to love something that is lucrative, there are hundreds who love things that won't put food on the table. If your advice doesn't distinguish between the two, its bad advice.

Very similar situation. But we are kind of the exception. I just happened to start loving programming/hacking around 6th grade. I spent all my time doing that, mostly sometimes in secret to avoid being viewed as a 'nerd'. Although it paid off, I am just lucky my interest was what happens to be flourishing at the time.

Thank you for this. I don’t think OP realizes the immense luck involved in being a person who is naturally interested in (and also has access to) computers from a young age in the current era.

The trick is picking the right thing to be interested in, and the problem is that you can’t force yourself to be interested in something, nor can you predict whether that interest will be lucrative.

That's an awesome story, did/do you find it hard as an entrepreneur to get off the ground with a lack of social proof from the ivy league degree? I guess after achieving some level of success from your entrepreneurial endeavors that itself is a far stronger signal of social proof but it seems difficult to "break in". Any tips?

While it's nice that this approach worked out for you, this is bad advice in general, - read Cal Newport's "So good they can't ignore you":

http://www.calnewport.com/books/so-good/

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

Sorry but I strongly disagree with this advice.

Being able to do what you love for work is a huge luxury that most people can not afford. It's much easier to learn to be content or happy with something that makes money than to make money off your interest.

Just look at the number of starving artists/actors/musicians on why following your passion doesn't really work for most people. The reality is that being able to get paid for something isn't up to you but society.

It isn't even necessarily dictated by how good you are at something. There are many examples of great composers who ended up dying in poverty but whose works of genius survive and are heard to this day.

I went through the gifted program and that's the experience of my peergroup as well, I think. A combination of effortless success in school and ADD left about half of my cohort completely failing in adulthood.

There are, of course, some hotshots with PhDs in cool jobs Toronto, but a whole lot of effortlessly brilliant folks just getting by with joe-jobs. While there's nothing wrong with that life, it does speak to how the kind of success people expected isn't just a matter of intelligence.

I think that school wasted their potential.

Yes, I coasted through school until college. Never studied, never had to, even in the gifted, honors, and AP classes. I especially did well on tests. Graduated 3rd in my class, only .001 GPA points from 2nd, with a handful of 5s (and a couple 4s) on my AP tests. Had undiagnosed ADHD (inattentive type) the whole time. Always procrastinated heavily, usually wrote papers/did projects the night before they were due. The closest I got to "studying" was re-reading the chapter I was going to be tested on the morning before the test, and even that was only for social studies classes where you had to remember names and dates. I did not need to study at all for math, science, or English courses. I got very lucky with a handful of exceptional teachers in high school. Teachers that actually cared about me and my success. I wanted to do well in school, because I got praised for it - both by my mom and by teachers. I craved that praise like nothing else as a child so I always did just enough to make sure my grades stayed high.

Life fell apart in college. Huge class sizes with no personal connection to the teacher and being solely responsible for meeting deadlines and studying eventually ruined school for me. Your lecturer with over 3000 students doesn't give a shit about you or your performance in school. I lost the immediate feedback and praise that I used to get in grade/high school, and with it, my hyperfocus on doing well in school was gone.

I fell into a deep depression, took a year off, took anti-depressants, tried school again but still just couldn't make myself go to classes anymore. Dropped out. Spent a few years working a dead-end call center tech support job. Wound up getting into software anyway (my failed degree was going to be in CISE) and I do well enough for myself now (especially after getting an ADHD diagnosis and getting medicated for it), but college/young adulthood was a disaster for me. I also had to declare bankruptcy in my mid-twenties - another consequence of depression and undiagnosed ADHD. Impulse purchases and the guilt/shame/avoidance spiral turned my credit into a mess.

Most of my peers actually did far better than me (like, they actually finished their bachelors (some went as far as PhDs) and went on to good jobs in the fields they studied for), but I don't think any of them had ADHD. That was the other thing that kept me focused in high school. I was part of a decently sized group of "smart kids" - we would compete with each other on grades, and that competition helped keep me on track. Lost that in college too.

Basically, yeah, giftedness and ADHD are a terrible combo. With ADHD, you need a lot of structure and work ethic to succeed in life, but if you're smart enough, you don't have to develop any of those skills to excel in grade/high school. Then you hit adulthood and everything falls apart.

I think the central problem here is not asking more of gifted people during early school years. I was pretty disengaged with school before college. It just wasn't challenging enough in the right kinds of ways. I flourished when I got to college since I was finally in an environment with unlimited challenge and rewards. I learned to set my own standards for achievement and be less worried about how I would be judged externally. This attitude has continued to serve me well through work and life.

If I ever have a gifted child, I'll raise the bar high early on.

100% this. If your school is boring, don't get bored. Find your own challenges.

I had a bit of an opposite experience, intellectually engaged throughout high-school, and extremely disappointed with the lack of academic environment in undergraduate.

As someone who was put into "additional classes" because of being labeled gifted, asking them to do more work isn't always the right answer. I felt like it was a punishment, basically more (boring) school work, and (as a kid) the best way to deal with that was to disengage further.

It's not supposed to be a punishment at all! If anything, the whole policy of "challenging" gifted kids is something that should be done in an unusually benevolent way, since the whole point is to visibly teach them that it's okay to fail at something that's especially difficult (particularly when they're just starting out on that task); and that good things can come out of failure, provided that it's followed by focused work and a moderate dose of "grit" - that there is a level above theirs where "no pain no gain" is the name of the game!

