It’s a regular day at University, forty-five minutes into a two hour lecture on ecosystem management. Around me people are busy scribbling or typing out notes. My paper is empty, except for a single word: boring.

During the break fellow students remark that I should take notes just like the rest of them. I shrug it off and change the subject. When we are discussing the lecture over coffee later that afternoon in a work-group, my opinions and suggestions are deemed unimportant.

“Why are you here if you don’t even pay attention”

Two weeks, three lectures and four work-group meetings later it’s time to hand in our assignment for the course. Most of my textual input has been rewritten by other members, and my comments on the draft have been discarded. Why should you trust the guy who does not even bother to take notes during lectures.

When we get the assignment back from the professor, the grade isn't bad, but certainly not great. When comparing his remarks to my comments on the draft, at least half of them were points I had already mentioned or corrected in my comments on the draft.

Misunderstanding

The story above isn't a stand-alone case, it’s something that happened several times during my years at university, and I’m not the only one it happens to. It is a common problem for gifted people: the lack of effort required for a task is misunderstood for a lack of commitment. And this isn't the only misunderstanding many gifted people experience.

Once people learn that you are gifted, they often expect you to excel at school, university or work. And somehow people also seem to think that being gifted is directly related to being good at math and physics. But in reality, underachievement is one of the biggest problems for gifted students and employees. Just like the rest of the world, practice is the key to excellence, and some fields are just not for you. Being gifted doesn’t mean that you are an all-round genius.

Over-Thinking

Being misunderstood isn’t the only challenge you face when being gifted. Something that I’ve heard time and time again from friends is that I should stop over-thinking everything all the time. What may be something small, like forgetting to send that one mail or reading that one paper, can stay in my head for weeks. On multiple occasions I’ve apologised for things, only to hear that the other didn’t even remember that that happened.

And that book I have to learn for subject x? I really can’t get through it because it just doesn’t interest me, and I much rather learn how to code PHP, or how nitrogen deposition affects the nutrient availability in soils. And no matter how hard I try, focusing on something else then what’s interesting for me at that point just doesn’t work.

The Others

But thankfully there’s those supports groups, right? It may sound good, but when you have to provide proof that your IQ is above a certain number or percentile before you can join a society, I think the boundary is crossed between acting as a support group and acting as a look-at-how-elite-we-are-group.

I spoke with several members of one such group at a career event, and when I presented them with my grades, they simply concluded I couldn’t really be deemed gifted: I didn’t have all A+ on there. If you judge as quickly as that, I think you are missing out on a lot of truly gifted people.

Disclaimer: My opinion on such support groups has been tainted by what happened, and I’m pretty sure that not all of them are like this, it just seems that I meet the wrong people from the groups.