A Former Child Genius

I used to think I was smart, boy was I wrong. LMAO. I was a weird child, always out of place any and everywhere. I had a double class promotion twice so (from grade 2 to 3, then grade 4 to 9). So I didn’t really grow up and learn with my peers and inadvertently didn’t learn how to properly mingle with people or play the social games people played with each other. This was all in elementary/primary school though. I sucked so much in high/secondary school and finally figured it out (I think) in college/university.

Now that I have about 8 years professional work experience I don’t feel as smart or as savvy as I was when I was younger. I only felt that while I was working on Gomoney at Sterling Bank, there was this energy and the urgency it demanded that I put my all into it; I have not felt the same was since. I read a post on twitter sometime last year that resonated with me. I don’t know the author but I think it’s worth reading. It’s called “An Orphanage for Former Child Geniuses”

An Orphanage for Former Child Geniuses

You used to be very smart. You know because you won a lot of awards as a child and everyone constantly told you how smart you were. Then adulthood hit and suddenly you’re not so smart anymore. You spend your days in a haze of ennui wondering if this is all there is. You cannot process new information. Simple facts escape you. Your fingers are the most exercised part of your body, scrolling social media and shaping half-thoughts that you never fully articulate. Instead you post the non-nuanced one liners written for maximum outrage extraction by bored teenagers with thousands of followers on tiktok who did five minutes of googling. You have a “good” job but it feels more like a trap than a path to a life well lived.

What happened to you? You used to be so smart. What is it to be smart anyway? The answer I like best is that smart is when creativity, an ability to influence people and intellectual processing power are put in service of turning imagination into reality. Smart for me is about the ability to shape reality into what your vision for it is. So what is missing for you, former child genius?

The missing pieces

Scaffolding and foundations. If you want to build skyscraper, you spend time investing in a skeleton structure to hold up the whole thing while it’s still incomplete. You spend time digging below the ground to root the structure in something. There is both a motivator and a goal. As a child, and pretty much into early university, we get scaffolding and foundation for free. We live in simple regimented environments where we know what we should be doing, who we should be doing it with, how long we should be doing it for and why we were doing it. Even if the reasoning seems pretty trivial in hindsight. Someone else had done the hard work of sketching out the path, all you had to do was stay on it.

And staying on it meant that the structure got built. The foundation (the why - regular praise, good grades, getting to show off) and the scaffolding (the how - study, show up, try, repeat) were taken care of. This is not to say that it was not hard work to achieve what you did as a child. But the real hard work is always the meta work. The real hard work isn’t filling in the blanks, it’s looking at empty ground picking up a shovel and digging. It’s being able to imagine skyscrapers in the first place. It’s being able to keep going when everyone asks why you’re nailing bamboo together when you said you wanted to build a skyscraper. It’s possible that you are actually a genius. But the truth is more likely that you are just a good follower. A good labourer. Good at filling in the blanks when there is already a well defined superstructure. Not so good at creating structure for yourself.

What now?

So here’s the big money question. What now? There are two possibilities:

• Accept that you’re not what you were told you were; find the well defined path that most satisfies the need you have for structure, extrinsic motivation and praise. I don’t see this as losing, so much as I see it as embracing reality.
• Figure out how (and I don’t know the answer, this is as much for me as it is for you) to do the truly hard work of building meta structure out of nothing. The grandest ships sit in dry doc on struts before they ever see water. How do you learn to do the unsexy work of building struts?

How does this apply to me?

I feel like this a lot. I personally don’t fully fit into the corporate world even though I tried do much to, I can’t play the social games they are playing. I also don’t fit into the highly creative world because I don’t speak their language. I’m just in this in-between, it’s not a great place to be. I have vision for things I want to build but they’re not entrepreneurial, they won’t make money, I want to build things for the fun of it or to prove that I can do it. I’ve tried to re-program my brain to “be entrepreneurial” but I always keep going back to factory presets.

When I was in uni I used to build games and I was good at it, but I sure wasn’t going to make any money from it because there’s no market for it where I live. So I learnt how to make mobile apps and websites to make ends meet and it’s worked so far. Now, while I don’t “believe” in anything I want to work on things I think should exist either to automate a previously manual task or to make other people lives increamentally easier; even if it’s by a small margin.

What am I doing to fix it?

1. I’m building a game platform; like FPL but for music. Sounds weird, but I’m still figuring it out and working on an MVP.
2. I’m training people; I started 2 years ago and it has helped me create the scaffolding and foundations other people can follow. It has been a very enlightening and rewarding experience. We’ve built a few things I’ve always wanted to build but didn’t care enough to actually start building them.

In conclusion, maybe I am smart, but just in a very niche way, I just need to find that niche and work at it. So I’ll keep working on things that I believe should exist and helping other people create mental models they can follow to become better builders. Hopefully, this helps you ask yourself the questions I’m still asking myself. Cheers.