[nicolethenerd]

There is a distinction between the pressure that comes from growing up in a "tiger family" and the consequences of growing up with the "smart" label, and I feel like the author is conflating the two. Personally, growing up with the label (but not the parental pressure) was one of the best things that could have happened for me and my education - the fact that others believed (whether true or not) that I was lightyears ahead of the class afforded me numerous opportunities - special classes, programs, etc. And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced. Did it inflate my ego a bit as a kid? Sure - but I had good role models to look up to who helped me tamp that down a bit, and I had plenty of time to figure out that I wasn't the smartest kid in the world once I got to MIT (which I might not have gotten into had I not so fervently believed I would!).

I can't comment on what it's like to grow up with the extreme parental pressure the author describes - I didn't experience that, and I'm sorry she had to go through that. But I think that's an entirely separate issue from growing up with the "gifted" label.

[XMPPwocky]

> And more importantly, the fact that I believed it meant that I was able to operate free of insecurities or imposter syndrome that so many of my peers faced.

How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)

Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?

[pizza]

It's nice to hear I'm not the only one as a kid whose reflex was to get suspicious of/thought it was lazy when/ people would quickly decide "you're smart". It seemed to me just like a way to score cheap points. It also made me feel worse about not understanding things easily.. people were telling me I was smart, after all! :P

My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.

[striking]

You can be nice about a well-meaning but ultimately misguided complement without taking it seriously.

[alexanderdmitri]

Someone once pointed out to me I had a tendency to momentarily scowl when complimented and then pretend I hadn't heard it.

Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.

Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.

[pizza]

Agreed, though it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that, haha.

[darkpuma]

Maybe it reflects poorly on my character, but when I was a kid I and several other "gifted" kids turned receiving undue praise into a sport. We'd compete to find the laziest way (without lying) to receive praise specifically from the 'gifted instructor' meant to be supervising us. I think I won when I printed off a picture taken from the mandrelbot set (I did not write the renderer, I just screenshotted it) and hung the printout on the blackboard with the word "Fractal" written underneath it. The response to that was as though I had invented fractals (which of course I never claimed.)

It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.

[XMPPwocky]

As an afterthought, the one thing I do actually find to help with my self-esteem is finding security bugs in places I know others have already looked. There, it's objective- you did something nobody else could. That... that's believable.

But essentially any praise from humans is not.

[em-bee]

or just to be able to keep going until i find that bug where others have given up.

[solidasparagus]

If you are consistently more successful than your peers at school while doing less work, it's pretty easy for a kid to believe they're gifted when everyone is telling them that they are.

[crooked-v]

I still remember eighth grade and the teacher who used the 'smart' kids of the advanced math classes as an excuse to not actually bother teaching anything and make it all 'self study'. My math grade went from a solid A to a D in the course of one semester because I couldn't just figure it out myself from the book.

[DoreenMichele]

I was one of the "smart kids" the teachers held up as an example. It made me a target of rampant hatred and helped to socially isolate me at school.

It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.

[barry-cotter]

“Look at Tim, he’s 16 and already 6’ tall. Why can’t the rest of you actually try to be tall, like Tim. You’re just slacking, sitting there at only 5’4”.”

[DoreenMichele]

Yes. Only more like "I'm such an amazing teacher, that's why he's so tall. But you slackers aren't even trying and it's making me look bad!"

I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.

Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.

Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"

Gee, thanks.

(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)

[em-bee]

you overestimate what it takes to be one of the best programmers. they are not geniuses. they just work harder. that makes a big difference. what you did does set you apart, and if you keep it up, it is exactly what will make you a great programmer. it makes you the kind of person i want to hire.

and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.

that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.

[sombremesa]

Ironically enough, it could be the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.

[shripadk]

The difference is subtle. The difference is that you were called "smart" in the areas you showed interest in. That propelled you to improve further and always be ahead of your contemporaries. In her case (and many in China and India - where I come from) society has certain expectations from you. It doesn't matter if you are interested in something else entirely. Maybe you have a liking for arts. Or for music. These are considered "secondary". There are certain core subjects that you have to compulsorily master else you won't have any "value" in society. Now when you get labelled "smart" for something you have no interest in but you have to do because you have no choice that label doesn't really give you any satisfaction. It just so happens that you did it because the society wants you to. Not because you want to. And then you have to live up to the label now that everyone knows you are "smart". It is a vicious cycle that is hard to get out of.

That doesn't mean the society discourages you from learning arts, music or anything else. You have to make room for it in your spare time.

Also, examinations to get into prestigious universities are brutal compared to the West. Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify. You can take a look at how tough the exam is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h_x13xHjVs

To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 1%. I am not even considering Medical (NEET), MBA (CAT) or Civil Services (UPSC) which is equally hard.

