Most of the smartypants I know keep themselves entertained by developing tools that allow them to work smarter. And then once they have created those tools, they use them to tackle problems that management doesn’t even know exist.
My workplace is awesome in that managers don’t care what you do as long as fulfill your job duties. So as long as you have pushed all your papers and counted all your beans, you are free to teach yourself a new programming language or whatever. If an employee came to me whining about being bored and not being challenged enough, I really wouldn’t have a whole lot of sympathy for them. There is always a problem that needs fixing, but the problems that are the most interesting will tend to be the ones you discover yourself. Expecting a manager to point you to a problem that will bring excitement to your life is a tall order, IMHO.
I’m raising two kids who are “twice exceptional”, which these days means “gifted” and (strongly correlated with gifted) various ADHD and similar issues.
The fact is it can be extremely difficult. A “Gifted” child can be as “special needs education” as anyone, but this isn’t recognized because the problems are masked, and they nominally meet society’s expectations (of getting good grades in early years). Schools are fond of saying “they’re ahead of the class so they don’t need anything” but fail to recognize that boredom, loneliness, etc. is a cluster of symptoms that deserves as much attention as “struggling” special needs kids. Without support, these can (and do, statistically) turn into behavior problems and other issues that manifest abruptly at times when it most matters (e.g. dropping performance as a teenager due to boredom/tuning out, just when it actually finally matters for college applications/future). My school fought classifying my elder child because performance was “fine” even though it was pretty clear he was going on “gifted” ability and tuning out/not actually learning when he couldn’t rely on that - it was an incredible relief to have his symptoms (via private medical support) finally appropriately diagnosed and treated (through nothing more than verbal counseling, but regular and symptom-specific counseling). My younger child (also “gifted”) had severe anxiety and selective mutism, so much so that it was spotted by teachers in kindergarten. That hasn’t been easy either, but in this case the spotting and early diagnosis was key, and it’s gotten easier as he’s learned to manage.
The thing that makes it hardest is, I can’t count the number of people (both in the education/medical system and just in personal life) who said “your kids are doing fine and don’t need support” because nominally, the “grades” were ok. Tuning into Facebook support groups (for the particular types of issues my kids were facing) revealed this to be a deep problem: so many parents saying “thank god I’m not alone, everyone was telling me my kid was ok and to get over it, even though I could tell they weren’t.”
Right now our school district is on a “all of these gifted programs are racist/etc.” kick and trying to do away with them. This is our next battle. Again, while I sympathize greatly with the resource constraints facing all special-needs kids, and I recognize that it’s our own middle-class privilege that enabled us to fight for the help we needed, the refusal to see these kids as “needing help” (e.g. by providing level-appropriate education so they’re not tuning out) is a deep and systemic failure.
This is why creativity, resourcefulness, and self-awareness matters a lot more than IQ. A manager isn’t paid to entertain employees and break them out of mental ruts. You go to your boss talking about how bored you are and of course you are going to get bullshit tasks in return. If there was a surplus of interesting assignments to be doling out, the boss would’ve already given them to you.
When I was a staff officer, I got bored all the time. So I initiated my own projects. Allowed the manager to take credit for work they didn’t have to develop themselves. Stretched the organizational culture by showing new ways of doing things. Create challenges in my own career by taking risks no one else was taking.
I have two kids that seem pretty bright to me (they are only 1 and 3 though). If it turns out that they are supremely smart, I will be teaching them that the cure for boredom is between their ears and no where else. It’s not a badge of honor or a sign of brilliance. It’s actually the opposite, IMO.
I’m going to answer the OP’s question with “depends.” Let me mention a few cases from my personal experience.
I was a pretty smart kid, maybe not “gifted” but certainly very good with pretty much everything, math, science, languages, music, history, etc. etc. Got bored in school somewhat easily, but that was offset by going to a college-prep type school track and having peers that were, for the most part, “professors’ kids.” So I didn’t stand out that much. I was pretty easy to raise, and as the elder sibling, took care of myself and to some extent helped keep my younger sibling on track. Unfortunately for me, I was always told “you’re so smart!” and it took a big effort to learn how to apply myself. I only really started to buckle down to do homework when I was in my senior year of high school. I did figure this out before it was too late, thankfully.
