And this is also why so many gifted children become mediocre adults.
Growing up 'smart' made me stupid.
I had tests and things, I was marked for inclusion in the TAG program. I got poor grades not because I wasn't smart enough to do the work, but because the work bored the hell out of me and I refused to do homework and thus allow it to intrude upon fun time away from that tedium (I suspect I also dealt with some undiagnosed ADHD; it runs in the family).
The problem though is that when everything comes easy, and you're never given much opportunity and encouragement to challenge yourself, then you also become prone to getting frustrated and confused whenever something isn't coming easily. You're not accustomed to that kind of failure, to not just knowing off the bat or at least being able to pick it up on the fly.
So you give up on things a lot. When you get out into the real world, you wind up with a complex. That stuff that made you 'smart' isn't actually that useful outside of certain areas, so on a 'regular job' you're still functionally useless.
As a kid in the 90s, at the beginning of the great tech boom, the .com crash still on the horizon, you were inundated with messages that said that because you were smart and knew computers you were somehow just on a free ride to be the next Bill Gates. When the reality is that most of the kids who did go that route wound up broke in '99, and the rest just never got that far in the first place.
I genuinely worry that the current startup culture and the push for 'start an app!' programs in schools are headed the same way. Selling tech and 'being smart' as an automatic win at life, which isn't true at all, and 90% of those kids finishing 'accelerated learning' courses in programming will be lucky to grow up writing backend code for a medical insurance billing provider.
I agree and also have faced this problem as I was in the gifted programs all through school, then into university. However, in my third year of University I failed the entire year, owing mostly to the assurance in my ability to just wing it.
This had profound effects on my psyche and over the last two years, I have been trying to reprogram and discover strategies to not fall into this trap. In areas of life where many struggle, I am sharp, but in other areas I really struggle and learning to appreciate the talents of others in this area has been an eye-opener.
One of the major things for me was writing; I just don't find it easy. Possibly the largest change for me was actually facing up to that fact and starting to read and write again, which I hadn't done since high-school.
Now I am enrolled in a MSc program and actively engaged in learning and struggling in the areas I am weak; I believe this change is starting to pay off. The hardest thing was to accept that I wasn't good at everything, and to start working hard like everyone else.
Gifted kids always hear "you're good / you're the best" so they learn to build their self-image based on this external praise. Essentially, since external feedback is always positive, a strong coupling forms between external inputs and one's feeling of self worth.
Later on in life when the world starts to send them not-so-positive feedback about their work, gifted kids take it really badly because the negative feedback hits their core.... whereas a not-so-gifted kids have learned not to take external feedback so seriously long ago.
It's definitely something to watch out for. Remember---you are not your work. Your worth is not connected to what you've achieved or what you own---your worth stems from your human nature, and your unlimited ability to adapt, learn, and do stuff in the future.
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-The-New-Psychology-Success/dp/...
I haven't been able to put my finger on what exactly it is that causes these people to "get lost" on their way, but it is common enough that I think we need to be doing something differently with regards to gifted & talented education in the USA.
One problem is that gifted programs (at least in public schools) are contrary to reality. If the gifted programs in your state are like the one I was enrolled in, then members had to have a 130+ IQ to be admitted. There is the rub. Upon exiting school you suddenly and jarringly discover that not everyone else in the world has a 130+ IQ like the people you spent the past 8-10 years with, and things get very slow. Even at places like Google and Facebook not everyone has a 130+ IQ. The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Some people, like me, have severe difficulties adjusting to this deceleration. I was in gifted programs from first until tenth grade. However, after college (tech Ivy), I spent almost a decade in low-paying and unchallenging jobs while wracked with depression. Only a few years ago was I able to pull myself out of that hole.
The solution is to disband gifted programs. The culture shock experienced by the members once the scaffolding is removed can be pretty severe. It's probably better to make the gifted kids understand that the other 96% of non-gifted people on earth with them are going to be around them all the time. They should learn to deal with it. If there's any gifted education, it should be outside of normal schooling.
There are plenty of students who, when bored or unchallenged, underperform to the point where they are initially mistaken for having an intellectual disability. For these students to have no support throughout school seems like a recipe for these students to "get lost" earlier in their life rather than after high school (where it seems to happen in my anecdotal experience).
On that note, I'm particularly interested in what, if anything, helped you to pull yourself out of the hole: were there any identifiable experiences that helped you find a "sense of direction", for lack of a better term?
As for me, I was correctly diagnosed with bipolar disorder after many years of misdiagnoses. Now with proper treatment I don't have mood swings, take rash actions, or go into months-long dark, suicidally depressive states. But I also can't output 2 weeks of project work in 3 days with 8 hours of sleep anymore. I'll take the good with the bad though. Overall, the death of my father was probably the main catalyst for improving myself.
I was also in a G+T program in the 80s and I'd say a major problem in young adult years is no one cares how smart you are, after 16 or so years of being told there's nothing more important than being smart. Much like your GPA, your IQ is pretty much irrelevant once you graduate. Workplace progress suddenly switches entirely over to who you know, who is your dad, who you impress, who you kiss up to, your golf game, etc.
Artificially concentrating smart kids in a group and then scattering them into the world is pretty counterproductive. I mean, it makes the school district look good ("We have 120 high-IQ students in the county! Stellar exam scores! We're fantastic!"), and at the end of the day, that's all the matters. The school system doesn't care much what happens after the students have left it.
For academic achievement, the majority of research backs up your thesis, and it isn't even a tradeoff, where you get better academics at the expense of worse socialization. Gifted programs don't work. It is far better to accelerate a student to a higher grade, even if it means putting students in classes with much older students (accelerating a gifted student is the most effective positive intervention that can be taken in K-12 education according to Hattie's recent review of meta-analyses, Visible Learning, and nothing else is close). It pushes them academically, and more often than not, helps them socialize, because they learn how older kids interact before internalizing too many abnormal frames and social habits.
So maybe we have to work with what we've got - 14yo that can learn fast - so teach them fast. Can't do it in the regular classroom, so gifted class. Socialization is apparently an issue there (why? same age group as other kids have, same teacher - what's really different?) so work on that.
I wasn't in the gifted programs when I was in school (to the contrary: the K-12 system stuck me in Special Ed for behavioral problems), but... this bit comes as a surprise. I thought Google and Facebook only hired the very gifted in the first place. I do have a 130 IQ (almost exactly, and it would be higher if not for my miserable visual-processing abilities and my "merely gifted" calculation abilities), and I'd be really surprised to find that the top tech companies (or... even... academia...) are filled with people less intelligent than me.
Congratulations: you just made me feel very, very alone.
> The world is a boring and unchallenging place when you're forced to go through it at school-zone speeds.
Yes. Yes, it is. Worse: when you're really really clever, and anywhere near a decent human being, you spend a lot of time failing to understand why the rest of the world seems to be so damn cruel, because after all, from your point of view, anyone with some decent common sense can see, plain as day, how to make things nicer for everyone.
Damn. Damn damn damn.