If You’re Naturally Smart, It’s Harder For You To Succeed — The Value of Failure
When I was young, I thought I was a gifted child.
I was able to improve pretty quickly in every activity I took interest in and was always a bit better than the people around me. If I wasn’t the best player, I believed I was at least right behind them in second place.
I had always been a competitive person and cared a lot about winning in the things I was good at. I played every basketball game like it was a championship game, and instead of having fun with friends in video games, I’d look for ways to become the strongest or the highest level or rank amongst them.
I strived to be the best at games and made sure everyone knew it. I practiced alone for many hours so that the next time I could display my skills to my friends, I would be significantly better.
I did not want to fail in front of them, so I made sure no one watched me in my weakest and stupidest moments.
I believed I was the best and made sure that I did everything I could to stay at the top. Even if it meant undermining others and putting people down.
Looking back, I think my inflated ego and aggressive desire to win came from the need to suppress the inferiority complex I struggled with. I didn’t want to be looked down on and searched for ways to inflate my social status.
I also think it was a consequence of my parents trying to build my self-esteem and confidence by telling me I was naturally great at everything I did. I’m not blaming my parents for their style of parenting. I’m saying that their good intentions and strategy to shape me was a double-edged sword.
They helped me develop a natural confidence that helped me tackle new, scary things in life and become a stronger person.
However, their strategy also made me believe that if I ever failed at anything or seemed like I didn’t know something, I would be exposed as a fraud. I wouldn’t be good at everything I tackled. I wouldn’t be the kid genius that they were proud of and showing off to their friends about.
If You Never Try, You’ll Never Fail
So how did I protect my belief of being an innately smart kid? I stopped trying.
Because trying would mean I could fail. Because trying and struggling would mean I wasn’t naturally good at something. I started believing that if I failed or didn’t excel quickly in something I cared about, everyone would see that I wasn’t the smart kid that they thought I was.
I also engaged in what I now recognize as “self-handicapping”. I deliberately did things that would affect my performance negatively in order to give myself an excuse for not doing well. I learned this from an interesting article on procrastination on The Atlantic.
Self-handicapping can be fairly spectacular: in one study, men deliberately chose performance-inhibiting drugs when facing a task they didn’t expect to do well on.
“Instead of studying,” writes the psychologist Edward Hirt, “a student goes to a movie the night before an exam. If he performs poorly, he can attribute his failure to a lack of studying rather than to a lack of ability or intelligence. On the other hand, if he does well on the exam, he may conclude that he has exceptional ability, because he was able to perform well without studying.”
I was able to create a safety net to protect my ego. If I failed, it was just because I wasn’t in the correct state of mind or I had no chance to study. If I succeeded, I could attribute it to my innate talents and could further inflate my ego.
I was able to get through elementary and middle school without studying with decent grades. I decided to protect myself by saying that I simply did not care about studying. I told myself that if I tried hard and “applied myself”, I could probably get high grades, just like my other friends, but I just didn’t care about school.
“This is all boring,” I’d tell myself. “If only I could find something I was actually interested in. I could flourish and show everyone how smart I am. Too bad they only keep teaching me all these useless things. It’s not my fault that I’m doing badly, it’s the school system. They don’t cater to the students and try to find out what we want.”
I indulged in the victimhood mentality. In this world, I was powerless to my oppressors, and could pity myself for the situation I was in. If only they could realize my true potential. If only someone would see that I was a smart kid and could do well if given an opportunity.
I stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. I started skipping classes, which turned into days. I started finding ways to deceive my parents to stop them from nagging at me.
School work got harder. My grades got lower. My parents and sister grew frustrated with my indifference. All they saw was a happy-go-lucky kid, only caring about playing video games and shooting hoops at the park with friends. All my parents saw was a boy throwing away potential and a great future to indulge in the short-term pleasures of life.
In those days, I did not even realize what was happening to me. I did not know that all of my actions stemmed from an insecurity that I had. The imposter syndrome was defining the trajectory of my life.
I was scared to fail, because I thought innately smart kids did not fail at all. They were supposed to be successful at everything they did.
The more people I met and the more I learned about the world, I realized how insignificant my accomplishments were. I met people who could beat me with one hand in basketball. I met people who were ten times smarter than me, and I met people who were twenty times funnier than me.
If they were my age or younger, I was even more devastated. The image I had built for myself crumbled as I grew older, and I became less confident and less competitive. I settled for mediocrity. I surrounded myself with mediocrity so that I could at least be exceptional there.
The Misconception of Gifted Individuals
When we hear about people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, we tend to separate them from the likes of us “commoners”.
This makes us think of their achievements as something unattainable to us.
This makes us think they were destined to do great things, while we are inevitably stuck in our mediocrity.
This makes us think that with their innate talents, they just thought of a great idea, immediately executed on it and gained wild success.
No one wants to hear stories of their past failures. We just want to hear about the millions they raked in with their successful ideas or products. We just want to hear about the success story — the rags to riches, the kid prodigy living up to their potential, the story of the hero.
One thing that connects all these great people is their ability to persevere through their failures. They learned valuable lessons from failing and never gave up even when they were challenged and doubted.
Before launching Microsoft, Bill Gates was a Harvard University drop out and co-owner of a failed business called Traf-O-Data. He started Microsoft and is now one of the richest men in the world.
Steve Jobs dropped out of college after a year and was fired from the company that he started. He ended up leading Apple to become one of the most recognized and valuable brands in the world.
Elon Musk failed to launch three rockets with his company Space X and both Tesla and Space X were on the brink of bankruptcy in 2008. He is now one of the most successful entrepreneurs and many praise him to be one of the greatest minds of the 21st century who will lead humanity to take progressive steps.
Once you realize that failure is a part of the process of learning and growth, you will be able to remove the fear and anxiety of tackling challenges or starting new things. You will realize that we were fed the myth of innate genius, and that we are all bad at things we start.
I read an interesting article that cited a study about students recognizing the value of failing. If students learned about the failures of revered scientists, they recognized failure as valuable and received higher markings on their grades.
As it turns out, recognizing that visionaries such as Albert Einstein experienced failure can actually help students perform better in school. In 2016, the cognitive-studies researcher Xiaodong Lin-Siegler of Columbia University’s Teachers College published a study that found that high-school students’ science grades improved after they learned about the personal and intellectual struggles of scientists including Einstein and Marie Curie. Students who only learned about the scientists’ achievements saw their grades decline.
Could this mean that they were encouraged to try harder and become more resilient after learning that everyone, including the smartest people we know both past and present, fails before succeeding?
If we only see and admire the final product, we’re unable to recognize that there was an entire beautiful and messy process behind the masterpiece.
Great books and artworks weren’t created in one sitting. The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, the Mona Lisa, War and Peace and countless other lionized works all took many years, many failures and edits before appearing to the public eye.
There is value in failing. We have to stop being afraid of failing and putting ourselves out there for the world to see. We have to acknowledge our weakest moments so that our greatest moments can shine brightest.
“It’s not the critic who counts; Not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit goes to the one who is actually in the arena; Who strives valiantly; who errs and comes up short again and again; Who knows the great devotions, the great enthusiasms, and spends himself in a worthy cause. Who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement; and, at the worst, if he fails at least he fails while daring greatly; so that his place will never be among those timid and cold souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