EDIT: Corrected 0.01% to 1%.

[thaumasiotes]

> Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify.

> To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 0.01%.

Your numbers suggest 1%, not 0.01%. 0.01% of a million examinees would be 100 passing scores.

[shripadk]

Ah sorry I meant to say 1% (I was thinking 0.01 in my head). Edited it. Thanks!

[thaumasiotes]

A more niche question: how does that biased 1% figure translate into selectivity at the level of the general population?

For example, if every eligible student takes the test and 1% of examinees pass, then the threshold for passing the test is being in the top 1% of the eligible population. If 30% of the eligible population at random take the exam, and 1% pass, then the threshold for passing the test is a little more lenient than the 1% figure makes it appear. But if some people identify beforehand that they are unlikely to pass, and don't bother -- say that the top 30% of eligible students all take the test, and the bottom 70% all don't -- then the threshold is much more strict then it appears; in the example, if 1% of examinees pass, then the passing threshold would actually be top 0.3%, not top 1%.

[shripadk]

Yes you are right in a way. Lets put it into perspective: The total number of students who gave their 12th final board exams was 1.43 crore in 2017 (https://www.india.com/education/board-examinations-2017-over...). That is roughly 14.3 million students. This is an aggregation across all boards: ICSE, CBSE and various State Boards. Let us assume that the same number of students gave their board exams in 2018 as well (I am sure the number is higher but I can't find stats for it).

Now not all of these 14.3 million students appear for IIT JEE. Only 7% of these (1 million) appear for JEE. But since you talk about "eligible student", all the 14.3 million are eligible. But many don't even bother to take it because (as you mentioned) they know they don't stand a chance. Many of them are not interested in Engineering and are interested in Medical. These students take up NEET (which is equally tough). The remaining move on to do Arts, Commerce or any other stream with an aim to either do an MBA (through CAT), become a CA, LLB (for law) or pursue Civil Services (UPSC - as tough or some say even tougher than IIT JEE). The outliers are those that do not follow any of these well trodden paths: these are few and far between. So in reality only 7% of those eligible students appear for IIT JEE and then 1% of those appearing get selected.

The other fact you need to consider is that the Government of India expanded the number of IITs from the earlier 7 (as of 2001) to now 23 (as of 2018) and increased the total number of seats from 4500 to 12000. So an approx 3x jump in the number of seats keeping in mind the total number of aspirants taking the exam. So the pass percentage remains roughly the same year-on-year. I am sure if you now take 30% of the total eligible population (from your example), viz. 4.29 million students appearing for the exam, the percentage that pass will further decrease (from 1% to 0.28%). Because students are ranked and IIT seats that are fixed (around 12000) are filled rank-wise.

[chess93]

I'm glad the label worked for you but it did not work at all for me. It kind of shoehorned me in to a personality type and limited my social options.

In all honesty I look back at my "smartness" as a kind of attention-seeking behavior where all I really wanted was the attention you got from getting the highest grade in the class or being the only one from your school to go to the ivy league.

To me, the smart label just means you are willing to sacrifice more than others to study/learn/build. Everything I have learned about people since starting college has told me that this is a net negative.

[akhilcacharya]

Believe me, it’s much worse being considered not intelligent instead. I knew so many people growing up that were orders of magnitude more intelligent and accomplished than me (and I still do).

[xtiansimon]

>> ‘...look back at my "smartness" as a kind of attention-seeking behavior...’

Isn’t attention-seeking sort of hard-wired into all dependent animals? So, well. You’re normal there.

[lawn]

Growing up with the "smart" label was the worst thing that happened for me and my education. It made me lazy and I almost never got challenged. If I had grown up in a challenging environment I could've easily progressed years faster (in areas like math and programming) than I did. I didn't have any parental pressure, or pressure of any kind either.

It wasn't until middle of the University I learned that I actually had to work and study to understanding something.

[barry-cotter]

You weren't challenged because the school system regards every child who gets an A as a success, full stop. That they put no effort into doing so or were capable of learning the requisite material three years before is immaterial. The smart label is irrelevant compared to the incentives teachers and administrators labour under and they get nothing for helping children fulfil their potential. They’re judged by average achievement on tests set for average children.

[rjsw]

Seems to me that having the label gives you confidence that if you think you understand something then you are probably correct. You can then build on that to learn the next thing quicker.

[hooande]

If you're really smart, you won't need someone to tell you that. It will be evident.

Once you realize you're playing a level up, you won't need encouragement from authority figures. You'll be trying to reach and surpass the greats, all on your own.

[akhilcacharya]

I grew up similarly but with very different results because I’m not intelligent - the proof is in me not getting into MIT. I think you’re the odd one out here.

[usbseeker]

Has your experience led you to develop any innovations?