Two posts in my blogroll made me ask myself this question today. The first one, provides the following quote from Sylvia Plath:
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age.”
The second one tells a story of two kids who were stellar students in high school, whom everybody considered super promising, but who didn’t manage to make it through college despite all the promise:
The scholarship offers rolled in, and he took the one from the school that accepted his AA degree and promised to fund his first two years in law school. He was a college junior at 18. His cousin from another state—which at the time promised free tuition at state schools for any resident who had earned a specific high school rank and grade point average—had one burning ambition: to get a “free ride.” And he did. Predictably, both flunked out. The golden boy didn’t survive the first year.
We all know those people who, in their youth, are described by everybody as rising stars. “Watch this kid,” people say. “He will go far.” “She is so full of promise.” “They have such a bright future ahead of them.”
More often than not, the bright future remains just that, a future, and the promise never gets fulfilled. The brilliant kids reap admiration, rewards, and applause for years as they glide slowly into their thirties. And this is where (maybe a little earlier or a little later) the applause and the admiration stop. Nobody celebrates their promise any more because the time for promising is long gone by this time. The former golden kids (a term suggested to me by the third great post I read today) are left feeling confused and anxious.
“Why was everybody celebrating my every little achievement yesterday and now suddenly nobody seems to care?” they ask themselves. “Why am I suddenly not everybody’s precious prodigy any more? How did I suddenly find myself in the role of an ordinary, nondescript adult?”
It is all the more difficult for such people to settle into middle age comfortably since their teens and their twenties were so filled with admiration and adoration that it becomes impossible for them to accept that all this cheering has suddenly gone away.
So where do these Full of Promise Rising Stars (FPRS, for short) come from and, if one happens to be a FPRS, what can one do to escape from the seemingly inevitable disillusionment of growing older without having achieved anything all that great? Why is it so hard to transform a promising youth into a happy adulthood and a brilliant middle age?
I’ll tell you all these things in my next post.
Clarissa's Blog 
Alas, this sort of happened to my sister, and not even before she hit thirty, she’s only nineteen. She got all the awards and special achievements and all of the attention from our parents and teachers, because she got good grades and was buttoned-up and ambitious, and would definitely “go places” and “make money”.
Nobody expected anything out of me because I was rebellious and prioritized many, many things before homework and assignments. 🙂 I went to a less than stellar school, she got accepted to U of Washington on a partial scholarship.
Now though, she is more into working two jobs so she can have enough money for trips to Vancouver and San Diego and party with her friends. That’s not nearly so bad though, because I get the feeling she’s happier this way.
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You kind of anticipated the entire second part of my post with this comment. 🙂
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Yes this does happen to many people. In many ways, the goals and parameters of achievement in childhood and young adulthood are more clearcut. You have to get good grades, or win some sports event, and so on. It’s as if society has defined your targets for you, and these full of promise high achievers are all too happy chasing these goals and running through hoops. Adulthood is by nature more mundane, there are more responsibilities, and a living to be made. I get the feeling that the goals of adulthood have to be more self-defined, people have to be more introspective and look within themselves for motivation, and not have to depend on society’s cheerleading. This is the biggest hurdle where many formerly high achievers stumble. They have become too dependent on societal applause and approval, and have not developed the necessary maturity to have self-defined life goals, priorities and parameters of achievement – most significantly the ability to be happy, and to pursue all that is necessary for it. This is my reading of the situation, but I am waiting eagerly for your next post, as well as the comments from your other readers!
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This is exactly what I’m saying, too.
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Mmm, I’ve seen this too. I find the high achievers who continue to do well tend to be the ones who have a genuine passion for something, be it music, medicine, whatever – an intrinsic rather than an extrinsic goal like ‘being a lawyer’. They still tend to stumble when they realise they’re mortal and can fail, just like the rest of us.
Anecdotally, (of course) I have a friend who is and was an incredibly gifted physicist who worked hard solely because he loved his subject, he always found things easy – until he didn’t. He hit a particular area of math that for the first time did not come naturally and even working wasn’t helping. He felt like a failure yada yada, spiralled into depression, very nearly flunked out. I convinced him to ask for a sabbatical instead of dropping out and, as he had no other plans, to come and work for me; training horses, something that he knew nothing about, and was not naturally gifted at. He was so depressed that it was fairly easy to steer him, albeit quite time consuming. I bulled him through six months of learning through trial and error and bruises and getting it wrong over and over and over again, and slowly he improved. One morning I was sat on the fence watching him as he rode and the horse threw a wobbly and I had to laugh because this guy who six months before would have been so completely discombombulated by it that he’d have had to get off: he just rode on through it carrying on like nothing had happened. He asked why I was laughing, and I told him: “Because you were so crap and now you’re so not.” He looked at me like I’d hit him with a brick and asked “Really?” I said yes and he carried on, still looking somewhat dazed. Three days later he told me that he was ready to go back to physics, that he knew he could do it now, and, he did.
After an emotional crash like that though, I doubt anyone who wasn’t genuinely passionate about their subject would have gone back. If you’re just studying for praise or because it’s what the clever people do, and then suddenly you’re not ‘clever’…. getting past that would be hard.
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Wow, I don’t know you, but you are an extraordinary friend. All I can say.
