[quote=“ActionAbe, post:12, topic:70232”]
In my own life, I was always told I was smart. I was always told that I bordered on, or was, a genius. The environment I was in was not one where everyone got told that, and I couldn’t discount that. I suffered incredibly for it. “Smart” people get lazy.[/quote]
I know that feel. I’m glad you conquered it in time to make it through tertiary education. It took me two tries before my work ethic improved to where I didn’t feel I could just coast on my “smarts.”
[quote=“ActionAbe, post:12, topic:70232”]
This is my kooky theory: On the balance, everyone is pretty much average in terms of smarts, and it’s all a function of skill acquisition and the ability to interrogate ourselves about our own level of knowledge. Then it comes down to motivation and satisfaction. There is no such thing as genius and there’s no such thing as smarts. There’s really no meaning to those terms. I might even go so far as to say that I despise those concepts and our collective fascination with them.[/quote]
My kooky theory: we all have approximately the same potential brainpower at birth (absent genetic defects or other such congenital conditions), but we are predisposed to certain interests. Mine are math, computers, and books, which correlate highly with things that people consider “intelligence.” However, I’m certainly no more intelligent than my sister, who is fluently bilingual, can sing, act, and play two instruments, and is a social butterfly. It’s just that in our youth, we had different interests, and the opportunity to pursue them, so our respective brainpower was diverted to different tasks.
So, had my parents encouraged me to learn music as a child, I’d probably be better than I am at it, but not as good as my sister, who was more interested, and certainly no Mozart, composing music at age six. I don’t think any amount of social activity would have made me a social butterfly, because I just prefer either solitude or one-on-one conversation.
I agree that a lot of it is work ethic and knowing how to learn, but I would say a large part is also individual interests and the opportunity to follow through on them.