Excerpt
The Gifted Adult
1
BEYOND GIFTEDNESS: EVERYDAY GENIUS DEFINED
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
To look at her, you would never suspect that Ann was in the midst of a crisis. She sat in my office, composed and resplendent in a black Tahari suit. The only sign of any agitation was her habit of coiling and uncoiling her index finger around her strand of pearls. She looked much younger than forty-three. As my client now for nearly four months, she, at first, had been at a loss to explain rationally what brought her to me.
“No one ever expects a midlife crisis, Dr. Jacobsen. I certainly didn’t,” were the first words that Ann spoke to me.
At one point in her legal career, Ann had been a dynamo, working on a team that won a major case involving suspected violations of interstate commerce laws in the dairy industry. The lead attorney acknowledged that it was her dogged efforts that helped dismantle the government’s case. Ann seemed destined to make partner before she was thirty-five and was guaranteed the pick of the firm’s highest-profile and potentially most lucrative cases.
Success hadn’t come without a price. Those who were passed over for promotion in favor of Ann attributed her meteoric rise to favoritism and not her razor-sharp analytical skills, her amazing intuition, and her twenty-six-hour workdays. Once lauded as the consummate most valuable player, Ann was eventually plagued by not-so-quiet whispers about her chameleonlike ability to transform herself into whomever each partner wanted her to be. Suddenly the qualities that had once been her most valuable assets felt like her greatest liabilities.
Always someone who took every criticism to heart, Ann stopped trusting her intuition and her allies. Rather than ranging far and wide to offer colleagues help, anticipating their problems before they even identified them, she kept to a carefully circumscribed territory in order to restore her coworkers’ regard for her. Her boundless interest and enthusiasm, previously characterized by being the first to volunteer to tackle the thorniest problem, now slid precipitously. She became aloof and distant.
“After all the problems I created by being a standout, I decided that the best way to get along was to go along and just joylessly grind my way through the day like everyone else. It seemed to be the only way that I could make working there bearable. Everyone else seemed pleased about my so-called change, but I was miserable.”
A few months before Ann first came to see me, I’d walked into my office one afternoon and was startled to find a man standing at the window tugging at one of the slats in the miniblinds and peering out at the street. He turned around and saw me. Then he took a couple of steps toward me, muttered, “How ya doing, Doc?” and stalked to the bookcase lining one wall. He pulled a book off the shelf and started leafing through it.
“You must be John,” I said as evenly as I could. “My clients usually wait in the reception area.”
“Well, I saw that other woman come out, so I came on in. You don’t mind, do you.” There was little to suggest that John was asking a question.
John soon put back the book and took down a few others, smiling ruefully and shaking his head after examining a couple of their titles. Eventually I came to understand that John was very nearly incapable of keeping still for longer than a few minutes at a time. In this instance, the classic stereotype of the patient lying on the couch was laughable. John was the epitome of the restless peripatetic at home and at the office.
Early on, John described how he perceived others. “It’s like the rest of the world is moving along at twenty-four frames per second, normal film speed, but to me that’s slow motion. Even when somebody’s talking during a meeting, I swear I look at their mouths and it’s like I’m advancing the tape frame by frame on my VCR. So, okay, film and videotape are two very different things, so maybe that’s not the best example, but maybe it’s more like the world’s a blender on stir and I’m on liquefy.”
John’s self-editing and criticism aside, his description is apt. To someone like John, the rest of the world does seem as if it’s lagging behind. From people walking too slowly on sidewalks and those counting out exact change in a supermarket checkout line to others arriving at a solution that seemed obvious to John minutes, days, or sometimes weeks before, everyone else always seemed to be moving at a glacial pace. A true multitasker, John used to upset everyone at meetings because he could monitor the flow of the conversation, read a report, scan the agenda for the next item of discussion, then jump ahead or interject at seemingly inappropriate moments.
“I’m sick of being told to slow down. If I’m on an express train and they’re on a local, why don’t they switch trains and get onto mine? It’s time for them to be responsible for catching up to me.”
