You Were The Smart Kid... So What Went Wrong?

You were the smart kid, the one who aced the  tests without trying. The one everyone came to for   advice and help. And now you're sitting here all  alone on your couch, probably in your 20s or 30s,   feeling stuck, watching people who you  used to outperform zoom past you in life,   wondering what the went wrong, and you can't  explain why.

On paper, you're super capable.   You're smart. You're talented.

But in reality,  you feel like you're watching life through a   window while everyone outside is actually living  it. You thought intelligence was your superpower.   You thought being naturally good at things meant  you'd naturally succeed at life.

You thought that   early academic success was a preview of your  inevitable lifelong awesomeness. But subtly,   quietly, something was going wrong  the entire time. In this video,   I'm going to explore the hidden psychology  of why smart kids often struggle as adults,   how your greatest strength can often become  your greatest weakness, and most importantly,   how to break free from the prison  of your own unfulfilled potential.

At 18 months old, William James Situs could read  the New York Times. By age three, he had taught   himself Latin. By five, he'd written a treatise  on anatomy and could speak eight languages.

His   IQ was later estimated to be between 250 and 300,  possibly the highest ever recorded. At age 9,   he passed the MIT entrance exam, though Harvard  made him wait until he was the ripe old age of 11   to be able to enroll. This still made him the  youngest person ever admitted to Harvard.

The   media went wild at the time. Newspapers called him  the wonder boy and followed his every move. At 11,   he gave a lecture to Harvard's math department  on four-dimensional bodies that left professors   stunned.

His parents, particularly his father,  Boris, paraded him as proof that genius could be   manufactured through proper education. But the  cracks were already starting the show. Situs   was bullied relentlessly.

He told reporters that  he wanted to live the perfect life. which to him   meant complete isolation from others. At his  graduation, he announced that he would never   marry, saying he detested the idea of any intimate  relationship.

The adult Situs became everything   people in his childhood hadn't predicted. He took  deliberate steps to destroy his reputation as a   genius. He worked as a bookkeeper for $23 a week,  collected street card tickets obsessively, and   wrote under pseudonyms about mundane topics.

When  employers discovered who he was, he would quit and   disappear. He was arrested at a socialist rally  in 1919 and his parents had him institutionalized   briefly in a sanitarium. He spent the last  decades in hiding, living in boarding houses,   avoiding anyone who might recognize him.

When a  magazine tracked him down in 1937 and published a   mocking article about the fallen prodigy, he sued  for invasion of privacy and then lost. He died in   1944 of a cerebral hemorrhage alone in his rented  room with no friends or family present. He was 46.  

William Situs should have been a cautionary tale,  but it's taken nearly a hundred years to process   what actually went wrong. To understand, we must  look at the childhood brain and how our identity   develops. Most people don't know, but it isn't  until around age two that a child first has a   conception of self.

It's around this age that you  start recognizing yourself in mirrors, realizing   that there's suddenly a me that is separate  from everyone else. By age four, you are able   to describe yourself, but only in really concrete  terms. statements like, "I have brown hair," or,   "I live in a blue house.

" But then something  fascinating happens between ages five and eight.   Your brain starts to develop what psychologists  call trait thinking. The ability to see patterns   and behavior and create stable concepts about  yourself.

This is when that teacher's comment of,   "Wow, you're so smart," stopped being just words  and actually became a psychological architecture   within your mind. Your developing brain literally  built neuropathways around this concept. Every   time you got praised for being smart, those  pathways got stronger, like a river carving   deeper into rock with each passing season.

By  middle childhood, around ages 8 to 11, you entered   what Eric Ericson called the industry versus  inferiority stage. You were comparing yourself   to your peers constantly, desperately trying to  find where you excel. Your brain was asking, "What   makes me special?

What makes me valuable? What  makes me me? " And because your prefrontal cortex,   your brain CEO that handles complex thinking,  wouldn't be fully developed for another 15 years,   it settles on simple answers.

Now, these are not  obvious choices. You didn't wake up one day and   decide, "I shall now build my entire personality  and identity around being smart. Instead, your   brain simply noticed patterns.

When I do well on  tests, adults smile at me. When I know the answer,   I feel powerful. When others struggle and I don't,  I matter.

" Your brain, always efficiency seeking,   consolidated these experiences into a single  concrete identity. I am the smart one. And   here's where it gets really interesting as well  as a bit tragic.

Once your identity is formed,   your brain developed what psychologists called  confirmation bias. I would call it confirmation   bias on steroids. It starts by filtering all  experiences through this singular lens.

