How the heck did you convince yourself to believe it? As a "gifted" kid, what I learned very quickly was that adults will happily exaggerate minor talents (which one acquires primarily through just spending time on them, a task made markedly easier when everybody else hates you) to absurdity- at one point I got an evaluation back from a summer program at Stanford telling me I might grow up to be "one of the best programmers of our age". What did I do to earn such acclaim? Got ahead of the rest of the class making a game, read the documentation for Flash, and used the extra time to add "voice controls" to my game (specifically, you'd shoot by yelling anything into your microphone, it was just triggered by levels.)

Seriously- how can you take that sort of praise seriously, and not just as a "look at the cute kid who knows more Adobe Flash than the rest of his age group"?

My sister, on the other hand, gets annoyed at my perspective - she finds it tiresome when people can't take the compliment. There's wisdom to both ways, I guess.

Made sense because compliments made me feel weird, even though I freely gave them out.

Since then I've trained myself to smile, make eye-contact and say "Thank you, I accept your compliment with confidence," before returning to the matter at hand.

It was a dumb game, but it taught me an important life lesson about how adults will believe what they want to believe. You don't even have to lie to people if they're willing to lie to themselves.

But essentially any praise from humans is not.

It's part of why I walked away from a National Merit Scholarship and dropped out of college at age 20.

I was the youngest kid at home and I learned to read at age four because my long-suffering, doting older sister reread me the same book a jillion times at my insistence. The poor woman could still quote the book in her forties.

Most of what I knew had nothing whatsoever to do with school.

Plus, it winds up being code for "You should all beat him up in the bathroom every chance you get!"

Gee, thanks.

(No, I was not literally beaten up in the bathroom.)

and from different perspective, the feeling that this came easy to you is exactly what would make you gifted. you are not impressed by your own achievements, but they are achievements. this is what gifted means. what's hard for someone else is easy for you.

that doesn't make it a good idea to call people gifted, because that has a tendency to make them lazy. it seems you saw through that though.

That doesn't mean the society discourages you from learning arts, music or anything else. You have to make room for it in your spare time.

Also, examinations to get into prestigious universities are brutal compared to the West. Around a million students (10.43 lakhs in 2018) take up the IIT JEE exam and only around 10,000 qualify. You can take a look at how tough the exam is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h_x13xHjVs

To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 1%. I am not even considering Medical (NEET), MBA (CAT) or Civil Services (UPSC) which is equally hard.

EDIT: Corrected 0.01% to 1%.

> To prepare for this, you would have to spend countless hours solving and sleepless nights studying. And even after all that, your chance at success is 0.01%.

Your numbers suggest 1%, not 0.01%. 0.01% of a million examinees would be 100 passing scores.

For example, if every eligible student takes the test and 1% of examinees pass, then the threshold for passing the test is being in the top 1% of the eligible population. If 30% of the eligible population at random take the exam, and 1% pass, then the threshold for passing the test is a little more lenient than the 1% figure makes it appear. But if some people identify beforehand that they are unlikely to pass, and don't bother -- say that the top 30% of eligible students all take the test, and the bottom 70% all don't -- then the threshold is much more strict then it appears; in the example, if 1% of examinees pass, then the passing threshold would actually be top 0.3%, not top 1%.

Now not all of these 14.3 million students appear for IIT JEE. Only 7% of these (1 million) appear for JEE. But since you talk about "eligible student", all the 14.3 million are eligible. But many don't even bother to take it because (as you mentioned) they know they don't stand a chance. Many of them are not interested in Engineering and are interested in Medical. These students take up NEET (which is equally tough). The remaining move on to do Arts, Commerce or any other stream with an aim to either do an MBA (through CAT), become a CA, LLB (for law) or pursue Civil Services (UPSC - as tough or some say even tougher than IIT JEE). The outliers are those that do not follow any of these well trodden paths: these are few and far between. So in reality only 7% of those eligible students appear for IIT JEE and then 1% of those appearing get selected.

The other fact you need to consider is that the Government of India expanded the number of IITs from the earlier 7 (as of 2001) to now 23 (as of 2018) and increased the total number of seats from 4500 to 12000. So an approx 3x jump in the number of seats keeping in mind the total number of aspirants taking the exam. So the pass percentage remains roughly the same year-on-year. I am sure if you now take 30% of the total eligible population (from your example), viz. 4.29 million students appearing for the exam, the percentage that pass will further decrease (from 1% to 0.28%). Because students are ranked and IIT seats that are fixed (around 12000) are filled rank-wise.

In all honesty I look back at my "smartness" as a kind of attention-seeking behavior where all I really wanted was the attention you got from getting the highest grade in the class or being the only one from your school to go to the ivy league.

To me, the smart label just means you are willing to sacrifice more than others to study/learn/build. Everything I have learned about people since starting college has told me that this is a net negative.

Isn’t attention-seeking sort of hard-wired into all dependent animals? So, well. You’re normal there.

It wasn't until middle of the University I learned that I actually had to work and study to understanding something.

Once you realize you're playing a level up, you won't need encouragement from authority figures. You'll be trying to reach and surpass the greats, all on your own.