From "genius" to "normal", what happened to me?

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I had so many people tell me I was destined for great things that I started to believe it. And when I stopped putting in all the hard work because I thought I was smart enough to get by without it, my grades dropped like a rock.

I changed my tune in college and worked my ass off, which got me appropriately good grades. Turns out the lazy people were right all along and it doesn't matter, but at least I felt good about myself.
 
FinalStageBoss said:
you got lazy. sure you had a more natural learning ability than other kids but you put no work in as you got older.
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This is definitely true for me. OP your story reminds me a lot of my life. I was also "advanced" in elementary school but in Middle School I went into auto pilot and by High School I had dropped out completely. I do have mild ADD as well, I saw that as one of the first responses.
 
vicissitudes said:
As a sidenote, I remember a research related to this phenomenon. They had two cohorts of kids: one cohort was praised for how smart they are. The other was praised for how much effort they put in.

Then they had the two groups work on a puzzle. More kids in second group were able to solve the puzzle successfully. The reason? Those kids, on average, tried to solve the puzzle for a longer period of time before giving up. The first group, praised for their intelligence, expected to get the puzzle naturally since they were naturally smart, so when they didn't, they gave up. The second group kept working on the puzzle because they were praised for being hard workers.

The second group are also more open to trying out new problems and taking more risks, whereas the first group shyed away from such activities, fearing that others' assessment of their intelligence would be proven wrong.

There's quite a bit of research that suggests the deleterious effects of praising kids on "being smart."
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That's actually really fascinating. I'd love to see a study on these students later into their academic career as well. Do the kids who are praised for being smart or putting in more effort have more academic success. Of course there would be more variables, but seeing the basic results of such an experiment could prove greatly beneficial.
 
Your post sounded kind of prideful, so I'd guess that when you were young you were praised by your parents/teacher for being academically above your level and fed into that by being studious. Then as you grew older, your parents/teacher either stopped giving you as much praise, or you just didn't feel rewarded by it and wanted attention/reward through other means like girls and videogames.
 
They put me in an advanced class at public school in like sixth grade. I hated all those kids, and I really wasn't anywhere as smart as they were, and got kicked out. Fuckers judged me for reading Animorphs.
 
Kirosia said:
They put me in an advanced class at public school in like sixth grade. I hated all those kids, and I really wasn't anywhere as smart as they were, and got kicked out. Fuckers judged me for reading Animorphs.
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You couldn't have been THAT smart if you were reading Animorphs pal.
 
vicissitudes said:
As a sidenote, I remember a research related to this phenomenon. They had two cohorts of kids: one cohort was praised for how smart they are. The other was praised for how much effort they put in.

Then they had the two groups work on a puzzle. More kids in second group were able to solve the puzzle successfully. The reason? Those kids, on average, tried to solve the puzzle for a longer period of time before giving up. The first group, praised for their intelligence, expected to get the puzzle naturally since they were naturally smart, so when they didn't, they gave up. The second group kept working on the puzzle because they were praised for being hard workers.

The second group are also more open to trying out new problems and taking more risks, whereas the first group shyed away from such activities, fearing that others' assessment of their intelligence would be proven wrong.

There's quite a bit of research that suggests the deleterious effects of praising kids on "being smart."
Click to expand...

There's an interesting post about this I read a while back, and how playing RPGs is bad in the same way as being praised for being smart: Awesome By Proxy: Addicted to Fake Achievement.
 
FuuRe said:
Guys, i never considered mysefl a genius, hence the quotes.

But i sure was above average compared to my classmates.

I figured a long time ago i'm not a genius, but since i was 12 i don't seem to have significant goals, i lost who i was not in terms of IQ, but on task focus, meaningful goals and achievements.

I lost the ability to support myself academically, that says a lot of who you are and what you can accomplish.

I'm still doing things, planning stuff and trying to get back to college, i just wanted to know if that transition was normal or could be triggered from another thing like a biochemical unbalance on the brain or something else.

