Siblings, Classmates, and Super High Intelligence (Oh, my!)

I am grateful to the people who shared their thoughts and lives with me during the twenty years it took to work with their parents first and then the subjects themselves 20 years later. These stories give readers a peak into what being extremely intelligent can mean for your self-concept, friendships, and so much more (the books with full results are listed at the end of this article).

Rebecca Resnick

Rebecca, an exceptionally to profoundly gifted Level Four who preferred INTP (Thinker, 1.7%) in childhood and adulthood, wrote this when in her late twenties:

Friendships were predictably difficult for a number of years. I have no idea how much of this was due to being gifted and how much of it was due to being a total jerk. I do know that in 5th or 6th grade, a classmate “invented” the game “Genius Germs,” which was basically “tag” except that I was always it, and from then until high school I pretty much spent free time alone. I struggled for many years to understand why someone I didn’t even know that well would do this to me, but thinking about it now, I had probably acted like a jerk.

As Rebecca’s mother explained in the earlier section on sibling relationships, Rebecca often didn’t realize that the ways she talked and said things sometimes didn’t land…