High Ability

Many social and personal issues can impact the career achievement and personal growth of high ability people.

“I feel there are two people inside me – me and my intuition. If I go against her, she’ll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely.”

– Kim Basinger

Many other artists talk about using intuitive guidance in their work and lives.

But it can be a challenge for people who are predominantly intellectual to acknowledge and make use of intuition.

Malcolm Gladwell describes personal and social aspects of how people become outstanding, on the upper end of intelligence, ability and achievement curves.

Photo: Oscar-winning actor Geena Davis has commented: “I took up archery in real life just because I thought I’d like to do a sport that’s not the ‘movies’ version. It really changed my self-image, my body perception.”

Perfectionism is for many people an aspect of being gifted and multi-talented, and can be an integral part of the pursuit of excellence and high achievement.

But being perfectionistic in unhealthy ways can make us feel continually dissatisfied or anxious, and hold us back from finishing – or even starting – creative projects.

Actor Emma Watson has a healthy attitude about being “perfect” – which, of course, isn’t really possible.

What is labeled mental disorder may really be an asset. For example, some researchers believe Mozart was a classic example of someone with Tourette's.

What are Excitabilities? One of the key concepts of Polish psychiatrist and psychologist Kazimierz Dabrowski, MD, PhD (1902 – 1980) is that individuals with strong “overexcitabilities” are good candidates for higher level development.

Stephen King has said: “I’ve taken off two months, three months at a time, and, by the end, I get really squirrelly. My night life, my dream life, gets extremely populated and crazed. It’s as though something in there is running all the time.”

What happens if you realize you are smarter and more capable than most people? Do you celebrate being exceptional, or try to hide?

Being too different can be painful, but those who choose to honestly acknowledge having greater abilities, and who nurture them, can gain more fulfillment and perhaps recognition than those who deny and hide.

One example of recognition for intellectual ability is valedictorian Bianca Phillips.

Lily Cole gained acclaim as a model, is an ambassador for the Body Shop, an actor (“Snow White and the Huntsman”), and last year achieved the academic honor of a Double First in History of Art from Cambridge University.

In one of her newsletter articles, Elaine Aron talks about the differences between giftedness and sensitivity, in both children and adults.

“There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see. I thought I was crazy or an egomaniac for claiming to see things other people didn’t see. “As a child I would say, ‘but this is going on!

Golf champion Michelle Wie has said she doesn’t simply want to be known as someone who won the most LPGA tournaments in history: “I want to be known as doing stuff that no one ever thought of… I want to be known as people that changed the world and people that change how people think.”

A healthy self concept includes acknowledging strengths, but for many, including those who are gifted, they have been ignored or were not expressed.

By Lisa Erickson, MS, LMHC : The caller says they went to my website and started to cry. I have heard this reaction before. It isn’t because they read the page on addictions or the one on depression. There is only one page that evokes this response.

The multipotentialite mind is always whirring: coming up with ideas, planning new projects, solving problems or learning new skills, and all that activity requires plenty of room to think.

Princess Diana is among a number of talented people who have experienced anxiety and self criticism, and used self-injury to deal with painful feelings.

How we think of talents in others and ourselves may have a profound effect on nurturing and realizing those abilities. Motivation is also a key element.

“The young Mozart’s prowess can be chalked up to practice, practice, practice. Compelled to practice three hours a day from age three on.. No wonder they thought he was a genius.” Malcolm Gladwell

So much categorizing people as gifted and talented emphasizes achievements or distinctions like high IQ or SAT scores, a bestseller book or movie.

Actor Ellen Muth, who starred as George (for Georgia) Lass in the tv series “Dead Like Me,” has admitted she had low self-esteem, like her character, and also said, “But I still feel like I haven’t accomplished anything… like I haven’t made it anywhere… And I know in the rational part of my mind that it’s not true.”

A blogger using the name “neighbor” wrote: "When I was little I was labelled Gifted. There's such residual confusion mixed up with that phrase. I'm not bragging (there's nothing to brag about).

"I was enrolled in GATE (Gifted and Talented Education) back when it was MGM (Mentally Gifted Minors) and when it was mostly a pull-out program.  I loved it – it was engaging and fun, full of creative thinking and problem solving.."

Dean Keith Simonton notes that intelligence is a necessary but not sufficient basis for achieving eminence, and there are so many other factors.

In her article Unrecognized Giftedness: The Frustrating Case of the Gifted Adult, Marylou Kelly Streznewski (author of the book Gifted Grownups) writes of Emily Dickinson: “Her story is well known: the seven poems published in a minor magazine as a favor by a friend; the fifteen hundred brilliant compositions tied in ribboned packets, filling the drawers in her house at her death. No eminence there."

Owning and operating a brain is hard. You are issued one at birth, a model that comes riddled with delusions and biases, prone to logical fallacies, and built to create stories to help explain the difficult and messy business of being a person.

"It has been my experience that gifted and talented persons are more likely to experience a type of depression referred to as existential depression. Although an episode of existential depression may be precipitated in anyone…persons of higher intellectual ability are more prone to experience existential depression spontaneously."

Arianna Huffington was described by her friend and author Sugar Rautbord [in a Vanity Fair article] as “probably one of the most intellectually seductive human beings on the face of the planet.

One of the myths of highly talented people like Huffington – fueled in part by media coverage of those who are highly successful – is they can almost magically choose whatever personal and career path they want, and realize their abilities without hindrance. It doesn’t exactly work out that way for everyone.

Embracing their identity as gifted and talented is not easy for many people. Why is this so tough? What beliefs lead to unrecognized giftedness?

Willem Kuipers discusses the challenge of accepting our gifted identity: "In my current experience and view, the biggest “social issue of the gifted” is the painful misfit between implicit beliefs about giftedness by the non-gifted and the gifted alike and the actual or perceived reality of very many gifted adults."

By Lisa Erickson, MS, LMHC Lisbeth Salander is the fictional heroine of Steig Larsson’s trilogy The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.

As the heroine, Lisbeth Salander embodies certain characteristics of giftedness, and these characteristics help her survive terrible, long-term physical, sexual and emotional abuse. What helps Lisbeth Salander survive her ordeals?