Exactly, when I was in elementary school, it was basically an additional class, that took me out of regular class time which then meant in addition to the extra class work, I had to also catch up on the regular class information, assignments, etc. that other kids had class time to learn/work on.

It was well intentioned, just not super well thought out I think. Also keep in mind that my perceptions are filtered through many years at this point, so take them with a bit of a grain of salt.

Middle school and beyond were a bit better, as you just ended up in more advanced classes (i.e. advanced Math).

My gifted program didn't put me into additional classes, just different ones. I was very lazy as a kid, but I took the highest classes possible because the difference in work was negligible but I wouldn't be bored out of my mind in class. I guess I got lucky.

> I learned to set my own standards for achievement and be less worried about how I would be judged externally.

If you want to foster that in gifted children, they need less schooling, not more of what caused things like worrying about external judgement.

This "we need to make kids do more" mindset is cancer in our society. Contributing to burn-out and depression rates that are sky-rocketing.

If you have a child please do not put more pressure on him/her than society already seems to. It will not go well, read up on "tiger moms" and the children who belonged to them. It doesn't really turn out well...

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 telling your kids that you got something because you worked on it, not because you are inherently “smart”. This gives them (at least in theory) something to work with when they run into obstacles.

Worry though what to do if they never pursue anything that is truly “hard” for them, and consequently need to struggle. and they never have to work.

Edit: changed wording in last paragraph to clarify intent

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

Summer and part time jobs. Working in a supermarket, fast food restaurant or on a golf course or construction site leaves you with a much better appreciation for the breadth of human capacities, interests and experiences than working towards your first I Banking internship. I’m sure volunteering as a tutor to disadvantaged children would help a bit too but only for realising the diversity of capacities out there.

this little extract is one that i identify with a lot:

Christina Kimont, 38, speaks of a similar experience. “The fact that I can be immediately good at something has left me as a jack-of-all-trades and master of none, so to speak, and left me rather adrift when it came to finding my life’s purpose.”

It's a kind of fear of missing out. If you spend all your time becoming keeping up with one tiny field, there'll be so much else that you know nothing about at all.

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”

Isaac Newton

Friends working for Google told similar tales. Until they worked at Google they had a pretty high idea of their own abilities and then they were outclassed to the point that some of them just gave up entirely. Being the best during your youth isn't always an advantage.

From what I've been reading in this thread the whole issue seems to be related to gifted people believing they are special -- which is not their fault, after all, everyone keeps saying that. If you're special, your life must be special, all you do must be great. That's a very dangerous illusion. At best, it will make you stressed out trying to be something you'll never be. At worst, it will make you completely depressed.

Truth is, even if you are pretty smart for an ape, your 80-90 years in this planet doesn't really matter. All there is to achieve is getting your life figured out. Which is no simple problem. Knowing what you actually want and need is very difficult already and that's only half the battle.

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. Let the child themselves determine their own destiny, don't impose things like academic success or a corporate career on them.

Maybe they are natural born entrepreneurs and they want to build a company, who knows? All these expectations thrown at an you child can be nothing but detremintal and anxiogenic, just let them grow up like any other child.

Normal school is pretty easy for children in the top 5%. For children who are much smarter than that following a curriculum designed for average children is not just a waste of time it’s incredibly boring and frustrating. Being bored all day with things you knew already or picked up three days into a six week unit is not a good way to get children to enjoy school.

If they’re good at school school is unpleasant because it’s not set up for them. Orders of magnitudes more money is spent on special education than on gifted education because no one cares about children who’ll already do fine academically except maybe, if they’re lucky, their parents.

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

Because being smart and $1.50 will get you $1.50 worth of coffee.

One challenge is kids will figure out they are smart all on their own. As a parent you have to almost actively repress the notion in a kid’s head that they are “smart”.

Why? Being smart is good. Why wouldn't you let your kids know?

Because it does more harm than good in the long term

I'd say having false belief (believing oneself not to be smart, when in fact, one is smart) is more harm than good in the long run.

I answered this elsewhere, but... I think it is ideal to just exist without putting smartness on a scale. Smart is not an inherently good or bad thing IMO. It just is. What you do with "smart" matters, so we focus on doing and effort in my house, not on inherent capabilities. Also, maybe you as a person just don't want to do "smart" people jobs when you grow up? Probably you will, but if you are holding yourself to some standard it could set you up for years of unhappiness if you feel you are "wasting" your talents.

Being smart is inherently good. It is ridiculous to suggest otherwise.

You can't argue Hitler, Stalin, etc weren't smart in their own ways. So being smart is not inherently good, it depends on what it applies to. There could be smart pimp who makes a lot of money, does that make him good?

Maybe being good is inherently good?

You don't tell them they are dumb or anything. You just let them exist as long as possible without labeling or self-labeling. I know it is just a saying, but I think the research backs it up: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard. Effort and discipline must come before "smart". It's okay to smart, it isn't like we shame it or anything, we just don't focus on it. We read advanced books and do all sorts of "smart" things in the house, but we don't label it or compare it. Smart is a thing that really breaks out your "comparing mind" as they call it in buddhism. The author had the same issues, feeling a bit smug compared to all of the average kids. That is the comparing mind in action and it all sets you up for potential failure.

> Why? Being smart is good. Why wouldn't you let your kids know?