I am raising a very bright son who also has some autism-spectrum issues (sensory sensitivity, anxiety, somewhat limited range of interests but very deep, etc.). The biggest challenges have been in trying to get him to engage his peers and take an interest in things outside of his computer. While he’s very smart and tests very well compared to his peers, I try to minimize talk like “oh you’re so smart…” etc. as it may tend to give him an unrealistic sense of how difficult things really ought to be. Instead I focus on helping him learn new things and to put in “the work” to get uninteresting tasks done.
My niece has long been known to be super-genius level in math and science. Very unfortunately for her, she has been in a fairly poor school district for much of her schooling thus far, where she is bored and can easily put her teachers to shame. (Meanwhile, power schools like Stanford are banging on the door, trying to get her to enroll in their programs for gifted middle school and high school students.) Add to this, her father and step mom are against education in general and verbally shoot down any discussions of her future there. Apparently I’ve been designated the go-to person in the family for discussions about math and science. It would be great if we lived nearby, but she’s pretty shy and is also suffering from issues such as OCD and pretty severe anxiety. Yes, in her case, she’s having a rough time, and raising her is difficult for a variety of reasons (none of which are her fault). Wish I could do more to help.
I disagree. I’ve never been bored a day in my life. I junior high when I was way ahead of the teacher in Algebra I played with numbers and invented some stuff, which I learned was obvious when I got to the next level. In boring meetings I can plot my book.
I’ve never been bored at work either. First, if you are gifted you should be able to get enough education and be impressive enough at interviews to get non-boring jobs. If you wind up in a boring job, innovate. If you can get through the work quickly, use the time to write a paper or get involved in activities in your field.
Yeah, it is easy to just do the work. I’ve seen plenty of PhDs who did good research when prompted by their advisors fall into the do the next job trap. But that’s on them. If someone is in a place where the management stifles innovation, they should leave.
Of course you have to demonstrate that your innovations work and save time and money. But play your cards right and you get the impossible jobs, which are the fun ones.
This is strange to me. How in the hell does one know whether a manager is “gifted” or not? Do people really go around announcing their “giftedness” in the workplace?
Now, I did once have a manager who told me she’d been identified as gifted as a kid when the two of us were talking about the topic of giftedness in a casual conversation. She was an awesome manager. But she didn’t strike me as being any smarter than any of the folks who reported to her. She was smart, but not OMG!! SMART!! I would later learn that she grew up in an economically depressed rural community. So I have no doubt she was an intellectual stand-out in the schools she attended. But maybe she wouldn’t have been flagged as special if she’d gone to a bigger school with a more competitive field.
I currently have a coworker who once told me (quite proudly) how he was gifted as a youth. And his story was very similar to my old boss’s. Top of the academic hierarchy in his little impoverished backwater, but not any more competent or capable than anyone else in the workplace. He is hard working, I will give him that. But he’s pretty average in the technical arena, with quite a bit of Dunning-Kruger effect working against him at times (to everyone else’s frustration). He wants to be manager one day, and maybe he’d be decent at it. But I don’t think anyone would be able to tell that he was a “gifted” manager.
I had one manager who was gifted. He had a PhD in Math from a top university, he was a poet who got state grants, he was an amateur mycologist who published and who was consulted by the state police for poisoning cases, and, by the way, he taught himself electrical engineering and got several industry awards. He was also a great manager. I’m not sure he was smarter than his staff, but only because he hired the smartest people he could find. He also never bragged.
On the other hand I had some managers who thought they were smart but were far from smart.
You can tell.
It appears to me (from some quick searching online) that intelligent people are actually somewhat less likely to be bored. However, that’s mild correlation, not a large one. Really, it’s better to assume that being bored and being intelligent are just two different things. There may be some connection between them in many cases, but in other cases they aren’t connected.
I can tell the difference between a smart manager and a dumb manager, sure. But I can’t tell the difference between a smart, hard-working manager and a brilliant gifted manager. What are the signs you use to distinguish these two types of individuals?
I’m with monstro on this one; I don’t think you can tell just by looking at what someone achieves in life. A lot of kids who qualify as gifted don’t go on to become accomplished standouts. They are actually at risk for coasting and floundering. Just as it would be wrong to assume these coasters and flounderers are not gifted, it would be wrong to assume that an exceptionally successful person is gifted.
