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I don’t love the implication that either genre of person has anything to be ashamed of, but let’s be optimistic and hope OOP just meant they’ll stop being judgy at jocks now.
I can absolutely spin myself as both; although while I have some legit sportsball bragging rights I’m under no illusions I was going to ever play above maybe D2 college level.
The burnout gifted kid weed use sure helps with my knee pain during the winter though.
I was one of the “gifted” kids. Went to the special school and everything. And I am. Gifted at taking tests and collecting information.
What humbled me was getting into adulthood and realizing how little that counted for anything. My organization skills were atrocious. My creativity is virtually non-existent. It has been the biggest struggle of my life just being able to keep my life together without some huge issue that came from me failing to address a small, easily handled issue.
It’s not burnout. And if there’s mental illness, it’s undiagnosed ADD or Executive Dysfunction. I just realized I wasn’t that special once I left school.
I can absolutely crush a written test (and only, written) though, so that’s… great.
I think this analogy is becoming more true as our economy slowly crumbles.
Most gifted athletes do not make it in professional sports because there are relatively very few jobs in those fields.
I found, as a gifted child, that you can do most things right. You can get the highest test scores and grades, you can earn high accolades, you can graduate with a “great” degree from a respected university, you can follow all the advice of profs and advisors… And still 99.8% of companies do not even bother responding to your handwritten resume.
As opportunity dwindles, the western system will naturally produce more unemployed losers like myself.
Why would you expect them to bother reading a handwritten resume?
Sending a handwritten resume tells them that you haven’t mastered the most basic skills they’d expect from an employee.
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I used “handwritten” but I really meant “handcrafted”. This means personalized cover letter, customized resume with keywords, and no AI assistance.
All typed, of course, not handwritten.
I also submitted thousands of AI-generated resumes, but I don’t really count those, they are slop.
I apologize as well. I jumped to a conclusion and responded too quickly.
I assume they meant that they composed the resume themselves vs a chatbot spit it out for them
They might mean human written, not AI generated
I apologized.
I honestly don’t know why I jumped to the conclusion that it was in cursive.
No. Even if you are not pro, you still are good at your sport.
The gifted child burned out is a failure to foster a kid’s interests and skills that translates into adulthood.
Gifted kid is still smart much like not pro sport guy is still good their sport. But both have the reality of they weren’t good enough when they grew up with their respective skills being their only identity.
Talking about your high school game where you threw 4 you touchdowns also doesn’t translate well into adulthood.
Someone who is good at sports gets encouragement and coaching. If they have any potential they are scouted and sponsored.
A smart kid can have straight “A’s” and a perfect SATs and then be left to fend for themselves to find the right college.
Even if you find a good college, that’s the great equalizer. A lot of us effectively intuited our way through high school, and some of us did manage to keep that up through college, but for a lot of us we get to advanced college classes and realize that we never had to develop the skills to actually learn things and have no idea how to start and then yeah fend for yourself… no one really knows what to do there, especially us.
That’s another facet of what I said.
You got good marks and the teachers ignored you. If you’d been on the sports team the coach would have been talking to you after every game, refining your talent. The high school just wanted to get out and become someone else’s problem.
There was a story a while back. The kid got scholarships to all the best schools because they had a 4.0 average and near perfect SATs. The school had a big display of all the great colleges the class had gotten into, and most of those places were that one kid.
The kid dropped out his first term and never went back to any of the schools.
This is my struggle right now. Thankfully, I actually did develop my learning skills a handful of times but for the vast majority of my life I’ve just used pattern recognition to get through school. I managed to get about halfway through my degree before I started having to actually learn, but who knows if even properly learning anything will land me a job lol
I have a strong feeling that nowadays it is more about connections and networking. Corruption touching every field just cant ignore big sports
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Johnson_(boxer)
Realistically, sports fans want sports. There may be corruption and steroids and point shaving, but in the end, they want to see someone do something incredible.
People don’t seem to realise how many young athletes bodies professional sports teams burn through.
Oh no, my knees told me that at 30
Is it 11?
Maybe neither are wrong, and as a society we also subject children to physically dangerous sports that can cause lifelong injuries. Both suck, and not being able to do something because of illness or hardship is painful to accept.