I'm grateful of all the on topic responses.
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Wrestled with this question myself (I spiraled downward starting HS- I was placed in classes two grades above me for math, skipped a grade etc...). In all honesty the conclusion I came to is that it's all about how hard you're willing to work and the quality of work that you put out. Stop dwelling on potential and go realize it.

My guess is that you're not used to working hard since it used to come easy to you and so when you struggle, it's an unknown feeling and so you shut down. If you want to go back to school, you should really think about developing your study skills. Increasing attention span for the most part can be trained.
 
Unfortunately the way you developed at an early age likely hurt more than it helped. Things came easy for you and you didn't develop much of a work ethic out of it.
 
PSYGN said:
Your post sounded kind of prideful, so I'd guess that when you were young you were praised by your parents/teacher for being academically above your level and fed into that by being studious. Then as you grew older, your parents/teacher either stopped giving you as much praise, or you just didn't feel rewarded by it and wanted attention/reward through other means like girls and videogames.
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That's what it sounds like to me.
 
Simpsons Season 9, Episode 17 is pretty much what happened to you OP. And not the Lisa portion of the story either.

Some people just get dumber as they grow up. Nothing to be ashamed about. I'm sure you'll find some people who share common interests:

XV6zoh6.png
 
Requiem said:
Talent is useless without work ethic

Work on your motivation and watch your genius return
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Yeah, pretty much. I had to learn the hard way that grades don't mean anything about your intelligence until you're in at least in college. A

lso, a really bad habit of mine was not even trying hard things, out of fear of failing and breaking the 'genius' image people had of me.
 
I went through the same thing. Excellent scores and everything up until mid high school. Then I was stuck in remedial classes and barely graduated. Went strait to community college and barely graduated. Worked a few years, got laid off, went back to school and Boom, honors student and double major now.

So, I guess what I'm saying is don't worry too much about it. Unless I'm wrong.:(
 
It sounds like you were smart enough to change your priorities in life. I couldn't believe how much people still cared about this shit in college.
 
Sounds like a similar scenario I found myself in. Got honors until middle school than everyone else caught up. Now I'm a 2.7 GPA graduate. Had extreme difficulty keeping up with the material but put in a good work ethic to finish.
 
Vince McMahon said:
If you truly are smart, look forward to a lifetime of looking over your shoulder because you'll decide that you're smarter than your superiors at work and start embezzling money and coming up with creative ways to amuse yourself to the company's loss.

I've been there, it's not fun.
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Intelligence and arrogance aren't the same thing. There's a chance you may be both, but even a genius would usually recognize that their superiors likely have something to teach them, if only because they have vastly more experience than you do (even IF they really are less intelligent).

It's not always the case, of course, but if that's your lifetime it's more likely to be the result of a terrible attitude of arrogance on your end than any stupidity on your superiors'.

FuuRe said:
This is my very first thread on GAF, be wary of my non native english and poor choice of correct words to express myself.

During my first years of life i was kinda advanced in terms of learning phases, i learned to read (and fluently) when i was three and before turning 4 i learned to write, i even read a speech for my kindergarten graduation and knew a lot of english words, terms and phrases (Thanks ATARI Basic).

My free time was mostly reading and learning, i didn't like very much to go outside and ride bikes like everyone else, i was happy with my Atari, books, and CNN (Yeah, the news network). I don't think i was autistic since i could spend the entire day playing with my cousins or close friends and i was really in sync with the kids trends of the time like TMNT,nintendo, pizza and whatever else.

I was rejected from several schools after kindergarden because i was deemed "too advanced" and counselors suggested my parents i would be better in a special school for advanced kids.

My mother wanted me to have a normal life, yeah, the one with debts and beer and wrong choices, and i don't hate her for that decision. After i entered a "normal" school i had the highest grades of my class for four straight years.