I am   the smart one. Got an A? It's proof that you're  smart.

Struggled with something? Better to avoid   it. It's for stupid people.

Other kids asking for  help validates your identity. Nobody asking for   help threats your identity. They must be stupid. 

By adolescence, when your brain is undergoing a   second major reorganization, these childhood  identities should theoretically become more   complex and nuanced. You should have been  able to think, "I'm good with some things,   struggling with others. " And hey, that's okay.

But  if you'd spend a decade protecting and reinforcing   your simple identity that you're smart, your  adolescent brain just doubles down on it instead.   The identity stops being something that you have  and instead becomes something that you are. This   is the identity trap.

An adaptation that was  perfectly reasonable for your seven-year-old mind,   becomes a prison for your 27-year-old mind.  The very mechanism that helps you as a child   make sense of the complex world becomes a wall  that now keeps you from fully experiencing it.   Which brings us to the sponsor of this video,  Grammarly.

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You can use my link below  to get 20% off Pro at grammarly. com/mansson2. Now, here's the problem that nobody explained to  you when you were getting all those gold stars.  

While you were carefully curating your experiences  to maintain your smart identity, everyone else   was learning something far more valuable. They  were learning how to try at something, it up,   work a little bit harder, and stick with it. They  were learning the most fundamental skill of life,   how to struggle well.

This is why today  psychologists and parenting experts tell us to   praise our children not for their skills or traits  but for their effort. Because you don't want to   reinforce a child's identity based on their  ability. You want to reinforce their identity   based on their willingness to try.

Because it  turns out that things like tenacity, effort,   and the ability to improve are themselves skills.  Arguably the most important skills that any of us   can develop. They're the meta skills that make all  other skills possible.

But you never develop these   skills because after all, you're the [ __ ] smart  kid. And smart kids don't have to develop skills.   They're the smart kid.

You spent your early life  avoiding failure like it was radioactive. Every   time you encountered something difficult, you  had two choices. Struggle and risk exposing   that you're not actually that smart, that  you're not actually who you thought you were,   and that's terrifying, or pivot, avoid, and  move on to something easier to maintain your   illusion.

You chose the illusion. And unless you  are an absolute genius, and I'm sorry to say,   but statistically you're not, at some point as  you were growing up, you hit a wall. You reached a   level where things did not come so easily anymore. 

Where success required some degree of failure,   embarrassment, and tenacity. But unlike your  peers, you had not developed these skills.   You'd spent your entire adolescence avoiding  the very experiences that were necessary to   build them.

So what did you do? You focused on a  handful of things you were already good at. You   specialized.

You narrowed. You retreated into  your comfort zone and told yourself that you   were being strategic. But here's the brutal  truth.

Those things that you were good at,   they don't actually matter in the real world. that  AP exam that you aced, history test you dominated,   the chemistry quiz that you finished in half  the time without reading the book. When you're   an adult trying to navigate a career to build  relationships, to solve real world problems,   nobody cares.

The real world rewards completely  different things than your childhood does. It   rewards persistence in the face of failure.  It rewards the ability to collaborate with   annoying people.

It rewards emotional  regulation under difficult circumstances.   It rewards humility to learn from people who  know more than you. And you never developed   any of those skills because you were too busy  protecting your identity as the smart one.

For this reason, smart kids often grew up feeling  profoundly isolated. And this isn't a coincidence.   Not because everyone was too dumb to understand  you, but rather because you never learned how to   be vulnerable and admit weakness, therefore never  allowing your relationships to become more than   surface deep.

As a result, gifted kids often grow  up surrounding themselves with mediocre people,   not because they're consciously arrogant, but  because those are the only relationships that   feel safe. The midwits around them allow them to  perpetuate their sense of easy superiority. But   in the real world, your network matters more than  almost anything.

The people who succeed are rarely   the smartest. They're the ones who build genuine  relationships with other capable people. They're   the ones who can collaborate, who can follow  when necessary, who admit when they don't know   something.

The gifted kid ends up cut off from  the best opportunities because they've surrounded   themselves with people who make them feel smarter  rather than people who make them better. And to   make this worse, the gifted kid doesn't know  how to solve these issues emotionally. So,   they double down on solving them intellectually. 

They study evolutionary psychology and social   statistics to try to understand group dynamics.  They read books about charisma and practice   conversational techniques in the mirror instead  of in real life. They become chronically online,   obsessed with obscure political and cultural  issues, replacing their lack of genuine connection   with a cheap feeling of social significance.