Unfortunately for John, what others perceived as his uncooperative attitude eventually caught up with him. While he hadn’t been fired from his job as a creative director at an advertising agency, he’d been essentially stripped of all authority. He’d been asked to stay on in a consulting capacity but was given little real work to do. John clearly sensed what was about to happen to him, but that only made him dig in his heels more deeply on some issues and veer recklessly from one more outlandish idea to the next, wielding his considerable wit like a saber. He’d gone from being a visionary Renaissance man of the company to persona non grata in a matter of months.
“It wouldn’t bother me so much, but before I came along most of them thought that HTML was what you saw when some of the letters burned out in a neon hotel or motel sign. I got us a jump start into Web advertising, and now everyone is reaping the benefits and claiming they were the masterminds behind the whole thing. It’s like working with a bunch of Al Gores claiming they were the ones who helped develop the World Wide Web. Of course, everybody knows that Dan Quayle was the one who invented the spell checker.”
GIFTEDNESS DENIED
While John and Ann couldn’t have been more different in certain respects, they do have much in common. They are both gifted adults standing poised at a crossroads. And they both initially recoiled at my suggestion that they were gifted.
Like John and Ann, when many of us hear the word gifted we almost always think two things: (1) “Only schoolchildren are gifted” and (2) “Since I’m not a child, I can’t be gifted.” These automatic responses are understandable given what most of us have been told about bright people. But most of what we have been told is radically incorrect and enormously incomplete.
Most of us think we know what giftedness is, but we’re unable to describe it or define it accurately. Part of the reason for that is that we live in a culture that emphasizes products over process. We can see what gifted people produce, but we can’t see the internal systems and operations that produced those products. In the previous sentence, even I had to resort to using words more suited to something manufactured mechanically than to how the brain really functions. While most people in society would accept the definition that giftedness is as giftedness does, it is not adequate for the purposes of this book.
Most definitions of giftedness include these components:
• Initially having and using natural abilities without benefit of formal training
• Rapid learning
• Creative and productive thinking
• High academic achievement
• Superior proficiency in one or more domains (e.g., mathematics, performing arts, leadership)
As you can see, the emphasis is on the cognitive components of giftedness. While the cognitive components are certainly important to consider in discussing giftedness, too often there is a piece missing. Giftedness is not merely as giftedness does or as giftedness thinks. Instead, giftedness is as it thinks as well as feels, senses, perceives, and does.
The Gifted Adult explores the psychology and personality of gifted adults—the most underidentified group of potential achievers in our society. Regrettably, too often in our society those who would most readily be identified as “smart” are most at odds with making their intelligence work for them. Quite often it works against gifted adults, preventing them from producing the kind of products that traditionally are the markers of giftedness. One possible explanation for this discrepancy is that we place a great deal of emphasis on educating gifted children. We understand that gifted children operate differently from those in the mainstream. As a result, we try to accommodate these differences among children by providing them with special programs and enrichment activities. However, even in the best school districts these programs are often inadequate and make the fundamental mistake of using only standard measures such as IQ as a basis for admission.
Programs for the talented and gifted are a relatively recent phenomenon. As a mother of three very different gifted children, as a former educator and advocate for gifted education, I can attest to the benefits and deficits of these programs. However, despite the varying quality of such programs and their methods of identifying students, they stand head and shoulders above earlier efforts to educate gifted children, since specialized programs simply did not exist. From firsthand experience, I know that many gifted “programs” consisted primarily of removing the “smart” kids from the classroom and giving them busywork or enlisting their aid as tutors for the “slow” kids.
If we accept the notion that some children are gifted, then we have to account for what happens to these children when they grow up. After all, it’s not as though these former children slough off their giftedness like discarded skin at the age of sixteen or eighteen or twenty-one. Gifted children do grow up, and they become gifted adults. It seems like an obvious comment to make, yet little is written about giftedness and how it applies to adults. So instead of asking if gifted adults exist, we might be better served by asking questions like the following: How many gifted adults are there? What are they doing with their lives? What do we know about how they function in society? What do they have to do to be successful and fully use their abilities? These are all important questions, and it is this initial line of inquiry that led me to more fully investigate the concept of giftedness as it applies to adults.
