Were you a gifted child? How are you seen as adult?

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While I do believe we all have our strengths and weaknesses, I get the spirit of the question and have enjoyed the discussion. Agree with much of what has been shared about being labeled "gifted" in elementary school, the expectations and subsequent struggles, and how as a young adult I found myself challenged, struggling, most likely viewed as intelligent but odd and not successful. I do appreciate my "gifts" in other forms but have not found ways to make them lucrative. I try to find ways to make them personally fulfilling.
Giftedness comes in many forms - not only academically/intelligence/IQ but also as far as specific talents or abilities, and, I feel, on another level, how we choose to accept and utilize our gifts and even lack thereof. I am choosing to graciously embrace what I've got and attempt to improve upon that which I am missing or deficient in...
Does that make sense?

I think I'm probably the other way here...

No... I was terrible in school - no interest whatsoever (well unless the topic was ww2 or airplane related - those I tended to screw myself by excelling on projects in... Which then pissed off the teachers when I would 1/2ass the next task because it was boring as sin)

Came out of school straight into an IT job in the tech bubble... Didn't last 2 weeks. Hated it. Bounced around job to job to job for 10 years. Had a couple I excelled at - but burned out at - eventually kinda fell into a rythm of one for summer one for winter (and they were both almost seasonal that way - so it worked; and the bosses were always glad to rehire me)

Then the world changed - one job - they changed billing - didn't make much; the other sold 'my' division to another company. Tried construction...

Do you know how awesome it is to be able to eyeball square/level/perpendicular? (something thats always caught my eye and makes me want to scream if its off). Maybe I'm the oddball - but with mechanics I can manipulate things in my head - so working from a failure back to a root cause - is quick and easy. So my job now - is puzzles... I get to eyeball up a failure, find the root cause, fix it, and the resultant damage... I rarely work in the same place 2 days in a row, I rarely do the same task repetitively enough to make it boring...

The fun in your early years is figuring out where you fit... Try some different things - I've been in this industry now for 14 years (other than a 1yr hiatus to - try something different again) - I'll probably stick here for a while longer I'd imagine. As it just 'fits' - my skillsets and my preference to have changing scenery.

As a kid I have been said "gifted and lazy", but later tests as adult don't go in the sense of giftedness. Maybe I lost it. I didn't lost my lazyness though.

I was in the gifted class in elementary school. However, I was not considered gifted (as my IQ score was 129 and the district used 130 as the cut-off).

Because of this, in middle school, I was placed in the non gifted classes. I was no longer allowed to be in the same classes as kids from my elementary school. I remember thinking how unfair this was. I also quickly realized that I was too smart to “fit in” with the “average” kids (who preferred sports to academics), but not smart enough to “fit in” with the super smart kids.

Nevertheless, I continued to “try” hard in school, simply because education was very important to my father and I was scared to death of the consequences of not having good enough grades.

As an adult, I work in technology. Pretty much everyone I work with is fairly smart.

This may be the best post I have ever seen on WP. Way to go Bears! I couldn't have said it better myself! You are not wasting your potential IMO, you are harnessing it!

Many of my teachers thought I was a particularly gifted reader, speller and writer. I'm now a professional writer, so I'm among others with similar skills where I seem a little less special. (I've never liked standing out, anyway.)

I was never considered gifted as a child.

I was considered gifted as a child. Could read very early on, very good at maths. Unfortunately I could never make full use of those gifts. Sure, I have been fairly successful in the software industry and have been the "go-to guy" at some jobs. But...it could have been so much more. Have never really gotten on easily with my peers. I joined a study group at college once and made the "mistake" of correcting some of the more talkative students there, they did not like that. Have a hard time with team efforts overall. A large handicap to have if you want to become anything in this world I think. Now as a side project I develop mobile apps entirely by myself and have some limited success, feels good to put my brain to use in some area at least.

I suspect I have ADD-like traits in that I can't really stick to one thread of interest. Had a hard time choosing what courses to take at college and didn't really follow any particular thread there, except for programming. Have started several electronics projects that I never finished.

I was a gifted child. I knew that I learned faster, easier than most of my peers. "Doesn't work to full potential" was repeated over and over. The problem was that I never really learned good organizational skills or even had the proper motivation. Everything came so easy! High school I could have breezed through if I put forth the effort; instead I cut class a lot but did well on tests. I passed my APs with 4's without studying! It all bit me in the butt in college, when I couldn't just breeze through.