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/index.html

tl;dr: praising them for being "smart" counterintuitively ends up discouraging them.

Of course, don't praise being smart. How is it praiseworthy? But do tell they are smart.

> But do tell they are smart.

The problem occurs when they incorporate "smart" into their identity, so telling them they're smart is a problem too.

From the article I linked:

> Since Thomas could walk, he has heard constantly that he’s smart. Not just from his parents but from any adult who has come in contact with this precocious child....

> But as Thomas has progressed through school, this self-awareness that he’s smart hasn’t always translated into fearless confidence when attacking his schoolwork. In fact, Thomas’s father noticed just the opposite. “Thomas didn’t want to try things he wouldn’t be successful at,” his father says. “Some things came very quickly to him, but when they didn’t, he gave up almost immediately, concluding, ‘I’m not good at this.’ ” With no more than a glance, Thomas was dividing the world into two—things he was naturally good at and things he wasn’t. [emphasis mine]

One very striking thing I've heard from a friend who went to a gifted school was that it let them have a "normal" childhood. Rather than being "the smart kids", they were just normal in their environment.

I'm reminded of a quote from a very good book:

> "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?" — is difficult to answer directly. It may be easier to start with a preliminary: what does everybody agree on? “Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule,” Nietzsche wrote (before he went mad). If you can identify a delusional popular belief, you can find what lies hidden behind it: the contrarian truth.

Tally up the number of people here vigorously (and defensively) arguing for "being happy", "being interesting", "being encouraging" (or anything but "being great") is all that matters, and you will get a very large number.

It's really, really hard to make an outsized contribution to humanity. So the consensus response to this is "well, but it doesn't really matter: just be happy". This cultural meme is extremely harmful to us all. People shouldn't be shunned for trying to do something great and failing. But we shouldn't go too far and say "well, as long as you're happy, you're not blameworthy". If you have a gift, you should use it for good. Your comfort is not the only thing that matters.

I think ultimately there is a very short list of people who end up having a life that really turns out how they expected — gifted or not.

You guys ever look out an airplane window or do some people watching in a crowded place? There are a fuck ton of people, all competing for the same resources, and with (if you made one of those FIFA-style player attributes charts, about the same overall ability). Im pretty darn good at running, recently did a big race and placed prob in the top 0.5%, the guy who won beat me by 3 mins (over 10% my time). I try and be good at music, really hard, probably not gifted at this, but my shit is way worse than any number of unknown artists. Everyone back home thinks I'm the smart one. All that's done is gotten me some jobs and into programs where I meet much smarter people. There are literally 10s of millions of "gifted" people. We're as common as a pretty girl on instagram. ESPECIALLY in "superstar" cities.

Feels pretty reassuring that there are a ton of smart and talented people out there. Imagine what the world would be like without them.

Heather Jones seems like a classic fixed mindset child. An excellent book to read on this subject is Mindset by Carol Dweck.

Essentially, by labeling a child as Gifted we are setting up in a child's mind that their intelligence is what they are and not what they do. This is a "fixed mindset". Fixed mindset children will stop trying as soon as they hit a barrier because failure proves that they are not gifted. This is too much to risk.

The opposite is to complement a child for exploring and trying beyond their current abilities. This is a growth mindset. If a growth mindset child hits a barrier then they will try to overcome the barrier because intelligent behavior is what they do not what they are.

Great summary, came to mention this too. I experienced similar growing up.

One good sign is that the "gifted" program at my daugther's school mentioned this book, which is how I came to read it.

There seems to be this idea that success, money, or fame will bring you happiness, however there are many people who have achieved success, or are famous and/or rich that are not happy which disproves the idea. I find it kind of sad that a lot of society seems to still associate those things with a good life.

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!

I still remember my 8th grade history teachers response when I told him I was gifted: "Well you haven't done anything gifted in here."

Which is really the main point. Ones circumstances aside, I strongly believe you can achieve what you set your mind to. I've been able to achieve everything I've truly wanted to achieve in my life so far.

I suspect the author of the article wanted to be a mother, married and to work with children. It looks like she achieved these things.

So what they are saying is really that they didn't have to try hard at school and so learnt to be lazy and that its not their fault that they're lazy - its society's fault for telling them they are/were gifted?

Please take some personal responsibility for your own actions (or inactions in this case).

Frankly anyone who has had a decent education (even if they were not "gifted") has potential to waste; its not unique to "gifted" people to throw that away.

I kind of wish my parents had never been told this.

I think being told I was "gifted" might have blinded them to a much more important problem - that I had severe ADHD.

I have the same story, and I’m pretty sure the author is undiagnosed as well. If her child has it, it’s almost a certainty that one of the parents has it, and it’s probably her.

Being born intelligent is only part of the equation. It takes hard work and a little luck, too.

The world is filled with successful people of less-than-average intelligence who simply work hard and are in the right place. On the other side of the coin, there are many highly intelligent people who never find satisfaction or material success.

The game is made up of many aspects. We do best when we don't ignore any of them.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not: the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

- Coolidge

I always say there's a difference between intelligent and clever, the latter meaning that you know how to use your intelligence to make the things happen that you want.

Being "gifted" is sometimes badly misjudged. I have a friend who was the best in his school, then we was at the bottom of his class in high school. All his confidence disappeared when he found that "best in school X" can actually mean nothing because school X may be quite bad by comparison. The one eyed person that is the king in the land of the blind is the best comparison. Second, even having a high native intelligence does not guarantee you will not waste your life doing trivial jobs where you don't contribute a lot to the society and it is not regarded as a good use of your capabilities. "Yes, I am the smartest burger flipper in McDonalds, I am awesome". Imagine Einstein deciding to become a plumber.

