Giftedness is Relative

… and Most Gifted People Don’t Even Know They’re Gifted!

The Relativity of Giftedness

It is important to understand the relativity of intelligence, talent, and giftedness. Why is this important? Because no two people are alike. Even between identical twins, their brains, bodies, reactions to their unique environments, and their preferences and personalities are not exactly the same. Unusually intelligent people — both gifted adults and gifted children — can find themselves in different groups whose members have different intellectual characteristics or overall goals than they do.

For example, when young, people who are clearly talented athletes in several different sports eventually have to choose which sport they want to focus on if they wants to turn one sport into a career. Some of them may continue to be good at several sports and may even take one or two of them up again later in life and become quite good in at least one of them. But even the professional basketball player Michael Jordan, after a 13 month mediocre stint in the MLB for the White Sox, ended up in celebrity tournaments instead of the professional leagues in his non-basketball talent areas. My point is: no matter how naturally talented or brilliant someone is in any field or domain, one still has to focus on, put in practice, and strengthen their knowledge base and experiences to improve and compete with the best.

Of course, this is true for careers other than professional sports. Should you live in a small or rural town, you may be known as the smartest kid there. And it might be true. There’s always the chance that another youngster will move into town and quickly take your place in the “smartest kid” category. What I attempt to show in Chapter 1 of my Big Book[i] is how “who else is there” can make you and others around you think of you as higher or lower on the pecking order ladder of smartness. It is natural to make comparisons, but sometimes talking about better or worse, more or less, good enough or not good enough, can be unnecessary and potentially destructive.