I think if I'd learned discipline early on, I could have achieved much more. I'm happy where I am now but it took awhile to get there after I crashed academically in college.

edit* nothing to contribute**

It may not have been your fault. My buddy, who speaks Russian, read an article somewhere, and told me about it. The article talked about what I chose to call the "Star Theory". To understand it, you have to be familiar with the stars' spectral classes. Class O is the brightest, hottest, largest, heaviest, and rarest. Class M is the dimmest, coldest, smallest, lightest, and commonest. Classes B, A, F, G (our Sun), and K all fit in-between.

Because class O stars are so strong, they have very short lifespans (for a star): less than 10 million years. They start off like a lion, so to speak. But they quickly burn off any stored energy they have, then explore as supernovas, and degenerate into black holes. Class M stars are the opposite. Their average lifespan is 10 trillion years, and some of the oldest ones are estimated to predate the Big Bang. They start off like a kitten. but burn of their energy slowly and gradually, until nuclear fusion stops and they get blown away by interstellar winds. Other star classes have in-between lifespans, with the end of life varying depending on the star's size.

The article talked about how gifted kids can become non-gifted adults. Extremely gifted kids (child prodigies) correspond to class O stars. They're super bright as children: learning to talk at 3 months, knowing the whole alphabet at 1 year 6 months, learning a second language at 2 years, playing an instrument at 3 years, reading adult encyclopedias at 5 years, taking college classes at 8 years, and doing a Master's at 13 years. But like the hydrogen and helium in class O stars, the mental energy cannot last forever at this rate; burns off very quickly. In many cases, they "run out of steam" by the time they reach adulthood, and oftentimes, get tired of playing the part of the child prodigy. When they're adults, all they have energy for is making just enough money to live on.

Your typical NT kids are class M stars. They learn to talk at 1 year, learn to read at 5 years, maybe take up an instrument at 9 years, never bother with encyclopedias except for classwork, start college at normal 18 years, and do their Master's sometime before age 30. Because they "pace themselves" so well, their mental energy lasts a very long time, like the ionized calcium, metals, and molecular gases in class M stars. So when these kids become adults, they surge up the career ladder, get into upper management, drive nice cars, own big houses, etc, etc, etc. They don't lose all the energy during childhoods because they never had to, be it due to parental pressure or inborn abilities. Instead, they really make it last, long enough to become successful as adults.

The original article did not take into account kids with mental disabilities or in special education. There are star classes L, T, and Y, which I guess would be the equivalents of these kids. Their nuclear fusion strength is below the level necessary to produce full illumination, but they're still stars in their own right; the original article just never mentioned them.

My own situation was more like a class A star. I too learned to talk early, read adult encyclopedias in 3rd grade, and pulled mostly straight A's all through school and college (although that was driven by the fear of punishment for bad grades). Now I'm an adult, live in a cheap apartment, work a sh*tty job below my qualifications, generally hate my life, lost my faith in god years ago, and get my kicks from movies, sports, beer, escort services, and alcohol-heavy Caribbean cruises, rather than science.

So that's the theory. Your example made me think of it. Let me know what you think, and share what star class you might fit into, if you wish.

I remember when I was 12 I wowed the music teachers with my perfect pitch, they predicted that talent could carry me far, but those were all dud predictions.

Your star theory was very helpful to me tonight. I'm not a failure- I just had early fast growth. My growth now is slow and even diminishing.

I now no longer feel this pressure to continually exceed all expectations of me. It's ludicrous to burn an engine in the red line for fifty years and each year DEMAND higher performance. Not going to happen. The star theory is like that to me- it makes sense.

Why do we change so many of the natural order when we talk about humans? This is truly not logical.

I think there is another interesting thing. I was a gifted kid (in certain ways, especially with language, comunication) and a lot of things was easier to me. When you are a kid, everyone thinks that this is great. However, this is not the most important thing among teenagers - now you need to be a social person, conquer some boys/girls, be a leader, convince other people, be funny in a right way, etc. The paradigm changes and your old "persona" doesn't fit in these new requirements.

Also, I think we are a kind of emotional survivors of this traumatic moment of our lives when we discover that it's not great to everyone in everytime to know that someone learns quickly. Especially in a competitive society.

That's reminiscent of my life. Organizational skills can be everything when it comes to academics, especially when it comes to the business world for a lot of people. I probably spent more time smoking joints than studying in high school and my first two years of college.

I think that it is not strange that children who appeared to be gifted are not as gifted as adults.
Since children develop at different rates, a child with some fast-developing abilities will be gifted, but they may reach a ceiling that is no higher than another child who developed at a slower rate but reached the same adulthood level.
It is perhaps more common for autistic children to have certain of these fast abilities with their scattered intellectual abilities that some have, so they would appear more gifted compared to their peers at age 5 or 10 than age 20 or 30.