prodigies are amazing, but I often wonder what they end up doing later in life when the intelligence gap between them and their peers converges to zero.
If they're lucky, the gap converges to zero because they surround themselves with more and more intelligent people as time passes. That's a recipe for success.
If they're unlucky, the gap converges to zero because they get used to not having to do much work, "fail upwards" because of the raw intelligence, and then can't keep up when surrounded by similarly intelligent people who actually do the work.
Failing at something you were told you were extremely good at, and hence based your entire identity around, is extremely difficult and demoralizing. Some people can never really recover from that, and AFAIK depression / suicide isn't unheard of.
Definitely not a problem for this particular kid though, "lack of hard work" and "coasting" is evidently not what this person is about.
THe middle scenario is kids that do the work, but stay in their community for economic / political / class / "born in the wrong place" reasons. Their talents are mostly squandered, but they might end up doing something very significant for the communities they're part of.
This used to be extremely common, a medieval peasant or ancient slave would most likely stay in their village, regardless of how much of a genius they were. The modern world made it much less so, and that's something worth celebrating.
Agreed, you put it well. It's really hard to develop a work ethic or learn how to study properly so late.
You lack all the foundational habits and are just used things working out naturally. There are zero consequences, only positive outcomes despite doing the bare minimum. And then it all goes to shit.
In my teens I was in an IRC community full of various hacker/script kiddie miscreants. Some of these people I would call actual geniuses.
The trajectory of everyone ranged from early Facebook employees, a CMU CS PhD, to one literally going to prison for an exploit lol. You can never tell where life will take you.
easy: how many genius people do you know who were also prodigies? early intelligence only gets you so far, the rest depends on hard work, passion, etc.
"Prodigy" and "genius" both lack rigorous definitions, so your problem might simply be one of cherry picking. Going with my own gut on each definition, here are a few examples to add to those already provided by sibling comments:
* Magnus Carlsen (chess grandmaster by 14, world champion for 10 years as an adult)
* Frédéric Chopin (concert pianist at 7, one of the top composers for piano)
* Blaise Pascal (rediscovered Euclid on his own at 12 with no training, went on to become one of the most famous mathematicians of all time).
* John van Neumann (could divide two 8-digit numbers in his head at age 6, learned calculus by 8, went on to be a founding figure in computer science).
If they're unlucky, the gap converges to zero because they get used to not having to do much work, "fail upwards" because of the raw intelligence, and then can't keep up when surrounded by similarly intelligent people who actually do the work.
Failing at something you were told you were extremely good at, and hence based your entire identity around, is extremely difficult and demoralizing. Some people can never really recover from that, and AFAIK depression / suicide isn't unheard of.
Definitely not a problem for this particular kid though, "lack of hard work" and "coasting" is evidently not what this person is about.
THe middle scenario is kids that do the work, but stay in their community for economic / political / class / "born in the wrong place" reasons. Their talents are mostly squandered, but they might end up doing something very significant for the communities they're part of.
This used to be extremely common, a medieval peasant or ancient slave would most likely stay in their village, regardless of how much of a genius they were. The modern world made it much less so, and that's something worth celebrating.