> Imagine Einstein deciding to become a plumber.

Might have solved sanitation for the entire world?

The popular book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance", explores this topic in more details, for those interested in the topic.

Isn’t the grit literature just Angela Duckworth rediscovering conscientiousness?

> Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature

> Grit has been presented as a higher-order personality trait that is highly predictive of both success and performance and distinct from other traits such as conscientiousness. This paper provides a meta-analytic review of the grit literature with a particular focus on the structure of grit and the relation between grit and performance, retention, conscientiousness, cognitive ability, and demographic variables. Our results based on 584 effect sizes from 88 independent samples representing 66,807 individuals indicate that the higher-order structure of grit is not confirmed, that grit is only moderately correlated with performance and retention, and that grit is very strongly correlated with conscientiousness. We also find that the perseverance of effort facet has significantly stronger criterion validities than the consistency of interest facet and that perseverance of effort explains variance in academic performance even after controlling for conscientiousness. In aggregate our results suggest that interventions designed to enhance grit may only have weak effects on performance and success, that the construct validity of grit is in question, and that the primary utility of the grit construct may lie in the perseverance facet. Keywords: grit; performance; meta-analysis; perseverance of effort; consistency of interest

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/000a/51e0d37b8a557318559e19...

> Predicting school success: Comparing Conscientiousness, Grit, and Emotion Regulation Ability

> The present paper examines validity of three proposed self-regulation predictors of school outcomes – Conscientiousness, Grit and Emotion Regulation Ability (ERA). In a sample of private high school students (N = 213) we measured these constructs along with indices of school success obtained from records (rule violating behavior, academic recognitions, honors, and GPA) and self-reported satisfaction with school. Regression analyses showed that after controlling for other Big Five traits, all school outcomes were significantly predicted by Conscientiousness and ERA, but not Grit. The discussion focuses on the impor- tance of broad personality traits (Conscientiousness; measure of typical performance) and self-regulation abilities (ERA; measure of maximal performance) in predicting school success.

http://ei.yale.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/IvcevicBracket...

People can work really hard at doing a crap job. Doing the job right makes more sense to determine positive outcomes. Having some academic shreds to back up the common sense is good too.

Thanks for the share on conscientiousness!

Being smart does not guarantee material success and job/food security.

This is something I finally started comings to terms with at 39. I was one of these kids who was falling asleep in class, pissed the teacher by doing so, had to do a personal exam mid-term and I completed it with A grades everywhere. People envied me for grokking everything easily and being seemingly genius with zero effort.

...Until I went to university and had to work after.

Not gonna repeat the article because it nailed a lot of things exactly right but again, realising that intellect does not strongly correlate with material gain is a mind-blowing revelation I wish I was taught much earlier in my life.

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.

My problem is that even in university, the vast majority of problems I was set were tractable, and I could oversee all of them with almost no effort. This only bit me when I had to do my final term project/thesis, since that was a problem no-one else had worked on before. I was a bit ambitious, after all I knew I was smart, but I just couldn't figure out how to start on it, so it took way too much time and was finished unsatisfactorily. The same problem haunts me in work since, and makes it very hard for me to find motivation.

Putting gifted students into separate class or being allowed to skip grade is not a good idea. The children should study with others of the same age at least up to 18 years. There should not be skipping grade and no failing grade as in the past. The thinking of children changes rapidly from year to year until they are 18. A lot of what we study is understanding how we interact with our fellow human beings. This is affected when skipping grade. It will be difficult to interact with fellow students not your age.

Skipping a grade versus giving gifted students work that challenges them are wholly different things that you have conflated. We cannot and should not let kids sit in class and be bored because the work is too easy. What you are describing is a least common denominator education system, which I think we are already in enough to some extent.

I disagree. I had to take a couple non-gifted/advanced classes in high school and I was so unbelievably bored and unstimulated. You get through so little material because you have to waste time with people asking questions, etc.

Lets not forget that most of the people labeled as gifted, are in fact probably not. Identifying a person as "gifted intellectually" at such a young age is bound to be inaccurate. The development of the mind is super complex. And although it might seem like we can identify someone as gifted, we need to make more careful decisions with ANY label. We simply are not that great at determining success when it comes to individuals, and at the extreme ends of the bell-curve we get much much less accurate.

I realized that being selected for a gifted class wasn't so much about helping my peers as it was protecting the order of the classroom. If someone said today, "hey, these people are exceptional, let's isolate them from the people they seem to lead," I'd recognize it for what it was. When I look at former gifted kids, it's almost as though a generation of young leaders were sabotaged by appealing to their parents vanity.

Sure, some kids need to get out of absurd public school situations, but knowledge these days is basically free. The only skills that matter for life outcomes are social and political, with things like abstraction and mastery a distant third.

The theme among former gifted students I know is a kind of naivety where their social segregation deprived them of experience with the tools for how less abstractly oriented people must survive. It makes them soft targets for someone with a chip on their shoulder, a double digit IQ, and an instinct to lie to cover their weaknesses. Few would argue against the idea that, teaching kids to solve problems using intelligence and creativity over collaboration and management is to put them at a disadvantage. Problem solving is what talent does, it is not what management and leadership does.