I will grant you that someone who is an award-winning poet, self-taught mycologist Ph.D-holder is likely gifted. But how many of the folks in this thread who were identified as gifted in childhood have accomplishments like this? I doubt very many.
It has been my experience that people identified as gifted in childhood go on to live similar lives relative to their non-gifted counterparts raised in the same socioeconomic background. If you have a decent enough IQ and you are raised by nurturing high-achieving parents, then you will likely be high-achieving yourself. So it amazes me how it always seems like it is high-achieving parents who do most of the worrying about getting their kids identified as gifted. Their kids are not the ones who are high-risk of falling short of their full potential. It is the kids who have low-achieving parents who need special interventions. Because they are the ones destined for boring, tedious jobs if opportunities aren’t opened up for them.
If you are from a well-to-do background and wind up with a career that leaves you feeling bored all the time, then I gotta wonder if you have been taking full advantage of the opportunity available to you. And that goes for gift and non-gifted alike.
One thing I’ve observed between the exceptionally gifted and the “normal” kids in our school district is that the exceptionally gifted kids are often removed from classes with the kids of average or slightly higher-than-average intelligence. From what I’ve heard and seen, this is because, due to their giftedness, many of them find it very difficult to relate to kids their own age. I imagine that might be very lonely because the majority of those kids have a very small subset of peers they interact with regularly and typically don’t socialize outside of that circle. And if they don’t have friends within that circle, they just don’t tend to have friends at school at all. Which probably sucks for them a lot.
Looking at my own kids, my daughter is considered “moderately” gifted while my son (her older brother) is not. In other words, she’s reading at a near high school level in 4th grade, doing math a couple of years above her level, but because you need to pass a standardized test to be placed in the gifted program and she doesn’t do well on those, she’s considered gifted but not quite gifted enough.
What’s great is that her teachers give her advanced work so she doesn’t get bored. However, one thing I find a little troubling about her is that since she’s so accustomed to understanding things really quickly, when she’s presented with a problem she’s not familiar with or finds difficult, she bursts into tears and gives up. So it’s a give and take: she works on a higher level than most of her peers, but melts down when she hits a wall.
My son, on the other hand, is considered of slightly above average intelligence, but the kid, despite his anxiety and despite having slow processing disorder (or maybe because of it because he’s extra careful now about organizing things before working on them), will plow through his homework and tests for as long as it takes for him to get it and demonstrate mastery.
So if I were to predict right now who would be in a better position to handle college, I’d say it’s my son. He’s willing to put the work in and doesn’t lose his shit when he runs into an obstacle. He works through it, asks for help, applies it and knows his learning style well enough to accommodate it more or less independently. My daughter hasn’t had to put the work in so she hasn’t fully fleshed out those skills yet, which in my opinion, would serve her far better than giftedness ever would.
I have no idea if I was “gifted” but I did really well on tests from elementary school though the lower level classes university without really having to study. It wasn’t until I got into upper level classes that I wasn’t able to ace things just from listening in class and minimal work.
However, I had developed no study habits and didn’t know how to persevere when things got difficult so consequently my GPA plummeted.
In contrast, I had a friend in pre-engineering who constantly got B’s in the same classes through hard work. Studying for finals together, I couldn’t believe how organized he was, and the detailed schedule for reviewing material. I would just wing it.
Later, he did better in the upper division classes because he had those great study skills. I’ve lost track of him but I’m certain he would have done very well in life. I didn’t understand it at the time, but the skills are more important than being “smart.”
That extra ounce of creativity and understanding. Pretty much all of our first level managers were smart. Only a few were standouts.
However I agree with you with the face that you can’t tell just from achievements. Besides the problem that a person’s achievements might be personal and not very visible, there are a lot of factors that could hold them back. And Og knows people don’t get promoted on brains alone.
A similar thing is acting ability in kids. Before I got involved in this world, I had no clue as to how to tell a kid with professional potential from one without. Many parents said that their kids could do it, but they just didn’t have the time. Many parents were wrong. The one kid we recommended to our daughter’s manager got signed immediately and did pretty well - for a short time. The Times even liked him.
