Had the top conversation in third grade. Have spent the rest of my life in the blue zone.
I avoided it by coasting, they did testing in kindergarten and I realized fast I didn’t want the attention. Especially being treated like a trophy by my dad.
Do I regret coasting now, of course. Do it for your self-confidence, later in life you’ll be happier you did.
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So I’m curious, how did you end up? Is there anything in your adult life that indicates your capabilities are above average?
There is no green region. It’s blue all the way up.
I like the term “twice exceptional”. All of my biggest strengths are aspects of myself that come with tradeoffs. For 20 years straight, I was praised for the strengths and scolded for the tradeoffs. Motherfucker, you can’t enjoy how quickly I learn things I’m interested in and also treat me like I’m lazy when you expect me to sustain equal amounts of interest in 10 different things that bore me and I fail. You can’t enjoy all the art and tech I make and then get annoyed when it’s difficult to break me out of a hyperfixation.
I firmly believe that the tortured artist stereotype is bullshit. There’s nothing about being an artist that requires you to be miserable. But we sure do treat people like shit when their brains work differently.
The later half is so true, early on when you’re a statistical anomaly you can get special treatment, but once you become a small problem or the skill backfires they blow up as if it couldn’t have been seen coming. They expect 100% efficiency like you’re a battery to sap and don’t care how it affects you mentally.
Others have touched on this, but ultimately the most vital trait a person can possess is perseverance and a bias for action. I would gladly work with a mediocre person who works relentlessly at improving their skills and figuring out solutions. I don’t enjoy working with “gifted” people who have plenty of ideas and few actions to show for it. Intelligence can make you risk averse, and you’re useless if you’re too afraid to take any action.
bias for action
Bezos intensifies
Which is the curse, built in risk aversion. 🥴
The creator of this comic is a self-described pro-sweatshop neoliberal, which explains the “woe is me, I’m too smart for my own good” delusions.
Do you have a source for that? I cannot find anything about it online in Google, Wiki or even in ChatGPT delusions.
I don’t think he’s ever come out in favor of sweatshops? Maybe you’re think of Matt ygelsia from vox.
Yeah the comic reeks of PMC brainworms. I say that as someone with PMC brainworms. “You’re special enough to make decisions, but make sure you cultivate too much self-doubt to make true change.”
That doesn’t fit with anything I know about Weinersmith. You got any source?
Sure, because something so egregious would definitely show up in a Google search for “Zach Weinersmith sweatshop”, right?
Unless…you’re exaggerating on the Internet to stir up outrage?
Awareness of your own weaknesses is the first step to make them your strengths.
Yes, this is funny, but anyone worth knowing in a PhD program will quote Hawkings at you if you take the green part too seriously.
“Only losers brag about their IQ.”
Or Thomas Edison (and yes, he was actually a decent engineer before he realized how much easier it is to just own a company)
“Great accomplishments depend not so much on ingenuity as on hard work.”
This is funny, but even the most intelligent people are inflicted with this. Don’t let it keep you down, we cannot be good at everything.
Its been consistently self-reported by Harvard students. And another effect is present, too - excellence leads to being placed in competitive environments, where everyone else is just as excellent. And this can make brilliant people feel stupid.
Intelligence also doesn’t necessarily translate to actual success. I’ve been through numerous assessments as a child that confirmed I am comfortably in the “green zone” (if measured by IQ, that is), but I also have pretty severe ADHD so I can only really make use of my brain for short periods of time.
I can get a week’s worth of work done in a day, but only once a week, and I spend the rest of the week wondering where I’d be if only I could work like that every day. I was also a decent student in school/uni but never near the top of the class, because I couldn’t bring myself to study for anything more than a few days before the exam.
No we’re not, you’re just in the blue zone. Us greens are quite happy.
Found the red
Well, there necessarily need to also exist below average Harvard students. Its probably more of a shock to have the one thing you might have been proud of, being rather smart, be taken away once you get there and realize you are probably at most average and have to find a new identity
But its just an illusion.
Like I’m even good enough to have imposter syndrome.