I'm sure there are many gifted students who are just fine, but the outcomes are arguably much more polarized than for typical students.

Management and leadership involve plenty of problem solving! It's genuinely hard work, not just faffing around - that's just the stereotype that prevails among people who have never been in a management role in the first place. For one thing, if you're in management, there's probably a higher-level manager that you're accountable to! Funny how people seem to forget this.

So the problems you solve in management are how to get people to solve problems, not the physical/logical problems themselves. It's not faffing around, and it's a higher level of abstraction, arguably something gifted people would be good at if they hadn't been trained to solve problems like a super IC.

You specifically said that management doesn't involve "talent", "problem solving", "intelligence" or "creativity". And often the best managers are people who are just as familiar with the physical/logical domain as the concrete "problem solvers" - after all, much of the difficulty of "getting people to solve problems" is things like knowing when to call BS on someone vs. when there's an actual issue that's gumming up the work and that one should deploy resources on. Stuff that's way too hard unless you actually grok what's going on.

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, something that has caused me to struggle throughout my entire software development career (I don't even know how to do long division!).

My personal solution would be to keep kids in the normal classes, but allow them to opt-in to more challenging course work if they feel they are not being challenged (with the ability to take a step back if they need it). I think the middle school age is the most important time to push this, where grades (at least in my case) aren't exactly the most important thing in the world and aren't a clear determinator of future success (i.e. affecting university admissions).

I don't have kids right now, but if I do, I am not letting them skip ahead on mathematic courses during their foundational years. I'm lucky that I've had the drive to succeed regardless of my inability to pass even the first Calculus class in college, but it's been a huge demotivator in a field full of passionate mathematicians who are my peers.

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!

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.

> My personal solution would be to keep kids in the normal classes, but allow them to opt-in to more challenging course work if they feel they are not being challenged (with the ability to take a step back if they need it).

I'm not sure this is a great idea, at least not without changes to the normal curriculum itself.

I recall middle school math as an extremely frustrating experience. I always grasped the concepts and problem solving techniques very quickly, but it still took a long time to do the work. stuff like dividing polynomials by other polynomials takes a long time to do on paper no matter how well you understand it. no matter how interesting the extra work was, I would never have signed up for it on top of the tedium I was already subjected to from the normal curriculum.

A lot of really smart people see the traps associated with "success" at high levels. Even if you're good at everything it's still a significant effort to rise to the top in most fields.

Also, to put all this in context I would say that humanity overall is failing pretty hard right now. We're basically destroying the planet and treating the vast majority of the global population like shit. "Success" is relative...

> my husband, young son and I were living in my parents’ house.

How big is her parent‘s house?

Presumably if it's the same house she grew up in, there are probably spare rooms if she had siblings that moved out. Also her and her husband probably shared a room.

Standard suburban detached-house above-grade bedroom count in the US since at least the 80s is 3br in normal neighborhoods, sometimes 4 in the more expensive ones. If for some reason you want a 2br house you're probably gonna have to look at neighborhoods 35+ years old, or attached (duplex, say) housing. Lots of the 3br houses in places where basements are the norm have been upgraded with a fourth, basement bedroom—sometimes "nonconforming" (no emergency exit window) especially if it was finished 20+ years ago, but that hasn't stopped people from sleeping in them.

I was lucky to have people smarter than me always around me. On the other hand, if you explicitly aim for surrounding yourself with people better than you, you will almost always succeed. So do that.

(I was the best math student in my class, my grade, my school, my city, etc. so I aimed for national math olympiad, and got to #10. Why would you settle for the best in your school?)

> my fear of failure – something I didn’t have a lot of experience with as a child – held me back from making the attempt.

It is the key to understand a mind of a wunderkind, I believe (at least in my own case it was so). It is the reason why parents should not praise their child on being smart. When you are praised on being smart at a child age, when your self-concept is being formed, then "to be smart" becomes a part of self-concept. To be not smart means to fail yourself. The worst part of it: it is a very short-sighted concept, it means that to fit into my self-concept I need not to really be smart, but to look smart.

It is like a mask I need to wear. The mask of a smart man. With a hidden fear of being not as smart as it looks from outside. Sometimes with a panic attacks when mask slips for a second (not the real panic attacks, but pretty close to it).

I remember that being at school I was reluctant to ask my father to help me with math homework. He could explain anything, but I never managed to understand his explanations, he was a terrible teacher. I knew that I couldn't understand him and I knew that he would ask "are you understand now" and I knew that I would be afraid to disappoint my father by my stupidity by admitting that I had understood nothing from his explanations. So I did math homework by myself, even if I struggled to understand how to do it. Even when my mother suggested me to ask my father about it.

That situation was projected to a future. It was hard to overcome fear of asking other (and to inform them that I'm "stupid"), it was hard (it is hard) to work hard when I'm suspecting that I'll fail with that. Even if I'm a little bit unsure about my coming success it would be hard.

I used to think that I just couldn't work hard, but then I realized, that I can work hard, just up to a point when I start to doubt my success.

I have a friend whose story was similar: she found grad school extremely hard because it was the first time she had to work at success.

I probably would have fallen into the gifted category, had I not been homeschooled. I was pushed to excel in several different areas, some of which I was less gifted at than others, causing at least a nominal work ethic to be inculculated.