Then it started

I started to lose interest in studying, for three years i managed to be at least top 3 of my class without making a lot of effort to achieve it but i knew i wasn't who i was before.

Then it really happened

I was 12, and i remember shutting down studies completely, i still was smart, but girls and videogames were a lot more interesting to me, i lost all my abilities to absorb knowledge easily and became a "normal" kid, a normal fat kid bad at sports without any major or minor goal to fulfill.

And it has been like that to this day, graduated from HS with average grades, couldn't get into the top tier colleges in my country, dropped college, became a father (2 more weeks for my second baby girl) and here i am trying to regain my life. And in one of my recurrent "what if" sessions it came to me that maybe there's something wrong inside me, something that made me lose a big part of who i was and wanted to be.

And maybe that "something" can be fixed with... i dunno, sports, medicines...

What happened to me? Hopefully someone can guide or enlighten me.
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That something can be fixed. The fix is called passion.

My life looks much like yours; I had the highest grades in elementary school, my teachers didn't have anything to make me do so instead of stimulating me with something new, they sent me to do shit in a corner of the class. In 4th grade, I spent 2 months remaking my teacher's documents in Word because I just didn't have anything left to learn in her class and that was what she found to make me do.

Then high school came around and by then I was bored; I started studying less and less and my grades steadily dropped from beginning to end (especially in math, I went from 90s to 60s); by the end, I was just about average and I was wondering exactly the same thing as you are thinking today. I went to college anyway, mediocrity followed me throughout.

After that, I took a 2-year break from studying to work and I found a passion in finance. Went back to university this year to further that passion, and you know what? My grades are back (yes, even in math, which is of course central to my classes). I love what I'm studying so much that I'm finding it worth the effort; I'm actually studying now. It's crazy, but that's all it took and now I feel like I found the real me again after so many years gone.

tl;dr:OP, all you need is a passion. Then your motivation will come back, and so will your supposedly gone intelligence.
 
SummitAve said:
It sounds like you were smart enough to change your priorities in life. I couldn't believe how much people still cared about this shit in college.
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image.php


What is this? An avatar for ants?

If you are referring to people still caring about going from a greater intelligence to a more normal intelligence, one would assume that would still be in people's minds due to their want to be superior to others in some aspect, in this case, in intelligence.
 
I have a similar story, except I did some tests at a young age and I was found to have a photographic memory. Fast forward 25 years later, I can hardly remember what I did on the weekend. I was also a 'gifted' child, but I also stopped giving a fuck in school, and that lack of motivation has carried throughout my studies and career to this day.
A good work ethic goes a long way. I wish I had one
 
You got bored/lazy.

You can probably go back and work up the academic food chain, but you gonna have to grind a little bit.
 
Being advanced early on doesn't always correlate with being a genius when mature. In fact I seem to recall reading about this very thing and how many child-geniuses eventually grow up to be smart, but not incredibly so. Perhaps don't think of it in terms of you being smarter then losing it over time, think of it as literally being advanced - your development was accelerated, you reached intellectual maturity faster than other people did, which inflated your classroom performance early on relative to your peers.

Do you still do very well when you apply yourself?
 
Considering how many developmental/life stages ago that was I don't know what you could draw from it, you kind of need comparisons where there's some amount of equivalence. If you had a significant drop from like 25 to 30 or so that might be a bit alarming.
 
Nothing matters until university (to a lesser extent, high school). Genius really isn't the correct term here. You're a genius if you're composing mozart at 3 or doing calculus at 5. Otherwise you were just motivated/taught by your parents to learn basic math and english.
 
vicissitudes said:
As a sidenote, I remember a research related to this phenomenon. They had two cohorts of kids: one cohort was praised for how smart they are. The other was praised for how much effort they put in.

Then they had the two groups work on a puzzle. More kids in second group were able to solve the puzzle successfully. The reason? Those kids, on average, tried to solve the puzzle for a longer period of time before giving up. The first group, praised for their intelligence, expected to get the puzzle naturally since they were naturally smart, so when they didn't, they gave up. The second group kept working on the puzzle because they were praised for being hard workers.