Another difficulty for gifted kids is a certain “greediness” they encounter from teachers, coaches, etc. On the one hand, it’s amazing to see people excited about working with your child. But when each of them separately tries to pressure the child to maximize their “prodigy” potential in their particular subject area, there ends up being this constant sense to the child that they are disappointing everyone by not choosing to specialize.
This crap actually started at around six years old. Celtling got excited about different things and wanted to try them out. Everything from chess, to violin, to Mandarin caught her eye at one point or another. And as a parent, my job was to make the elements available, and watch for what really fed her soul at any given moment. But I had to watch for signs, and fend off coaches one after the other who wanted to press her to spend hours on becoming their little star pupil.
Meanwhile I’d have one camp accusing me of being a Tiger Mom because my child was in Mandarin class (it was cartoon-based and she loved it!) and another camp vilifying me for not pushing her as hard as they wanted me too in their particular chosen direction. How many times did I hear “She could be truly great, but you need to start now and teach her to apply herself” where “apply herself” meant devoting 2-3 hours per day to their subject area.
Then you find yourself crying along with your child who thinks the coach hates her now because she won’t choose to devote her life to their preference. It’s absolutely incredible what people will lay on these kids. There is an assumption that because they are smart they can handle the pressure. But emotionally they are still only children. And they need freedom to stretch, try things, play, and just be children.
That’s for sure. A teacher told me once that the parents who went to teacher meetings were the parents who didn’t need to, and vice versa.
Our town in NJ was near a lot of research centers, and when the elementary school had a meeting about the GATE program the place was packed. As many people were there as there were at even well attended meetings of our GATE support group covering our entire school district. I know lots of parents, middle class or above, who think school just isn’t that important.
My bosses hobbies probably wouldn’t count as traditional achievements. What turns gifted people on is often a lot different from what counts as traditional success.
I think high creativity is a marker of greatness as well, but I don’t think it maps very well onto high IQ. Thesestudies found that creative potential and IQ exhibit a correlation up to around an IQ of ~120. Above that point, there doesn’t apper to be a significant relationship.
However, the latter study did not find a threshold to creative achievement. Which makes some sense to me. Brainiacs tend to be more educated and credentialed than non-brainiacs. I imagine that education and credentials help a person considerably when seeking a public platform (and thus recognition) for their creative endeavors. When it comes to kids, I would speculate that kids labeled as gifted tend to be given more opportunities to achieve, since there are so many people pushing them to “maximize their potential”.
In my workplace, rockstars(e.g, those folks with the most charisma, most impressive academic backgrounds, and/or most specialized mad skillz) quickly acquire golden halos. These halos shield them from the criticism and skepticism that “mundanes” would normally be subjected to. Which emboldens them to come up with ideas and solutions. So I can see how non-cognitive factors that are correlated with high IQ might explain creative attainment.
So how is separating them supposed to help? That’s the part I’ll never understand about those tracking schools.
The biggest problems I had making friends at school boiled down to: I wasn’t allowed to play on the street, I wasn’t allowed to play on the street and I wasn’t allowed to play on the street. Yes, I’d arrived late and had a clash with the Queen of the Universe on the first day, but not knowing the games and running away as soon as class ended wasn’t helpful. My classmates thought I was a conceited bitch, even though they didn’t know the words.
When they found out that my mother was forcing me to run home so I could do adult-level amounts of housework our pocket version of the Cold War melted down, but by that time I had already missed learning the basics of “how to make friends”. I was used to spending time with other children exclusively when I was acting as a shepherd, and to entertaining myself any time I wasn’t working. That I still couldn’t play on the street didn’t help.
When I went to them, NY schools tracked from fourth grade onwards. What this meant for me was that I had a great high school education. (Junior high too.) Even if I was a bit ahead of the class I wasn’t far ahead. The teachers taught to our level, and I never got bored. We had a minimum of busy work. In AP history after the teacher figured out the kids got it, which didn’t take long, we had few lectures on material and mostly discussions about it. I think we had 1 quiz in 2 years. We all did fine on the AP test.
It was also a good way to make friends who would understand you and who you would understand. And since you were competing with other bright kids, it kept you on your toes, which was good preparation for college.
I understand that you can’t track if there aren’t enough qualified kids, but my graduating class was about 1600, so it was no problem for us.