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thanks for the anecdote. I am getting a PhD in physics and while I am super-motivated and love the subject now, I know what to do if and when I hit the doldrums in my future academic career – train some horsies! 🙂
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This is the reason I am so strongly opposed to universities’ honors programs. They keep gifted students really busy and never give them time to think on their own and pursue ideas that may not be related to their courses. Of course, the other factor is that taking the best students out of mainstream classes deprives the more typical students of useful role models.
I was a Wunderkind (hoping I spelled that correctly. My German is minimal.) who somehow escaped this syndrome and continued being successful. This post makes me wonder how I did it.
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“This is the reason I am so strongly opposed to universities’ honors programs. They keep gifted students really busy and never give them time to think on their own and pursue ideas that may not be related to their courses. ”
I was in the Special Honors as an undergrad. And I can say that you are absolutely right. I begged my school (McGill U) for more hours to explore my minor, but they just wanted me to graduate and move on. I wanted to take philosophy and history, I was ready to pay for two more semesters, but they wanted me to graduate for the graduation statistics, so I agreed.
‘I was a Wunderkind (hoping I spelled that correctly. My German is minimal.) who somehow escaped this syndrome and continued being successful. This post makes me wonder how I did it.”
– I didn’t escape the syndrome. These two posts were probably the two most intensely personal posts I have ever written but it seems like the readers are not catching up on that, so the posts are not very popular. 🙂
If you escaped, it must have been because your parents or caretakers didn’t invest too much in your success.
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—but it seems like the readers are not catching up on that, so the posts are not very popular.
Catching up on this and especially sharing similar experiences means that one has to admit he or she considers him(her)self a Wunderkind. 🙂 🙂
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Hey, I’ve admitted so much more on this blog. What’s a small thing like this? 🙂
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—What’s a small thing like this?
And above you said it is deeply personal for you. 🙂 So stop the demagoguery 🙂 :).
But seriously, I never considered myself a Wunderkind, as in my mind this title was reserved only to internationally known prodigies. Otherwise I fully understand what you are talking about. I guess I am lucky that I finally found enough internal motivation in the field I happened to be in. Still, I often find my motivation to be of a contrarian variety – I like to disprove other peoples theories. 🙂
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I’m now internationally known thanks to the blog. 🙂 Too sad that all this notoriety came to me when I might still be a “Wunder” but hardly a “Kind.” 🙂
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If you escaped, it must have been because your parents or caretakers didn’t invest too much in your success.
I think they invested a lot in it. It was very hard for them when their third son, unlike the first two, was not an academic superstar. But, I did not find their demands onerous. I think my brother two years younger maybe did, but he is also successful. In most respects he would be regarded as more successful than I.
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jokes apart, I agree that you did a great job helping your friend! one of my friends who is much smarter than me and also a physicist went into clinical depression (needless to say his ambitions were also greater than mine, and high intelligence and ambition often come with a price), and we were not able to do much to help him.
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I used to be this kind of in-your-face really great friend. I got my friends out of really sucky situations. And then when I look back on it right now, I feel happy I got involved and hounded them to get help, and practically dragged them out of the crappy situations. Today, however, I wouldn’t do it. Nowadays, I’m more the kind of “Oh, you are doing this shitty XYZ to yourself? Cool! Tell me how it goes!” person.
And I’m still not sure if that’s a good development for my personality to get this way.
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I haven’t read part II yet, so here’s my take. I was the super student, and high school and college were wonderful for me. I hardly tried, and managed to graduate college with honors and a thesis for both of my majors, written in a foreign language. Then I went to law school, and since the variety had disappeared – there were no distractions, only one subject – I realized how completely boring and useless the cycle of achievements was. I personally will not be at the top of any field I choose to be in, and being average in my field doesn’t interest me. So…studying all day’s not fun and not rewarding. Realizing this, I decided to go for one out of two. I dropped out and now work making coffee. Utter waste of my talent, but I have fun every single day and I’m great at it. I know later I’ll regret it…but I also know I’ll regret it if I give up tons of my time and energy in pursuit of a high-powered career that doesn’t make me happy.
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‘I dropped out and now work making coffee. Utter waste of my talent, but I have fun every single day and I’m great at it. I know later I’ll regret it”
-No, no! You shouldn’t regret it! And it isn’t a waste of talent, or anything like that. My friend, if you are enjoying it, if you come to your job feeling like you are doing what makes you happy, then you are one of the very few who isn’t wasting their life.
If one has to wake up, contemplate the need to go to work, and then feel daunted by the prospect, who cares how much money they make my torturing themselves in this way?? You are such a lucky person to have had enough personal maturity to understand that this endless chase that is supposed to make you happy is all about nothing.
When I was 20-22, I made HUGE amounts of money doing a job I didn’t hate at all. I was very highly paid, my social status was very high, everybody envied me. But, gosh, I was so miserable, I can’t tell you.
So I dumped the high-paying career, the social status, the wonderful real estate that I gad accumulated, and just left. I became an indigent student who had to sit on the floor to eat out of a plate she shared with someone else. A Starbucks was too expensive to visit for me.
But I was so happy and fulfilled that it was all worth it.
It’s all a stupid myth that money, status and possessions will make one happy. No. Only by doing what we really dig do we get to happiness.
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