Growing up I was always told I was really smart; I had teachers telling me I was the smartest in class, right in front of the other students. I got into the gifted children program and I got into the national-level math competition.
What did that all do? Did it make me grow into the next Einstein or Witten? Nope. All that praise just got to my head. At 15 my head was larger than the Hindenburg, and just as doomed to catastrophic failure.
By high school I didn’t even study. I didn’t put effort into anything. And soon enough my grades started dropping. Pretty soon I was not only not the top student at the school, I was barely the top student in my own circle of friends. Everyone was wondering what was wrong with me. Psychiatrists, counsellors, all that jazz.
Looking back I’m not sure what was wrong with me. I think I was just disillusioned at everything. Maybe I was even a bit depressed. Being the ‘smart’ kid resulted in my not having many friends and generally being alienated from the rest of the world.
It was only much later that I ‘snapped’ out of it, but I think that if I actually had a good motivator, a good teacher, someone with experience and wisdom, things might have turned out differently. But it’s so easy to blame everyone but oneself, I guess. I suppose I’m the one who has to take most of the blame.
Anyway, I tried to catch up with everyone else but it had now become hard, because everyone had spent so much time solving math problems and physics problems. I remember being confused by some integral and one of my friends solving it just like that. I was amazed and incredibly jealous. I resolved to find out his secret. I kept an eye on him and it turned out he was spending ten hours a day at the library solving math problems. I couldn’t imagine anyone putting that much effort into anything, cause I definitely hadn’t ever put that much effort into anything. To my teenage self, ten hours a day seemed like herculean effort.
I think I can somewhat identify with this.
Growing up I was always told I was really smart; I had teachers telling me I was the smartest in class, right in front of the other students. I got into the gifted children program and I got into the national-level math competition.
What did that all do? Did it make me grow into the next Einstein or Witten? Nope. All that praise just got to my head. At 15 my head was larger than the Hindenburg, and just as doomed to catastrophic failure.
By high school I didn’t even study. I didn’t put effort into anything. And soon enough my grades started dropping. Pretty soon I was not only not the top student at the school, I was barely the top student in my own circle of friends. Everyone was wondering what was wrong with me. Psychiatrists, counsellors, all that jazz.
Looking back I’m not sure what was wrong with me. I think I was just disillusioned at everything. Maybe I was even a bit depressed. Being the ‘smart’ kid resulted in my not having many friends and generally being alienated from the rest of the world.
It was only much later that I ‘snapped’ out of it, but I think that if I actually had a good motivator, a good teacher, someone with experience and wisdom, things might have turned out differently. But it’s so easy to blame everyone but oneself, I guess. I suppose I’m the one who has to take most of the blame.
Anyway, I tried to catch up with everyone else but it had now become hard, because everyone had spent so much time solving math problems and physics problems. I remember being confused by some integral and one of my friends solving it just like that. I was amazed and incredibly jealous. I resolved to find out his secret. I kept an eye on him and it turned out he was spending ten hours a day at the library solving math problems. I couldn’t imagine anyone putting that much effort into anything, cause I definitely hadn’t ever put that much effort into anything. To my teenage self, ten hours a day seemed like herculean effort.