You're Smart. So What?: Examining the Importance of Soft Skills

Fairly anti-climatic. For someone that it comes easy too there is no real emotion or sense of accomplishment.

It would be like trying to explain the color green to someone that was born blind.

In general there was an attitude among my circle of friends to try and show off how little work they can do to still pull off a high score. I would say yes, most of the people I know who are considered "gifted" in general do work harder in the background than they let on. They themselves probably want to believe that they can effortlessly achieve in the classroom (and probably in life).

I think for me, at least, what happened was that I would really get into things and work extremely hard for a short period of time (sometimes without realizing it) and then coast for a while and appear as though I'm super talented and naturally good at many subjects. I don't think I was consciously planning any of this, but it just happened that way.

Looking back now, I do think that the attitude was pretty immature and obnoxious.

But, that said, my idea of skipping school was heading downtown to the GWU library. I started taking AP courses as a sophomore and always had long-term papers to write. I spent much of my senior year in a local wetland taking water samples.

There was definitely a balance. I tended to work hard at things that I enjoyed and completely blow off stuff that I deemed tedious or irrelevant. And overall, the balance usually fell in my favor.

There were students at school who were both smarter and harder working than I. And some of them were accepted at elite universities, where I landed at a top-notch public. But, we tended to have vastly different approaches to life. They live to work and found careers that they love. I work to live and found a career that I don't hate (but mostly, just want to get my paycheck and go mountain biking, kayaking, or something else outdoors).

And like another response indicated, this was all just natural. My peers were all overachievers, most of them naturally so.

Actually, one of my favorite memories from university is from an algorithms test. We had to find nearest smallest neighbors, or something like that, in O(n lg n) time. Our professor was good, and an algorithms guy, so I was surprised when I realized it could be done with just two sweeps across the list [O(n)]. When I showed him (I was wondering if the question mentioning 'divide and conquer' was a hint or a restriction), he couldn't believe he'd missed it.

I picked up the knack for listening to what teachers emphasized while teaching and correlated that to the home work, drew parallels and 9 times out of 10, most of what they had in common was on the test - so no extra studying needed. It was easier for things like Maths, Physics and Chemistry because you have a formula to use - and all the questions that revolved around these forumlae had keywords as far as what facts you have to use and what you need to find. Once you see the pattern, you can apply the forumula (which you've probably seen at least a dozen times in class and/or homework) at this point and its just applying it.

As far as things like vocabulary or other word definitions go, I've learned how to photographically remember things so I could breeze through a textbook and remember key words and/or key dates and look for those in questions on the test.

I dont mean to say that it is either hard or only gifted people can do it, I think everyone has their own unique learning style and once they figure out what works for them, tests can be easy.