why not both? I’m a formerly “gifted” child who is now an anxious adult with dozens of abandoned hobbies and unfinished projects. I’m also a doctor.
Me too! Got diagnosed with ADHD about 4-5 years ago. Somehow made it all the way through medical training white knuckling on anxiety and caffeine, lol. Vyvanse is much better.
“Im a doctor and I use lemmy”
Sir, exactly what kind of doctor are you?
Oh, can definitely confirm. Also ADHD is often misdiagnosed by school faculty as “gifted but not reaching potential.”
You are getting my upvote due to a lifetime of wasted potential
I am the former. “You’re so smart, you just don’t apply yourself” is a sentence I have heard my whole damn life.
I feel rage at this
The most autistic professional I’ve ever encountered was an anesthesiologist. He explained in an excited monotone every detail about how anesthesia works before a surgery I was scheduled to have. I cracked some dumb dad joke about counting backwards from 10 I think and he stood up and said “you’re not taking this seriously, I’ll return” and left. He eventually came back and asked if I was ready to continue. The nurse said “Yeah, he’s serious”.
I was “academically gifted.” Straight A student until middle school, put in a special “smart kid” class in elementary, and throughout high school breezed through without needing to, or ever learning how, to study properly. It bit me in the ass in college, nearly failed out my first semester.
Parentally, it meant nothing I ever did was good enough (“you’re so smart you’re stupid”), while my sister was cheered on and celebrated for barely making B and C grades. Led to pretty bad neurosis and a paralyzing obsession with doing things perfectly, which led for a long time to not doing them at all.
Nowadays I’m an IT engineer, consider myself smart enough (though not a genius), and my only real hobbies are reading, music (audiophile on a budget), gaming, and exercising. I occasionally watch anime or movies/TV, but rarely and wouldn’t consider that a hobby. Haven’t really abandoned any them, since they’re the main things I enjoy (except some of the exercise can go to hell, but I need to do it for my health).
Turns out I was “gifted” with mild autism. Go figure. 😅
I think a big divide for those that were listed as academically gifted were how their parents treated them.
I was basically “tier 2” gifted in that I was in the gifted programs, AP classes, honors, etc. I was a pretty solid B student and couldn’t just cruise through class and get As, that took some effort.
I have what most people would see as a prestigious career in STEM, I know people that I went to HS with that doctors, researchers, etc. The key difference is that there was way less parental pressure. My parents (and the others I know that are successful) didn’t get rewarded or punished for good grades. It was a more of a what you make of it situation. “You know you can do better than this B if you applied yourself, but we won’t punish you for it”. My parents gave me more freedom as I demonstrated responsibility. I never had video games taken away as a punishment. Never given money for good grades either.
In contrast, all those kids who had their parents up their ass (often out performing me) mostly went nowhere. Burnt out before hitting college, selecting “middle of the road” careers.
I think it boils down to motivation. All those parents suffocating those kids. The kids never build any intrinsic motivation. It’s always driven by fear and reward for them. You need your own motivation to push through the “more challenging” career choices.
The kids never build any intrinsic motivation. It’s always driven by fear and reward for them.
Oh sure, blame the deep seated flaws in our society.
They can also be both. Successful career, but forever haunted by a fear of inadequacy that just won’t go away.
I recommend magic mushrooms.
Sometimes it doesn’t go away even if you spend 70% of your time at work goofing off and 30% being ultra productive to the point that no one notices.
I was considered gifted. I was raised by parents who never showed me any affection, so I excelled in school because being praised by teachers was the only way for me to receive positive attention from a caregiver figure. I ended up crashing after high school and had to do the long, arduous work of treating my deep-seated psychological trauma. I ended up developing an autoimmune disease when I turned 18, likely from the chronic stress, but it’s infinitely better than constantly ruminating about how nobody will ever love me unless I get an A++ in every class. I am suffering decidedly less these days.
This was written by a doctor making assumptions about people who didn’t become doctors. I grew up in gifted classes all through elementary and high school, and have a challenging and rewarding career. I have a handful of hobbies that I keep up with until I lose interest and find new ones.
This is a stereotype which tries to find people living on the niche extremes to make fun of what the author feels is their inadequacy compared to his own circumstances.
I see an anti-correlation amoung the ~20 PhDs I trained over the years. I now only accept B students after a careful interview.
My biggest problem with Med students is how they lie, manipulate and game the system. Is this really who we want treating us or disease?
It’s really about knowing how to navigate the system. Need a family rich enough so that you don’t have to work to support yourself so you can scribe and volunteer, need to know what classes count for medical school admission, start prepping for MCAT and gaming that…
I have trained MD PhDs, and they do not fit that narrative. These people are gifted and work hard. But that is a handful within any med class.
We have liars and manipulators as political leaders, liars and manipulators as spiritual leaders, why not liars and manipulators as health leaders? (/s)
Every person who wants to get a job does that, not only medics.
Not medical but I don’t know a single person who passed the courses I took who did not cheat, which is great to find out after failing many times.
I got upset earlier today because some of my friends were better at sodokus than me. I’m supposed to be the smart socially inept one. Don’t take my smarts away. ;_;
In the trans community this can manifest in the “gifted kid burnout to trans girl with a praise kink pipeline,” which is where a lot of the Programmer Socks community posts come from.
…I don’t use Arch btw. I’m too scared of mutable OS’s for that.
Nix is an awesome idea. The language sucks donkey balls. I wish Nickel (typed Nix language) was still being worked on.
hobbies aren’t abandoned, just done in cycles as there isn’t enough time for them all all of the time
I don’t go crazy over mistakes, but they do bother me quite a bit
solidly in between, I’d say
or end up stressed post docs with a lot of discarded hobbies and scientific projects
Post docs count as docs!
You okay?
its not as bad as it sounds. But it is the other side of the coin of academic freedom. You can do what you want, but that just means i end up wanting to do everything and then of course failing to finish evreything. But i have learned the solution is to find collaborators, and to accept that some things will simply not get done. The only problem is that the things that do not get done are sometimes important, even if they are not the most interesting (such as filing travel reimbursement forms). TL:DR no worries but do think carefully before going for a phd, there is very little external structure
Ahhh, i still need to fill out the reimbursement forms for a conference I attended last year. And also another from five years ago. Might be a bit late for that one though.
I think we’d have more doctors.