The second group are also more open to trying out new problems and taking more risks, whereas the first group shyed away from such activities, fearing that others' assessment of their intelligence would be proven wrong.

There's quite a bit of research that suggests the deleterious effects of praising kids on "being smart."
Click to expand...

OH FUCK
 
John Kowalski said:
Early intelligence fosters a degree of boredom that can drag people into shitty situations.
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It happened to me... Slept through all of my classes because they were so mind-numbingly easy, and completely lost all desire to learn anything else around high school.

Oh well.
 
Sounds like you had/have potential, OP. You still have to do something with it. John Coltrane for example was a genius but he also practiced 12 hours a day. There are many more examples like that.
 
genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration; there's no accounting for virtuous circles of hard work. newton, einstein, feynman ... all hard workers.
 
Intelligence isn't grades, or the ability to bury yourself in books. In the long run it's intellectual curiosity and an inner drive that will determine how smart you become. All child prodigies eventually grow up and lose the uniqueness of being special. From the sounds of it OP you just didn't ever have the drive necessary to succeed. Maybe you can still find it, it's never too late. Best of luck to you.
 
Same thing happened to me. I lost my motivation.

Then I got into university after just going to community college and graduated with a 4.0. Now I'm a teacher, because I want to help as many kids as I can to stay or get motivated in school and show them the joys of learning.
 
Happens to a lot of people. You were pushed along as a kid but got lazy and didn't continue to work as hard as you got older. May have built a small ego, too. Takes a lot of self discipline to keep pushing yourself and seem "above average."
 
FuuRe said:
This is my very first thread on GAF, be wary of my non native english and poor choice of correct words to express myself.

During my first years of life i was kinda advanced in terms of learning phases, i learned to read (and fluently) when i was three and before turning 4 i learned to write, i even read a speech for my kindergarten graduation and knew a lot of english words, terms and phrases (Thanks ATARI Basic).

My free time was mostly reading and learning, i didn't like very much to go outside and ride bikes like everyone else, i was happy with my Atari, books, and CNN (Yeah, the news network). I don't think i was autistic since i could spend the entire day playing with my cousins or close friends and i was really in sync with the kids trends of the time like TMNT,nintendo, pizza and whatever else.

I was rejected from several schools after kindergarden because i was deemed "too advanced" and counselors suggested my parents i would be better in a special school for advanced kids.

My mother wanted me to have a normal life, yeah, the one with debts and beer and wrong choices, and i don't hate her for that decision. After i entered a "normal" school i had the highest grades of my class for four straight years.

Then it started

I started to lose interest in studying, for three years i managed to be at least top 3 of my class without making a lot of effort to achieve it but i knew i wasn't who i was before.

Then it really happened

I was 12, and i remember shutting down studies completely, i still was smart, but girls and videogames were a lot more interesting to me, i lost all my abilities to absorb knowledge easily and became a "normal" kid, a normal fat kid bad at sports without any major or minor goal to fulfill.

And it has been like that to this day, graduated from HS with average grades, couldn't get into the top tier colleges in my country, dropped college, became a father (2 more weeks for my second baby girl) and here i am trying to regain my life. And in one of my recurrent "what if" sessions it came to me that maybe there's something wrong inside me, something that made me lose a big part of who i was and wanted to be.

And maybe that "something" can be fixed with... i dunno, sports, medicines...

What happened to me? Hopefully someone can guide or enlighten me.
Click to expand...


vicissitudes said:
As a sidenote, I remember a research related to this phenomenon. They had two cohorts of kids: one cohort was praised for how smart they are. The other was praised for how much effort they put in.

Then they had the two groups work on a puzzle. More kids in second group were able to solve the puzzle successfully. The reason? Those kids, on average, tried to solve the puzzle for a longer period of time before giving up. The first group, praised for their intelligence, expected to get the puzzle naturally since they were naturally smart, so when they didn't, they gave up. The second group kept working on the puzzle because they were praised for being hard workers.

