Intelligence isn’t responsible for success. Hard-work and intelligence aren’t mutually exclusive. Natural ability/talent is the myth you comfort yourself with when everyone around you works and practices harder. These enlightening ideas are ones I had to come to terms with as I wondered where all the potential I was praised for as a precocious child had gone after failing my freshman year in college. Once I internalized them, and realized that the only thing standing between my goals and I was myself my grades did a 180 and I found a renewed sense of self knowing that I did have autonomy over my life and could determine how far I went. Once I got out of the negative confirmation bias feedback loop, I quickly saw the arrogance of my erroneous ways. I’m a walking example of what our mentality both inhibits and allows us to manifest.
It was the end of a turbulent freshman year and I was left wondering why my mental acuteness seemed to be regressing. My entire sense of self-identity, which was tied around academic achievement, crumbled as my terrible study ethic turned me into an “average” fish in a big pond. A tragic event to someone who’d attributed her sense of identity to being told they were intelligent. Once I failed chemistry, then nearly failed calculus, my self-worth hit rock bottom. Those were the first learning barriers I encountered with no tools to overcome them after coasting by effortlessly in high school to earn my spot as summa cum laude. I thought encountering those learning barriers meant I just wasn’t smart enough to conquer those topics like I’d countered countless others in high school without effort. Because smart people don’t have to work hard. This black and white defeatist attitude is a hallmark of the smart-kid syndrome phenomenon.
All my life, my experiences set up a false dichotomy between hard-work and innate ability or intelligence. A barrage of overheard comments to the tune of, “My daughter’s three years ahead in Math with straight A’s and she never studies!” ingrained in me that success at any level was a natural occurrence – not the result of cultivated practice. That effort was paramount to stupidity because struggle was not a part of reaching success. Because success had always come without the struggle for me so I grew complacent without the resilience, skill set, or even desire to study. “Why study or try if I’m obviously not good at something from the start,” I thought.
That was the beginning of the end. Those with smart-kid syndrome often fail to realize that successful people are the product of hard-work, discipline, and resilience powering them through every learning barrier. Even the geniuses of the world – the Alan Turing’s and Stephen Hawkings – those with a naturally-predisposed ability to excel in certain subjects, didn’t earn their mark in history without a lifetime of academic work and dedication. Intelligence alone means nothing without the hard-work to prove it through creation.
The fault of the former “child-genius” lays in thinking failure is caused by uncontrollable lack of mental ability, instead of a controllable amount of effort. The arrogance of my ways was in thinking things should come easy, because they always had – even at an increased level of difficulty. And if they didn’t that I should just give up because I just wasn’t fit for them. Because “smart people don’t work hard.” Polar opposite, a symptom of this is quitting hobbies once you realize you’re good at them. It’s all about proving ourselves, and once something is easy it reinforces our laziness.
The good news former-smart-kid is, there’s actually nothing wrong with you, you’re the only one stopping yourself from achieving your goals. Nothing has changed but your attitude, you’re still the same kid full of potential and drive you were in grade school. I recently learned that as I opened up my semester grades to reveal a 3.9 average after struggling with C’s on exams starting the Spring semester. A kind of validation which broke through the negative confirmation bias feedback loop I’d become so entrenched in. I called myself an idiot, so my actions reflected that, and my results tainted by that mentality, served as confirmation for those beliefs. Any effort felt like an exercise in futility.
At some point, it got too much to bear – I could light a candle or succumb to the darkness. So I let my failures and my pains drive me into work. Into completely shutting out everything for three weeks and studying for finals and midterms. I would practice until I couldn’t get it wrong. Until I could teach it. ‘Do or do not, there is no try,’ I thought. That candle lit a path, one that showed me I wasn’t actually naturally “bad at math”; I’d gotten a 95 on my statistics final – a class I’d mentally checked out from during every droning, confusing lecture. Out of laziness (stemming from never having to study), I had made a choice to not understand. Because of the fallacious belief that intellectual ability is seperate from effort. That kind of positive validation shattered my belief that I was inherently inept at math, that I couldn’t go on to get a master’s in the subject as I currently plan to.
Being bad at something is a choice. No one is born knowing formulas, knowing quantum physics, no one hits the gym the first time and presses 200 pounds to reach a goal. It’s a learning curve that requires effort. Intelligence alone does not lead to success – not in the long-run. While we, awakened to a very uncomfortable reality, complacently sit in the comfort of our anointed “intelligence,” there’s always someone with a strong work ethic producing results. Internalizing the fact that intelligence alone doesn’t owe you anything will help you grow and reach the goals everyone knew you were capable of since you were a child, but you didn’t allow yourself to fulfill.
Don’t be afraid to be bad at something at first, to fail. Anyone who’s anyone started at the bottom and only climbed to the top by transgressing through the rough terrain, while the equally intelligent, but less resilient individuals didn’t. Embrace that not knowing is the first step to mastering a field, that difficulty isn’t a sign of a lack of intellectual capacity but rather the effort required to master it. A wise man knows he is not wise.
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