But  this doesn't help. It only removes them further   from intimacy and causes them to feel more  alone. For example, Bobby Fischer became the   youngest chess grandmaster at 15.

He defeated  the Soviets in the world championship in 1972,   becoming an American hero. Congratulations. How  you feel, babe?

Tell us how you feel about it.   With an IQ of up 187, he was undeniably brilliant.  But he saw chess as psychological warfare,   famously saying, "I like the moment when I can  break a man.

" Oh, the greatest pleasure. Well,   when you break his ego, this is where it's at.  Yeah.

His inability to connect with humans ended   up destroying him. After becoming world champion  at 29, he forfeited his title and disappeared for   20 years. When he resurfaced, he was ranting about  Jewish conspiracies despite the fact that he was   Jewish.

Praising 9/11 and living in exile, hiding  from US authorities. He died alone in Iceland in   2008, refusing his own medical treatment with  no real friends. His reported last words were,   "Nothing is as healing as the human touch.

" A  tragic recognition from a man who spent his entire   life avoiding exactly that. Fisher conquered  chess, but he never learned to connect with   another human being as anything but an opponent  to crush. You could say he won everything at   chess and lost everything at life.

And then  of course there comes the rationalization,   the elaborate theories of why you're alone.  Nobody understands you because you're too   deep for them. Clearly, people are threatened  by your intelligence.

Clearly, society doesn't   value real thinkers anymore. Clearly, the  world is unjust and completely up. Clearly,   the system is rigged against people just  like you.

And finally, the identity erects   its biggest and most indestructible wall. None  of this is my fault. I'm the victim.

The world   failed to recognize my gifts. People are too  shallow to appreciate what I have to offer. And   this mindset doesn't just keep you stuck.

It makes  you repellent to anyone who could actually help. So, how do you fix this? How do you escape the  smart kid trap that's been suffocating you for   decades?

First, stop identifying as the smart kid.  That means admitting that you might be dumb. And I   mean really admitting it, not just saying it while  secretly believing that you're brilliant for being   smart enough to admit it or thinking that you're  smart by admitting it while being smart enough to   admit it while being smart.

Look, let me put this  straight. You're a [ __ ] idiot. And that's okay.  

People will still love you. I will still love  you. But you need to hear it from somebody.

Okay?   You're a [ __ ] [ __ ] How do I know? Well, if you  were really that smart, wouldn't you have the life   that you want?

Intelligence isn't fixed. It's not  some character stat that got rolled into you when   you were born like a World of Warcraft character.  It's a collection of multiple skills.

And like any   skills, they develop through practice, failure,  and growth. The moment you stop protecting your   smart identity is the moment you can actually  start doing things required to become smarter.   Second, assume everyone else knows something  that you don't.

Why? Because they do. When you   meet someone new, stop trying to establish your  intellectual dominance like a silverback and just   listen.

Nobody cares that you mined Bitcoin for a  hot minute in 2012. No one cares that you actually   read Napoleon's letters and figured out that half  of them were counterfeit. Nobody cares that you   prefer French bread made in Switzerland instead of  in France.

Let people discover your capabilities   naturally. Or better yet, let them never fully  know. Be mysterious.

Be human. Be something other   than smart. What if you listened more than you  spoke?

What if you asked questions you don't know   the answers to? What if you let yourself be taught  something? Third, doing this will force you to   embrace discomfort and imperfection.

Not in some  abstract philosophical way, but practically and   obviously. In other words, you will have to look  stupid sometimes in front of people. It's okay.  

Let it happen. Join that pottery class and make  terrible ceramics. Go to that dance lesson and   step on someone's foot.

start that project you've  been putting off and let it be messy and imperfect   and human and then give up on it. The goal isn't  to become good at these things, though you might   think it is. The goal is to teach your nervous  system that you can survive while being bad.

That   your worth isn't tied to your performance. That  people are not going to abandon you if you're   not super duper impressive all the time. This  isn't massochism, it's medicine.

Every time you   fail publicly and survive, you're rewiring your  brain, teaching it that failure is not death,   that embarrassment is not exile, that being  bad at something doesn't make you worthless.   And here's what nobody told you when you were  young. Being average at most things isn't a   failure.

It's called being normal. It means you  can try without the weight of expectations. That   you can explore without the fear of falling from  your pedestal.

You can be curious without needing   to be an expert. The people you watch succeeding  around you, they're not succeeding because they're   smarter than you. They're succeeding because  they're willing to be dumb.

They're willing to   ask obvious questions and they're willing to fall  on their face and get back up and do it again.