It’s also indicative of problems in the ways it’s acceptable to teach and raise children: their self worth as humans shouldn’t be predicated on how well they perform, they shouldn’t be subjected to intense pressure to achieve academically and/or athletically, and the illnesses/injuries they encountered as a result of these pressures should have been treated preventatively instead of reactively.
I manage 50 staff every day.
A few of them are rockstars at what we do. Most are just “Also Ran” and you know what… A crew of people who arent amazing at their jobs doing their best get the job done every day.
Yep - can’t just celebrate the rockstars, the plodders and in-betweens are amazing too!
All part of the different strengths we all have. Lord knows, someone’s got to not care enough to ‘clean the toilets’ (in whatever context a team deals with)
You never had the makings of a varsity athlete.
While that’s not the nicest way to say it, I think accepting that is a huge part of growing up, IMO.
I am intelligent, and I am skilled in some things that are incredibly difficult to others such that those things are almost effortless to me. But I’m not the best. I’m definitely not the most intelligent by any fucking metric. There’s tons of people more skilled than me in what I’m good at. There’s countless more skilled than me in general (not just in my skillset), and even more than that skilled at what I’m not skilled at.
And that’s ok. I’m good enough.
The world is complicated, and the story that the most skilled always rise to the top, that so many gifted children hold onto through their youth, isn’t universally true. That can be depressing, but what I find important is this: There are countless people less skilled than you who were and are able to find a place to fit and a way to make it, and you never know when you’re going to find someone better than you that forces you to re-evaluate just how good you actually are at something. Take those as opportunities to learn.
Just be you. You can find a way to make it.
You don’t have to be the best. Not being the best doesn’t mean you aren’t applying yourself or working hard enough. The world isn’t separated into the categories of only first place and losers.
Good perspective, I agree.
I should also clarify (which maybe I should have done in my comment above) that I was just referencing a snarky quote from The Sopranos, not a targeted jab at OP or anyone else in particular.
In The Sopranos, it’s used to belittle the main character Tony and comes from his uncle Junior. Tony was supposedly a good athlete in his youth, but had too many missteps to be great. So his only path in life became having to follow in his family’s footsteps with the mob. Pro sports could have been an out for him, but he never had the chance. Uncle Junior, then the most senior member of the crime family, was being gradually outmaneuvered by Tony in a series of power grabs, but he jabbed his nephew with that petty remark as a reminder that he could never become anything other than what he is, and Tony hates that.
Pro is a very specific thing too. There’s not really an equivalent for computer science because pro is so competitive that it’s only like the top 0.1% of players that are skilled at high school level. It’s not a good comparison.
Nice! Sopranos reference!
This reminds me of that time I was in a diner and
At least the injury probably wasn’t the jock’s fault. I got no one but me to blame for going nowhere with my life.
Lots of “gifted” children are essentially left alone with their problems and often didn’t get the education they needed, e.g. to learn how to actually put effort into learning. Someone with more willpower or something might have pulled through, but children generally need parenting and education to learn that kind of thing and chances are pretty good that their parents, schools etc. just failed those children.
IDK your exact story, but I think this idea that it’s entirely their own fault if they don’t succeed seems like the exact kind of mental pitfall that “burned-out gifted kids” would fall into.
Conversely, injuries often happen because the athletes don’t do things that are known to mitigate injuries, such as specific strength and mobility exercises, or are just pushing themselves too hard; though I assume that the education of young athletes in that area is usually lacking, too.
That’s… some pretty blantant disordered thinking.
A huge chunk of life is things outside of your control. You only have control over how you react to those things.
Beyond that, if you got yourself into a mess, you can get yourself out. Any time where you’re only fighting against yourself is a time where the odds are better in your favor than usual.
It’s will draining work to fight yourself into a better state, can be soul crushing, and it sure as hell isn’t fucking easy, but it is possible.
Self-care isn’t always giving yourself grace to fail, but it’s also not just beating yourself up for past failures. Survival is a perfectly ok goal. Then attempt for comfort and vague happiness. Then maybe you should consider trying to “make something of yourself”.
Very few of our names will live on past the people immediately surrounding us. That can be freeing if you can frame it the right way. Very few “make it”. Most just “get by”, and that’s fine.
Are you sure about that?
Kind of a disgusting sentiment, not gonna lie.