Math was always relatively easy for me to conceptually understand: I thus nicely got a C in Calc 1 for understanding concepts and failing to really be able to grind out the work properly. Grades improved after that, let's just say. :)

I also think that excessive success in the childhood years and early teens often skews with people's heads and they often don't do well later on. A lot of stories about gifted kids going mediocre. Terry Tao is an interesting counterexample to that, though.

Anyway, I think the big takeaway is that Grits is a key character attribute for success.

I think just leaving your kid to compete normally is the best option. Don't skip grades, only put them in summer classes and advanced classes if the explicitly ask for it. If a kid actually is extremely intelligent, they should have no problem succeeding amongst their peers. If the additional work given to them isn't their idea, all you're doing is impeding their social life, and status. Don't run around telling them how amazing they are all the time. The creation of an ego starts early, and if your kid is to function happily for the rest of their lives, you want it to be a good one.

As an aside, calling a kid with ADHD neuro atypical is a bit much. I hope the kid doesn't know their parent uses that terminology about them. That could be crushing, or set up a crutch to use in justifying failure, or the perceived lazyness associated with ADHD.

6% of children are enrolled in gifted programs. https://www.nagc.org/resources-publications/resources/freque...

I think that experiencing failure and learning from it is under-rated as a skill. By not allowing our kids to fail, and/or putting them into systems that prop up their egos (e.g., gifted schools), they will never internalize what it is to struggle. We all struggle eventually in whatever it is that we want to do.

This story reminds me somewhat of the Billy Beane story from Moneyball. Billy never really experienced failure until he was drafted. All the way through high school, he was a "can't miss" prospect. A 5-tool player. The best athlete on either team, etc. And that went to his head. He wasn't able to deal with failure at all (and this is well chronicled in the book), which ultimately led to his downfall as a player.

In other words, she was completely failed by the education system which forced her to work at a level below her capability and excluded her from the Challenge is necessary to develop that were challenges necessary to develop that were Tailored to meet the needs of less gifted children while her needs were ignored.

It seems fairly obvious that a system that forces people to work below their level of capability for the first couple of decades of their life, is conditioning them to do that for the rest of their life too.

Of course some people will find a way out of this path, but this is what the system does and generally gifted people will be disadvantaged in this way.

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...

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?

The worldview of this comment baffles me. Do you think living to maximize some imaginary "life score" is a good idea, a healthy idea, a utilitarian idea? Why not make yourself useful in whatever situation you are in, trying to make constant progress on what is important to you, and be a benefit to the people you care about? They won't put my life score on my tombstone.

Assign those goals or being useful a score then try to maximise it.

Write the deeds on the tombstone and let future people assign their own score.

This was me. They told me I was gifted at 5, but missed the part where I was on the autism spectrum. It led to severe mental health issues and substance abuse. The only reason I'm not dead is because I finally figured it out, 25 years later.

Now I can apply myself and am not so terrified by failure. I feel unencumbered for the first time. I can pursue my interests.

I don't think telling 5 year old children they are gifted is helpful. There is no upside.

Here is a nice thought experiment: substitute the word "privileged" for "gifted" and see if, and how, your response to this article changes.

My sister and I were both in gifted programs, back in the late 80's and early 90's. Neither of our lives turned out the way we expected. We also have a few gifted friends, some who have severe mental illness or drug addiction. Though most quite lead very ordinary lives, I know none of who achieved anything incredibly extraordinary. I know I've done better than most, it doesn't feel like enough...

I quit gifted back in grade school as I found a lot of it was preening. I prefer to do things/achieve rather than be content being a thing.

Being 'gifted' can make you lazy, because you can be. It's a temptation for anyone above average. If you can coast and get praise, why kill yourself? Depends on your underlying personality I guess. This phenomenon is also why it's hard to progress a lot farther than your parents level: there's a diminishing level of praise for higher levels of achievement.

I suggest reading the book "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success". The author's TED talk is interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/carol_dweck_the_power_of_believing...

Ooof, this hits home. Was told my whole entire childhood that I would "cure cancer" (Why all the adults decided I would do that is beyond me) and that the world would kneel at my feet because I was intelligent. Come to find out, I'm not all that intelligent when compared to other really intelligent people, and the world actually doesn't care so much about whether you are smart - especially in late capitalism when 'hustle' (and audacity) (and maybe some amorality/sociopathy) seems to be much more well-rewarded politically and financially.

All I have to say is that you need to be careful what information you are inputting and what social circle you keep as well.

ie; it was very easy when I was a poor activist that never read HN and had no hope of even making rent that month to not give a shit about money (and often, to semi-despise those people going after it)

Now, as a programmer, making what my former-self would have thought would be obscene amounts of money, I often catch myself jealous of people that get paid more, that didn't spend 10-15 years doing activist work and instead bought passive investments, etc etc.

Do I really care about money that much? No, not really. But because I'm exposed to way more people way more often making way more my brain automatically wants to compare in that direction.

It's trickier than I thought.

Just wanna mention I would have been a miserable loner of a kid if not for the Duke TIP summer camp program. Being surrounded by other smart kids was incredibly affirming, gave me vital social skills, and made my 'normal' public school life much more bearable.

So much to unpack here.

1) Intelligence isn't linear. How could it be. Problems in the general sense are terrifying graphs of graphs with meta edges everywhere that are conditionally relevant depending on what "value" is at any given vertex. Being good at one type of problem doesn't necessarily translate into being good at another type of problem. Being gifted doesn't mean you're necessarily smarter than your peers it just means that you're better than they are at a particular type of problem that you aren't generally expected to be good at.