Who wants to bet that most commenters will place themselves in the blue zone?
Thankfully I can look down on everyone as I’m firmly at the top of that curve.
A lack of self-awareness does come with its perks.
Is it surprising that people like that gravitate to a place like this?
No it’s not and it’s also weird to treat that percentile as if people in it are extremely rare. People who fall in the blue area (noticably higher than average intelligence, but not exceptional) are about 15% of the population. The problem is that people somehow feel attacked if someone claims themself to be clever and it’s accepted to shame them for that.
Ah, I see the stereotype of everyone thinking of themselves as “lazy genius” is something we’ve carried over from Reddit. We’re all above average intelligent and could really achieve something if we just bothered to work hard and apply ourselves!
lol
Yeah, one of the most important epiphanies I’ve ever had is realizing I’m not a lazy genius, I’m just lazy. It was a rude awakening to realize that I need to work twice as hard to keep up. But it was probably the best thing to happen to me!
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Only the very stable ones.
You’re gifted enough to cruise through the first few stages of your education without trying, so you forge an identity as “the smart kid” but never build up skills in learning or studying, so when you finally get to a level where your natural intelligence can’t carry you anymore you can’t keep up with the people who did learn those skills and you start to fail and lose your identity as the smart kid which causes you to break down because that’d how you defined yourself for so long… or so I’ve heard.
Excuse me, I resent being attacked at 5am on a Friday, tyvm.
I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.
Then the math got complicated and I didn’t know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I “lost” that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.
I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn’t really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.
I am crossing this divide now. I have secondary education but no university and I am working to get to med school now (In Finland it is a combined undergrad and med school). I think I can do it but I don’t really know how to study. I know how to learn but learning in schedule is the issue. I was too ill to go to university when I should have and I could have gone to easier courses I could have gone to without an entrance exam and done OK but I always wanted medicine. Or well, I not easier but easier to get into like maths. After I got better I ended up in aid work, and stopping that is really hard. But I still want to become a doctor so I am trying now in my thirties. Having what looks like undiagnosed ADHD that is now under investigation and crappy childhood might explain part of why I never became what people felt I should have but the fact that I never had to learn to study because I didn’t need to get through is up there.
I try to remember that our education does not mean anything for our value, but it seems hard when it comes to you.
More or less the same, except I ran out of steam somewhere in the calc 2 to calc 3 area…so instead of becoming an engineer, I became someone who works for them.
In some ways it ain’t bad. I’m “skilled technical staff” whose work makes my position “salary non-exempt”, which means that at most companies/employers, my work gets guaranteed salary pay, but if I am asked to go over 40h in any given week, they’re legally obligated to pay me 1.5x OT pay.
Why did you have to remind me of my higher education failures
That stang…
Also, when you see it happen and you actually start trying and do better but some teachers always give you a lower mark to “motivate” you so you’ll “try even harder”.
some teachers always give you a lower mark to “motivate” you so you’ll “try even harder”.
Do people actually do this? I know one thing for sure: someone who does that is not “gifted”
Yes they do. The old “we expect more from YOU”.
Yes, they do…
Wow, that’s exactly what I’ve… heard… too!
First half describes me, second part does not. Never struggled in school or university (although I did fail lectures because I was too lazy to show up for exams).
But I also never defined myself about being “the smart kid”, I always rejected that notion. Society didn’t and still projected it onto me. That’s why I’m breaking down crying every other day. I always tried to help people that do struggle, I always tried to keep my “gift” as far away from conversation as possible. It didn’t matter, I’m a failure.
That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.
This is actually the reason. Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”. Not more than there is “natural strength”. There are natural predispositions, yes, but what you get is function of what training effort you put in. Whether you realise, and/or like, putting effort into training your intelligence, is is another thing. So people who are “above average” were in a favorable environment that fostered their development without it feeling forced, or unnatural. And then, when the environment was replaced by the school’s, it sadly didn’t foster personal development anymore. I would argue we would need to redesign education, now that we have internet. We don’t have to design courses around physical limits.
Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”.
Weell, some children have it easier to comprehend stuff on the logical/abstract level than others. Which feeds their curiousity. Which trains their intelligence…
Well you have to meet these people with down syndrome
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It is also not always about our intelligence but our skill set. I rarely have hard time learning when I want, but issue in my case has been in addition to probable ADHD and mental health issues that the system wasn’t designed to teach me studying.
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“Gifted” programs royally screwed my education. I had huge gaps in my knowledge because they decided that being top percentile in reading/writing (and being the weird kid) meant I could just skip out on classes for special little weird classes or sit with higher grade classes. I just had ADHD btw and really liked to read. Anyway, I would LOVE to know wtf they thought they were doing moving a kid around that much in 3rd-5th. I suffered the hardest with math. I was missing bits and pieces, which is pretty gd important in math, and I’d still somehow get the answers right but talked to about my overly complicated or ✨creative✨ solutions lol. Even now I hide my work if I need to solve something because I’m probably doing it weird… Then later it was really fun finding out that I couldn’t really live up to being “gifted”. 0/10 being special made me less educated.
For what it’s worth, math can be taught very linearly, but I think it can be explored and approached many different ways. I did the same thing, the teachers would say “I don’t know how, but you got the right answer”.
I kind of wish we leaned more into the way individual kids intuitions of math worked, I think you could teach the foundations much faster that way.
3-5 is mostly arithmetic and intro to word problems anyway, I’m awful at arithmetic but it doesn’t affect doing any of the important parts of math.
Skipping classes as a “gifted” kid always seemed like a very weird concept to me, you’re making the child lose a lot of interaction with their peers for dubious reasons. It seems to me like it should only be reserved for the most bulging hyperwrinkled brains, like those kids that finish college by the time they’re 16 or whatever that would obviously be extremely understimulated when going the normal pace. Even then you could argue the gigabrain kid would probably benefit greatly from socializing with their peers, I mean where’s the rush really? They’re young, they can always learn more later.
those kids that finish college by 16 usually just have parents that pay a fuckton of money to skip their kids through the honestly very simple and bleak public schooling experience. has nothing to do with intelligence and everything to do with not dragging out units for ages and paying a small fortune to get private tutors and certified testing done.
“well if those kids are so smart surely they can do more with less right?”
-average conversation at an budgetary meeting for education, probably
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Truth. When I was in the gifted reading program us dweebs had to temporarily be relocated to the teachers break room.
I’m sure the teachers that shared that break time with us didn’t enjoy it.
was just joking around with a sibling about how some of the most intensely “being highly intelligent is my identity” people from high school with supportive families grew up to be dumb as hell.
the gifted valedictorian became a nurse, then went full “iraq had WMDs, but it was classified” chud, quit the workforce to have 4 children, is a god-tier horder with rooms full of actual garbage, and now is entangled in several MLMs shoveling a spouse’s very high income into a blackhole.
the “actually, i have a 160 IQ” inherited a bunch of $$, bought a bunch of vehicles, had 5 kids, went full blown “dance mom” facebook+social media freakshow, and spends most of their effort trying to cultivate inappropriate relationships and fabricate dramas with other married spouses in their neighborhood.
excellence and success are subjective. a life of curiosity, personal enrichment, family, and friends can be excellent without needing accolades or other features of careerist striving. but i’ll be damned if some really “smart” people don’t take their potential and, in defiance of the odds, turn it into a shit smoothie.
You sound bitter and cruel. Nursing is a wonderful profession that requires a lot of intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with having children. Hoarding is a fucking mental disorder and one of the most intelligent men I know struggled with it.
you sound like you are entangled in several MLMs.
There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
Was this from Dexter? I feel like this is from Dexter.
I thought Wednesday Addam’s said that?
100% Wednesday Addams.
It might be the best line/delivery in a movie full of great ones, and maybe Christina Ricci’s best as well.
Oh I think your right.
I could totally have seen this been a joke delivered by Dexter, going out for Trick or Treating with Asher and Cody, or going to an office costume party.
