Random Non Sequitur

If you grew up in the eighties or onward, you probably heard the term “gifted child” a lot. Maybe you even had it applied to you. Generally, all it meant was that you got to skip normal class once a week to go to a much more interesting and fun class. I was one of those kids. In Illinois, “gifted” simply means you scored in the top 8% on standardized tests (you know, the ones that test your ability to use a #2 pencil correctly), but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. The very word itself is misleading. I thought it meant I had a gift — something that was given to me.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this as I read Gladwell’s latest book Outliers. I won’t go into the details of what he says in the book, because it’s worth checking out on your own. But the basics of what he discovered when he studied exceptionalism can be summed up in two sentences. Experts practice a lot, and must have the opportunity to do so to become experts. And seemingly arbitrary factors such as when you were born or where you were raised can have a big impact on your success.

Suddenly the truth of the gifted program becomes clear. For some reason or another, some kids got a jump-start on their intellectual development. The top 8% were identified as efficiently as possible and accelerated. I guess that’s the best public school can do, and I’ll never fault them for that. They simply can’t help everyone. But it certainly does reveal a few things about the pattern I have observed as the lot of us age into gifted ex-children.

As you grow up, the special programs tend to disappear, and by the time you reach college it’s assumed that you are capable of finding something suitably challenging on your own. Additionally, your exceptional intellectual growth as a child has probably slowed down and the other students are catching up to you. You may even be starting to see them pass you. Just like that, the gifted label is gone. Children are gifted. Adults are ambitious, hard-working, and driven.

So what happens to you now? The understanding that you are somehow different from the people around you has already become a part of your subconscious. You might struggle to fill the void of the “gifted” label with something else. “Nerd” or “geek” maybe. You might feel pulled towards engineering and computer science, where the myth of exceptionalism still thrives. Or maybe you just let it go quietly, and mourn the death of your childhood potential. It was nice while it lasted.

But the fact is, you were never gifted. No one is. No one is deemed worthy of some special gift that makes them better than everyone else. And the myth that you were may – may – have prevented you from doing the things that you needed to do to become truly great. Like working hard. Seeking challenges. And not taking anything on faith.

I spent four years in college doing more or less nothing and wasted every good educational opportunity I had because I believed I was too good for it. Because it’s hard to hear that getting good takes work – no more, no less. I’m lucky in that I have a singular love for what I do that kept me plugging away at it, but I still struggle with the notion of hard work and practice. I get angry at myself when I don’t do something perfectly the first time. I have to coach myself to keep trying. It gets better slowly but only through extreme, sometimes painful awareness of the fact that I am not gifted.

But in a way it’s kind of nice. I always felt guilty, that I never deserved whatever “gift” I got. Now I know that it’s just a frame of mind — and that can be taught. And where there are people willing to teach, we are all gifted.

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