2) Problems get harder at an exponential rate while utility from intelligence improves at a linear rate. Example: Brain surgery is pretty hard. Fighting a gorilla is pretty hard. Now imagine trying to perform brain surgery while simultaneously fighting a gorilla.

If you are gifted as a child then you're solving problems that are harder than what your peers can solve. But as the set of problems you want to solve gets more difficult the value of your giftedness is going to be lessened.

3) Utility = effectiveness * alignment * time (more or less). Having your head in the game (alignment) can make a real difference in whether or not you're useful. Being able to commit more time can make a real difference in whether or not you're useful. And intelligence can affect effectiveness, but experience or having good mentors can also raise your effectiveness (sometimes more than intelligence can).

4) As far as I can tell, some people like to unify all of their experiences into a singular framework of understanding the world and some people like to compartmentalize their experiences into different spheres. To some extent we all do both. Unifying as a child can make you look gifted because you'll start to understand complicated topics where your peers only mimic competency (think having an algorithm that calculates outputs versus a lookup table that just gives out memorized results). However, often in the real world (tm) mimicking is more than effective enough for what people want to get done. So the compartmentalizers are completely adequate. However, the compartmentalizers also can deal with incompatible scenarios much better than the unifiers. If you try to unify the cold logic of a computer with the fuzzy interpersonal relationships of office politics, then you aren't going to be making any progress without years of studying both. However, if you can compartmentalize the two, then you can start being productive and advancing on day one. There's going to be some cap to what you can do as a compartmentalizer, but that cap is probably far above what you need for nearly all domains that most people are likely to encounter.

This resonates a lot with me. I've said before that all the success I've achieved has been in spite of the "gifted" label, not because of it.

Unlike the author, I was lucky enough to experience failure before college, so I didn't enter it thinking I was "special." So many of my peers (as well as my older sister), didn't know how to deal with not being "the best" or having competition from others.

But that doesn't mean I overly excelled in college -- in fact, I didn't really care.

I had a pretty typical quarter life crisis timed with the great-recession and didn't go to grad school or law school, and was in kind of a listless "what am I doing with my life" place for a few years.

My relatives DID comment "it's a shame what happened to filmgirl" -- but in my case, it was absolutely said with judgment (and not a small amount of schadenfreude -- because both my sister and I grew up "beautiful," "talented," and "brilliant" (and in her case, she was also very popular) and then wound up not taking over the world, while my relatives kids became doctors, etc.) and family friends would whisper about all my wasted potential.

For a time, I felt that way too -- and then I got over myself, realized (again), I'm not fucking special and that just because I was given a label that created bullshit expectations on my future, didn't mean I was going to freak out because things didn't go according to plan.

Ironically, within a few years of that quarter-life crisis, I was on TV all the time, I was interviewing high profile people, and doing well for myself in my chosen field. And now I'm in a different field and I work at a large company in a high profile role and make a very good living. On paper, it certainly looks like I've lived up to my potential -- even though the story of how I got there is a lot different.

Which, to me, sort of underscores what bullshit so much of all of this really is.

The schools, the test scores, the labels, they don't matter. They can help, sure -- but having them ins't a guarantee for "success" and not having them doesn't mean you'll never go on to do anything.

For what it's worth, my parents never pressured me and didn't care when I was a fuck-up. They loved and supported me anyway. But I still felt like a failure and a fuckup for not living up to my potential because of the external pressures put on me as a child.

I was deemed gifted in school, and always thought of myself as smart. I've come to realize in adulthood that I just have a fantastic memory which I leaned on for everything. In other forms of intelligence I'm probably around average.

"True" I think as I spend yet another hour clicking links on Hacker News.

> “It’s a shame Heather never did anything with her life.”

> I was about 30 at the time

It's a bit strange and sad that much of society holds this idea that if you haven't achieved greatness before you turn 30, you never will.

The problem with being gifted is that you get used to doing everything effortlessly in school, and then with a little luck you end up on a top-notch University - and all of the sudden you're surrounded by people just as smart or smarter than you, and also more motivated and more ambitious, professors' standards are much higher and you're just not used to working hard. And on top of all that, there's family and peer pressure and expectations, to add to the stress. It sucks, and the only way around is to push gifted kids to work harder when young, giving them special, harder curriculums, forcing them to acquire self-discipline early on, when it's easier...

Funny that only 'gifted' people make comments in this thread, and everybody relates.

I was labeled gifted too, once, by my mommy. Yeah.... It's a hard life, Pfew!

Yes, if you get there early (like in a good school) then your view is complete and you're still happy to later tone the things down and chill on the job.

So, I think they way we try to educate our young is messed up. I was in special ed as a kid, and now I am an engineering leader as an adult.

I'm not sure I've ever read anything which has reached me on such a personal level as this. I should really try harder.

Point being. Grit is what gets you places.

True, but an important corollary is that many people who could serve our world in wonderful ways aren't learning grit, since our school system isn't set up for it and neither are most parents, even if they're smart and have recognized the problem. This is a huge waste of human potential, and also makes them much unhappier than should be possible.

The only way for the society to learn is by doing. We need people who are gifted and have no grit and people who are not gifted but has.

