What my Gifted Friend Taught Me by Flunking University

Meet my friend Mark. I met him at university and this guy was amazing; he had a gifted intellect. The people that knew him at school told me about him.

He used to attend classes after school for the extremely gifted, the regular school syllabus that us mere mortals would study, he found boring.

Mark could read something and understand it and remember it, so much faster than the rest of us. He used his amazing intellect to cruise through school. He never really had to put in too much effort because much of school life was reading and remembering facts and then regurgitating them onto paper in what they called ‘exams’.

We were never really challenged to think about the stuff we were being taught. They did not teach us to question, or gain insights, form opinions, or build sound arguments.

The only real testing subjects where things had to be ‘worked out’ were science and mathematics. But even then, at school, if you could remember the sequence and steps required in calculations and the formulae, you could still pass without actually working anything out.

Mark’s gifts of intellect extended to all subjects, and he excelled throughout school life without even working up as much as a sweat. Many of us would struggle with something here and there, and then overcome it and get through the year, but never with the glowing grades that Mark achieved.

School was boring for him. In fact, he even found the after-school classes for ‘extending high achievers’ boring.

Mark had the entire world waiting for him. He would cruise through university and start at a prestigious law firm. He decided that law was where his interest lay.

With his reading and comprehension skills, law would be a walk in the park.

Except, Mark was about to be beaten with a bat named ‘reality’. That bat beat him and it was ugly.

Mark, the guy that had never had to spend more than an hour on exam preparation, suddenly found the limits of his amazing intellect, something he had not discovered before. He found he had to put in many hours because of the volume and complexity of the work.

The many hours required self control and discipline and focus, three skills Mark never needed in school life.

Suddenly, he had to think and structure his arguments based on insights and case law. No more would his amazing reading and comprehension and memory get him through. Make no mistake, his skills had a significant advantage for him. However, the one thing he lacked was the one thing that would secure his success.

That one thing is something we call discipline, or self-control. He could not focus and control himself to focus on the work. If he could focus and access his internal self-control button, he would require half the time or less than the average student.

But the average student in his class had built the mental muscle and focus from years of grappling with high school work and year of having to work for the grades that they achieved. Mark had never built the mental muscle and focus, he had never needed to.

Mark flunked out after a year, he didn’t even make it past first year law at university. The guy voted most likely to succeed just a year earlier in highschool was a failure.

Mark signed up for a different degree, this time in finance, but the results were the same. He was not prepared to put in the time and focus, self-control and discipline required.

The blessing of his intellect had turned on him like a parasitic worm, and was now feeding his failure, devouring him from the inside, rather than serving his success.

My friends and I kept our heads down and passed our exams, through studying and discipline and after the years of study, we achieved the degrees which we signed up for. Mark left the university like a dog with his tail between his legs and tried his hand at various careers not requiring higher learning.

Mark eventually found success in managing large shopping centres. He rose in the ranks to manage the complexities and coordinate large shopping complexes. He was quick to decide and sort out problems, and he seemed to be very skilled in project management. He had found his sweet spot.

Using his quick thinking brain, and his reading and comprehension skills, to read through council regulations etc. Made him successful. I guess he had learnt to focus when that focus was paying his bills.

What did Mark teach me?

He taught me that nothing comes easy in life, and even when you have gifts, if you don’t refine them and utilise them, you won’t achieve what you set your mind to. He also taught me the benefits of self-control and that self-control, focus and discipline is more important than talent in most things in life.

The science seems to agree, researchers found that self control is more important than talent in predicting academic success during adolescence.

Self- control can be learned, and it is not something that you are just born with. There may be some people who are more self controlled naturally than others, but through various little daily self-control exercises, we can all increase our self-control.

It starts by saying ‘no’ to everyday temptations and doing what is right. People who can do this have a greater propensity for success.

By minor acts of self-control, everyday leads to an increase in our capacity and power of self-control, over a lifetime. Self-control is like a muscle that needs to be trained.

There is a self-control plasticity, we can increase our self-control through training ourselves to be more self-controlled. This is becoming a much greater challenge with the distractions of the digital world that surround us, but those who overcome will b that much stronger.

I quote from one of the studies I linked below:

‘ In the fall, we administered a standard IQ test and a multi-method battery of self-control, including questionnaires completed by students and their parents and homeroom teachers, as well as both hypothetical and behavioral delay of gratification tasks. Seven months later, at the conclusion of the school year, we collected official school records.

What did we learn? We were unsurprised to find that students with higher IQ scores in the fall went on to earn higher report card grades and standardized achievement test scores in the spring. But we also learned that self-control predicted all the same outcomes and more: fewer absences, less procrastination, more time studying, and less time watching television. Finally, whereas self-control predicted rank-order gains in report card grades, IQ did not. In follow-up studies at the same school, we found that rank-order changes in self-control every six months predicted subsequent rank-order changes in report card grades — but not the reverse (Emanuele et al., 2010).’

Heading into the silly season, and overeating being a self-control challenge, let’s see if any of us is brave enough to exercise our self-control muscle…