Ok it's like I feel like an insect.I don't know if I really was or wasn't gifted as a child.I'm smarter than most my peers, but I don't really feel exceptional and YET from a young age everyone - parents, teachers, peers kept telling me that I was an absolute genius, gifted, etc.They kept saying that I'm gonna be great, that I'm a sponge that absorbs information, that I'm a living computer?!And yet I never had any achievements, there was never a reason for them to be impressed.I have 0 achievements.But all this changed me in a bad way.It's like I assumed I'm smart and destined to be successful, so I never put any effort in anything.By the age of 19 I couldn't solve a quadratic equation.I only speak 3 languages(unlike actual prodigies who speak 20-40).But my ego is damaged from the childhood of falsely being called a genius...and now I feel like I'm being crushed every time I read about an actual prodigy.Like this guy:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_James_Sidis

Reading about this guy I have the impression that compared to him the guy from the movie "Limitless" is a retard...and compared to the guy in the movie "Limitless" I am a retard...yeah it's not a really good feeling.It's like I was lied to.I mean when I think about it it's almost INSANE.Every day all sorts of people would compliment me on my intelligence and I had NO achievements whatsoever.No skills, no nothing.My only skill is that I have supreme cognitive empathy - I can almost read peoples minds by the smallest signs of body language, change of tone or facial expressions that most people wouldn't even recognize.I've always had this skill.But it's pretty much useless.The only intelligence type I respect is the mathematical/logical one and it's the one I'm lacking in.I learned all of high school math in 3 weeks(which Sidis would have learned in 1 day) and vector calculus in about 30 hours(which he would learn just by knowing the basics of calculus and vectors and deriving the rest on his own) in order to get into a university with programming and here's what I noticed there:

A lot of people who study something related to tech have the tendency to base their worth on their intellectual abilities and react negatively when proven inferior.

How do you guys feel about this?

I know exactly how you are feeling. I have always had a feeling of peerlessness, yet being hopelessly inferior to everyone above me. It really makes me feel like I have no real talent compared to everyone, despite what everyone says. Somehow, I can't measure up to these people, yet my conversations with friends are too far above their heads. I, too, feel like I have a strong empathetic feeling; it leads to me being a good friend to those I care to keep around by "always knowing exactly what to say", I've never been wrong about determining someone to be a bad person, and I have an annoying hobby of calling out the endings of television programs based on the first couple minutes, and watching them come true, much to everyone else's chagrin.

I wish I had some advice to give, but after many years of relentless depression and frustration, my first appointment with a therapist is in eight days. I am yet in no position to make recommendations, but I might suggest that you do the same.

EDIT: Regarding IQ tests, when I had taken one as a child in my school's "Gifted" program, I apparently scored a 141, and was called a genius for a while. It was hard not to let it feed my ego. Ultimately, I had learned that IQ rating is not an absolute scale and, from what I learned, the scale is based on the overall scoring of the population, and thus my 141 then could be higher or lower now, with my same exact test result. If I am incorrect or misread, then someone feel free to update me on this, but it was all very disillusioning, and I quickly learned that the number is truly meaningless. Besides, they told all of the students that had low scores that IQ didn't matter, it was what you did that was important, so that kind of diminished any good feeling I had.

The OP is pretty much my experience. Aside from a very small subset of tasks which I really love to work with, if something is hard for me to do I just give up. This tends to involve tasks that require work ethic, rather than intelligence. That is I don't have an issue with hard stuff, I like figuring out how to make programs work. But I can't stand XML editing or easy boilerplate code. Drives me nuts. I have a slightly below medium form of ADHD but I think the real problem is the consequence of going untreated for so long that I skated on intellect without having to learn to work through my condition and now my flow chart is permanently stuck on:

if (dull) skip;

And its a habit I have terrible trouble trying to break. I was on adademic probation or failed out of college like 4-5 times. I just couldn't handle the workload. I got all As on tests but homework and worksheets and projects simply wore me down too fast until I just gave up and waited to fail.

I went to a psychiatrist but he said he didn't think ADHD meds would really help me. They would give me a little more oomph but not enough to become a productive citizen. And now I need to figure out a way to defeat my habits.

In school everyone is intelligent. Either you are the intelligent dude who does everything and aces everything, or the intelligent dude who does nothing and just passes exams but has "so much potential!". It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius. And university is more about how much you can tolerate weekly assignments, exams and finals (year after year!), not intelligence.

BTW, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority It is common to consider oneself as "above average". Considering oneself as a genius is rare, but most people consider themselves above average, even if that defies its definition (okay not true, average != majority, leave me alone statisticians :P ).

Sadly I only have experience on gaming forums, but from what I've seen, these kind of threads are filled with the "I'm the most intelligent one in my family/friends group" kind. Everyone will share their own stories of exams they passed without studying, or stuff like that (that one time they took that IQ test and "scored pretty good" also).

Sadly I only have experience on gaming forums, but from what I've seen, these kind of threads are filled with the "I'm the most intelligent one in my family/friends group" kind. Everyone will share their own stories of exams they passed without studying, or stuff like that (that one time they took that IQ test and "scored pretty good" also).

To be fair, there is an inherent selection bias on these forums. If you are doing game development (or any kind of programming really) you are probably reasonably smart in the first place. I'm reasonably certain that the majority of people here are genuinely of "above average intelligence" compared to the wider population, or at the least pretty good at exactly the kind of problem solving / logical deduction that IQ tests measure.