Also don't tell every child they can become anything, they can not. I suggest telling them "they can do anything they set their mind to but they need to want it" that last part is the grit part, gifted people me as well hits a wall at some time in life where the rules and systems (job) do not fall naturally like coursework, here you have two choices stand up and do your job (just know, you will succed it just takes some more time than usual), or don't and be bad at your job and don't excell.

Whining about what you where not taught Fron society or parents gets you nowhere in life, but acceptance and perseverance does, atleas that's my experience.

"Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call 'promising'." --Cyril Connolly

my brother is an actual genius. like Feynman level, without a doubt. he could have done something to change the world.

but he decided early on that life is short and he just wants to have fun. so he works an easy, well paid government engineering job, and plays video games all the time.

Not sarcastically: good for him. Sometimes I wonder if we put too much pressure and expectations on geniuses, like they are supposed to solve the world's problems for us. It's cool to hear your brother is just trying to maximize his happiness like any other person would.

I'm in this picture, and I don't like it

I can confirm the author's experience but from the opposite perspective. In third grade I was diagnosed with ADD. At that time the school didn't know what to do with that, so I was segregated into an "educationally handicapped" class only available at another school across town. So, I had to ride the proverbial "short bus" (for the handicapped kids) and did the rest of elementary school in a "special" classroom in a temporary building isolated on its own from the "normal" classrooms. The other kids in my class had far more severe problems than mine, often both physically and emotionally. The class size was smaller but the teacher had to spend much of her time dealing with challenging issues.

Basically, unlike the author, who was told she was so smart, I was given every overt and covert signal that I was handicapped, both at school and at home. I was "mainstreamed" in middle school but was assigned to go to another "special" classroom for all core subjects. Again, this was the only different classroom on campus. It had double wide doors and actually had a small adjacent observing room with a two way mirror in-between. My fellow students were often so disruptive and required attention from the teacher that I was allowed to spend most classes alone in the "observing closet" reading. It was dark and pretty quiet. Some of my best memories of school actually.

When I was in 8th grade, every 8th grader in the state had to take the same standardized test. It was basically like a middle school SAT. I remember a few weeks after taking the test, the principle of the school came to my special classroom and told me I needed to retake that test, this time in his office while he watched. A week after that I was suddenly re-assigned from that "special" classroom to now take my core subjects not just in the normal classes but in "accelerated" classes for mentally gifted kids.

Obviously, I was simply not neuro-typical. I still struggled mightily with some subjects in school while succeeding wildly in others. My grades were 'A's and 'D's with little in-between. I dropped out of college because I just couldn't get past some required classes. I taught myself computer programming, got deep into technology, got involved very early in a startup, then founded my own startup, then another, then another. Took one to IPO, two others to acquisitions. Stayed with a Fortune 500 acquirer as an executive and eventually ascended to the C-level. Now I'm well-known in my industry and considered a substantial "success" by most standards. I manage armies of incredibly sharp ivy league MBAs and Phds yet have no degree myself (and not for cool Zuckerberg reasons like dropping out of Havard). My Mom still says stuff like "Out of all my kids... well, we thought we'd be caring for you when you grew up and now you're caring for the whole family."

Bottom line, many people see my schooling experience as tragic, and it was truly awful in many ways, but I've always attributed my entrepreneurial drive and much of my success to the perverse experience of being told and treated as if I was handicapped. I worked harder because everyone told me that I'd always have to work harder and nothing would come easy for me. I didn't give up when I failed because I mostly expected to fail.

The biggest realization for me was that this system is an inverse funnel and as we move towards the top, the advantage of your gifts are diminished.

This made me dropout from the academics and do something little of my own which I felt better in doing and I continued at my pace, didn't worry about competitors etc..and it turned out quite well than my student self who wanted to be ahead at any cost.

I was brought up in an environment where everyone told me I am better than others around me, this made me put more and more work untill I couldn't.

Now, I don't believe I am better than others, nor I want to compete with others.

Sounds like engineering class, where every kid in the room is “that kid who is good in math”.

My kid just got into the the local youth symphony (tough competition), and as I explain to her, every kid in that symphony is probably 1st chair in their school, and now one of you will be last chair.

You can be smarter than 99% of the people around you, and there are still 60M people in the world smarter than you.

Maybe you really are not “gifted”. Must be a western thing. My two examples above have a large percentage of Asian students. After reading the “Tiger Mom” book, there certainly wasn’t any coddling in that child rearing.

This is a good realistic perspective. Another great way to look at it positively: surrounding yourself with people better than you is a perfect opportunity to “up your game”. I played a lot of basketball in my youth but was never more than a mediocre player. it wasn’t till my late 20s playing street ball in Oakland that I got a lot better. Those first few weeks were really hard, understanding just how far I was from the other players.

There’s too much focus on “gifted” folks and not enough on normal people. Normal people don’t have a champion in society.

When I graduated school they specifically the degree we have is only a permit to do what we were trained to do. What we do with it is up to us.

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.

Because the article basically assumes that all gifted people are like her. And that being gifted is not so much an asset.

Which is statically wrong. But there is a category of gifted people, and the girl in the article probably belongs to it, which considers that being gifted is so bad and that people who say the opposite just don't understand what being gifted is. I'm gifted and I have no issue with that, like said in the threads they need to stop assuming that because they are gifted everyone owe them everything, work hard like anyone else if you want success

I believe the name for what you're trying to describe is called "clinicians error" or something like that? I see your point. But I think the article speaks to the idea that most people equate being gifted with 100% success. When in fact, like anything else, there are no guarantees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com