The second group are also more open to trying out new problems and taking more risks, whereas the first group shyed away from such activities, fearing that others' assessment of their intelligence would be proven wrong.

There's quite a bit of research that suggests the deleterious effects of praising kids on "being smart."
Click to expand...
I think this is probably right. I've noticed from my experiences in life that people who can absorb and understand things very quickly as children tend to develop a very lazy learning ethic. As they get older and are faced with more difficult subjects that actually require hard work and studying, they begin to falter and a good portion of them fall by the wayside.

Warren Buffett has stated that investing is not a game where the person with an IQ of 160 beats the guy with an IQ of 130. The truth is, that's not only relevant for investing but life in general. I was similar to you in a lot of ways. I was #1 in my class until the 8th grade. I never studied for anything and because of that I ended up taking a soft major which made me even lazier.

RevoDS said:
That something can be fixed. The fix is called passion.
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Listen to this man.

After getting my worthless degree, I found that my passion was in computer programming. One of the things I LOVE about programming -- and this is probably true for most STEM majors -- is that it forces you to learn how to learn. It kicks that stupid part of your mind that says you know everything way down into the gutter. And because I learned to learn, I found that I could tackle any subject. I went from making a C- in remedial math in my first major to making an A in calculus in my second major.

So find a passion, something that motivates you, and accept that you're going to work your ass off if you want to master it. Chances are you still have that spark.
 
I think it happens to a lot of "savants". I'm not sure that's the right term, but you hear stories of kids aged 10-12 learning (or teaching) Calculus and stuff like that, but they they aged and just generally become in-line with other other students once they catch up (though likely still at a high percentile.)

I wouldn't say that I was a "genius" but I had really high top marks in High School and Undergrad but here in graduate school I find myself a little less engaged and interested. GPA isn't as important here but's it's slipped a little bit. I think 2 decades of school work has just kind of taken its toll.
 
I started out advanced as well, graduated HS with top grades, etc. Then University/College happened and everything fell apart. See, my problem is that I am lazy as fuck. You can't cruise through college on smarts, you have to put in the time and work, and I'd rather play games or read fiction or go fishing.

In the end, I developed a work ethic and went back to school and got my BS, but it took awhile and I think that smart guy is gone. I'm 40 now and while I am good at my job I am nowhere near as intelligent or articulated as I was back then.

So laziness and lack of ambition is what happened to me.
 
I used to program VCR controllers with my eyes closed at 7 that I thought I was going to be some kind of genious when I had like 20.

Im a genious alright but not "that" genious, would say the normal genious, well not even a genious more like a normal adult.

Fuck Im dumb as all hell :(
 
Sounds like life choices. If you really wanted to you could have had good grades in high school and possibly made it into a good college. However that wasn't the outcome.
 
Man I was in the 99 percentile in every national/state test through middle school and I'm hitting 30 and I can't even get a tag on GAF :(
 
I don't really get the emphasis that's often placed on intelligence. It seems like in the positive aspect it has people living rich lives with a sense of inspiration and challenge, but intelligence is just a single factor in that and the larger part seems to be us having some meaningful endeavor that we'd take up and use to test ourselves against regardless. It seems like in emphasizing just our natural aptitude for things we're just taking hold of another stick to beat or reprimand ourselves with or use as a measure of social comparison for no real purpose at all. We could always be smarter but I can't understand why we'd care if we're not thinking that way to make our lives fundamentally better somehow.
 
I feel like your situation happens to a lot of people. I always fell in the upper echelon in my classes as a kid, then I stopped giving a fuck. School can never be designed with every child in mind, they need to focus on a certain group, which leaves a lot of people disinterested or confused. If that happens, those kids start focusing on other stuff in their lives. That's what happened to me, probably is what happened to you too.
 
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