In school everyone is intelligent. Either you are the intelligent dude who does everything and aces everything, or the intelligent dude who does nothing and just passes exams but has "so much potential!". It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius. And university is more about how much you can tolerate weekly assignments, exams and finals (year after year!), not intelligence.

BTW, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority It is common to consider oneself as "above average". Considering oneself as a genius is rare, but most people consider themselves above average, even if that defies its definition (okay not true, average != majority, leave me alone statisticians ).

Sadly I only have experience on gaming forums, but from what I've seen, these kind of threads are filled with the "I'm the most intelligent one in my family/friends group" kind. Everyone will share their own stories of exams they passed without studying, or stuff like that (that one time they took that IQ test and "scored pretty good" also).

Did you go to one of those rich white people private schools? Because I don't know what world you live in but everyone was NOT intelligent at my school.

I do agree with your opinion about college though. Its all about work ethic.

There is plenty of research these days that the optimal intelligence range is around 105-120. Lower is average and higher causes all sorts of maladjustment problems due to our mechanized education system. School doesn't just fail the below average people.

This is compounded by parents and teachers telling you you are really smart instead of praising your hard work. This turns out to be one of the reasons for the massive success of women in getting to and graduating from college.

Because of patriarchal prejudice women's success as children is attribute to hard work, because of course it couldn't be that women are really smart, while men's is attributed to innate intelligence. Thus providing the most effective conditioning for success in modern society. Not that this makes up for the way women are treated, but its somewhat amusing that the patriarchy is screwing itself over that way.

In school everyone is intelligent. Either you are the intelligent dude who does everything and aces everything, or the intelligent dude who does nothing and just passes exams but has "so much potential!". It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius.

Did you go to one of those rich white people private schools? Because I don't know what world you live in but everyone was NOT intelligent at my school.

The second sentence was the key: "It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius.", which I agree with. Raised in California, the public school systems were horrible because they kept on dumbing it down so they'd have a higher percentage of graduating students with better test scores (because they also dumbed down the tests); probably to keep getting federal government financial support.

I'd just like to QFT who ever said "go do something". That's the only thing that counts in life. Seriously - no one cares if you were a genius if you don't leave behind a legacy. And you don't need to be a genius, pretty or even good with people to leave behind a legacy. Look at Donald Trump.

On the topic of geniuses and intelligence - I'd like to point out a little something. It's kind of true that the bulk scientific discoveries that aren't freak accidents, are made by people who are textbook geniuses. Or at least so it seems. Nevertheless - the reason these people seem to possess such seemingly exceptional skills isn't a question of mathematical or emotional prowess. It's a combination of things, which amount to insight and ultimately allow one to think outside of the box in a new and (at the time) spectacularly intuitive way. Discovering special relativity wasn't so much the work of a mathematical genius, as it was the work of a man who saw across traditional boundaries. That's a question of thinking logically. (That isn't to say that one can as easily discover and prove special relativity as one can think of it.)

What makes a human being special is their collective set of talents. Very few people are born with one talent disproportionately out of whack and it does kind of seem to be the case that these people aren't all that successful (or happy, for that matter) in life overall. Personally, I cherish being a bit of an average Joe with a head that can think somewhat differently - even if that means I can sometimes end up chasing my own tail when performing something like a simple debugging task.

In your place I'd rather think "holy crap - I'm no worse than everybody else. In fact I seem to be better than most other people". That's actually pretty damn precious with 7 billion people in the world.

Second, there's always someone better.

...and quite often it's an Asian.

I don't watch Cronenberg movies because they're so much like Gilliam movies, I watch them for the unique touch only he can provide - in other words: you cannot perfectly walk another's journey. Anybody worth knowing about is worth knowing about because he did his own thing - not to mention the fact that many artists and scientists died in abject poverty/obscurity and were only appreciated after the fact. I guess the point I'm trying to make is stop worrying so much about being special (which is ultimately an ego thing) and just live life to the best of your abilities.

In school everyone is intelligent. Either you are the intelligent dude who does everything and aces everything, or the intelligent dude who does nothing and just passes exams but has "so much potential!". It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius.

Did you go to one of those rich white people private schools? Because I don't know what world you live in but everyone was NOT intelligent at my school.

The second sentence was the key: "It's because school is easy, not because everyone is a genius.", which I agree with. Raised in California, the public school systems were horrible because they kept on dumbing it down so they'd have a higher percentage of graduating students with better test scores (because they also dumbed down the tests); probably to keep getting federal government financial support.

Its true that public school is getting ironically easier as the number of jobs requiring lots of training and intelligence is rising.

However that is in the standard track classes. For AP classes the work is still hard and often many kids at my school who ended up going to Harvard and Stanford were struggling on tests and other things. And I live in a not so great inner suburb in St. Louis and went to public school. And the AP test scores are graded relative to every other test. In fact the break down for 2011 was as follows:

• 5 - 14.4% of test takers
• 4 - 19.5% of test takers
• 3 - 23.6% of test takers
• 2 - 21.1% of test takers
• 1 - 21.4% of test takers

And this is for kids already tracked into high level classes. The average score was 2.84. Anyone receiving a 3 was objectively above average even if we didn't account for the already higher level of kids put into AP in the first place.

I just don't buy this bullshit that all these people are wrong about their relative intelligence. I agree that people who are above average or brilliant and accomplish nothing shouldn't be given credit just for an accident of birth. But its stupid to try and claim that all these people are actually average when its clear they aren't. I object to the idea that we cannot accept both their higher intelligence and their failure to make something of it.

The thing about wrongly evaluating your intelligence is that its more likely they are above average but think they are more above average than they are, rather than that they are average and think they are above average.