Comment by XMPPwocky | Hacker News Reader

Comment by XMPPwocky | Hacker News Reader

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> And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced.

How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)

Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?

It's nice to hear I'm not the only one as a kid whose reflex was to get suspicious of/thought it was lazy when/ people would quickly decide "you're smart". It seemed to me just like a way to score cheap points. It also made me feel worse about not understanding things easily.. people were telling me I was smart, after all! :P

My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.

You can be nice about a well-meaning but ultimately misguided complement without taking it seriously.

Someone once pointed out to me I had a tendency to momentarily scowl when complimented and then pretend I hadn't heard it.

Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.

Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.

Agreed, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, haha.

Maybe it reflects poorly on my character, but when I was a kid I and several other "gifted" kids turned receiving undue praise into a sport. We'd compete to find the laziest way (without lying) to receive praise specifically from the 'gifted instructor' meant to be supervising us. I think I won when I printed off a picture taken from the mandrelbot set (I did not write the renderer, I just screenshotted it) and hung the printout on the blackboard with the word "Fractal" written underneath it. The response to that was as though I had invented fractals (which of course I never claimed.)

It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.

As an afterthought, the one thing I do actually find to help with my self-esteem is finding security bugs in places I know others have already looked. There, it's objective- you did something nobody else could. That... that's believable.

But essentially any praise from humans is not.

or just to be able to keep going until i find that bug where others have given up.

If you are consistently more successful than your peers at school while doing less work, it's pretty easy for a kid to believe they're gifted when everyone is telling them that they are.

I still remember eighth grade and the teacher who used the 'smart' kids of the advanced math classes as an excuse to not actually bother teaching anything and make it all 'self study'. My math grade went from a solid A to a D in the course of one semester because I couldn't just figure it out myself from the book.

I was one of the "smart kids" the teachers held up as an example. It made me a target of rampant hatred and helped to socially isolate me at school.

It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.

“Look at Tim, he’s 16 and already 6’ tall. Why can’t the rest of you actually try to be tall, like Tim. You’re just slacking, sitting there at only 5’4”.”

Yes. Only more like "I'm such an amazing teacher, that's why he's so tall. But you slackers aren't even trying and it's making me look bad!"

I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.

Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.

Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"

Gee, thanks.

(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)

you overestimate what it takes to be one of the best programmers. they are not geniuses. they just work harder. that makes a big difference. what you did does set you apart, and if you keep it up, it is exactly what will make you a great programmer. it makes you the kind of person i want to hire.

and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.

that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.

Ironically enough, it could be the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

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