Is underachievement a common thing among gifted people?

My guilty pleasure is Quora, which I dip into if a question intrigues me. Sometimes I “archive” the more interesting topics here.

Is underachievement a common thing among gifted people?

Sure. I doubt we know any hard and fast proportions, because (in the US), there is no institution that is able to recognize gifted and talented people in any consistent way, particularly for fields that are not, at some level, math-related. I came up through gifted and advanced-placement classes in school, and as far as I can tell, the main things the kids in those classes had in common were involved, affluent parents; plenty of nutritious food; and stable, supportive home lives. These are pretty good springboards for success, but an anonymous poll of those parents would probably yield a lot of stories of “underachievement” – whatever that even means.

There are a lot of reasons kids can excel (or not) in class, let alone life – native interest, teaching/training quality, health status, specific cognitive or neurological issues, and so on. I don’t think any of those are necessarily linked to (anyone’s) intelligence in any meaningful way. Also, there is a persistent idea among involved, affluent parents that gifted kids require special learning opportunities and teaching, which is rather strange, given that intellectually gifted children can probably succeed in any teaching environment. To the extent that they benefit from “enrichment” in their learning environments, it’s seems obvious that kids who are not as “gifted” would benefit even more.

I can tell you one thing I missed out on as a kid who found school easy: plain talk about how important it is to develop good time management and study skills. I am in great company in this regard, and I am sure that I and many others are great disappointments to people in our lives because we lost ground struggling to put those pieces together later than we should have. As I hear people bitch about NYC phasing out their gifted-and-talented program, I can’t help thinking that all of us could probably benefit in school from some plain talk along the lines of: real life involves needing to pay attention to things you couldn’t possibly care less about, there is no such thing as reading it once and getting it (learning almost anything requires multiple passes), and good time management is like this crazy super ninja skill that makes almost anything seem magically achievable.

My answer on Quora