David Brooks on How Giftedness Plays Out in People’s Lives

??????????? In this New York Times column, David Brooks looks at the life trajectories of children who score high on intelligence tests. Unsurprisingly, a high I.Q. is strongly correlated with academic and occupational success (lots of doctors, lawyers, and professors) and moderately correlated with lifetime income. “Intelligence really matters,” says Brooks.

??????????? But longitudinal studies of gifted kids have also found that only a few go on to be creative geniuses or make transformational contributions in their fields. Why? “Some brilliant people lack ambition,” says Brooks. “Some brilliant people don’t want to spend their lives at work, slaving away for eminence. They have different values and prefer to do other things with their time.”

??????????? In addition, there are downsides to being identified as exceptionally intelligent. One man interviewed in a British study said, “My being seen as gifted has produced awful deficiencies in me. I was emotionally scarred by being made to perform. All the time it was, ‘Look what Jeremy can do.’ I could do almost anything on demand, but I used to feel like a performing penguin.” Fear of failure haunted him, and after 13 years as a medical student and doctor, he was sidelined by depression and wound up being a musician, not exceptional but enjoying himself and making enough to pay the bills. Researchers have found that it’s nearly impossible to predict adult exceptionality from early I.Q. tests.

??????????? “When you get a glimpse of the real lives of gifted people,” says Brooks, “you see that it’s a mistake to separate this thing we call intelligence from all the other aspects of their lives.” Do they have deep friendships, rich intellectual conversations, unconditional love, conscientiousness, self-confidence, resilience? These are harder to measure than intelligence but just as important to the quality of a person’s life.

??????????? Treating gifted children like “a brain on a stick” and stuffing them full of school learning is a mistake, says Brooks, and can put their emotional balance at risk and undermine future success. “The bottom line is that we need to put intelligence in its place,” he says. “We need to value it and put precocious children in settings where they are nurtured and stretched. But we don’t want to overvalue it.” He believes it’s a mistake for universities to reject applicants who score below 1300 on the SAT.

For people who do accomplish extraordinary things, drive and determination are more important than intelligence: “Great accomplishment is the marriage of ability and interest. It’s the vital spark that makes people passionately curious about a subject, that makes them determined and relentless, that causes them to say to themselves: I’m going to figure this out, no matter what it takes… They didn’t wow people at age 18, but over the course of their adulthood they found some deep interest in something, and they achieved mastery… They had the right mixture of slight advantages and character traits that came together in the right way.”

??????????? “It’s nice to know who is good at taking intelligence tests,” Brooks concludes, “but it’s more important to know who is lit by an inner fire.”

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“What Happens to Gifted Children” by David Brooks in The New York Times, June 14, 2024, summarized in Marshall Memo 1041