My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn't have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn't last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn't as solid).

So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn't inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.

I'm still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I've learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.

I'm pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the "smart but lazy" label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn't enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It's certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.

I can promise you if you are here you’re above average. Average is shockingly bad. Maybe not average for engineering school but still above it.

"A big fish in a little pond", it's how I described my achievements in my first job out of uni.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big-fish%E2%80%93little-pond_effect

makes me feel better in a way, knowing i at least had a purpose. even if that purpose was to make someone else's purpose seem more meaningful.

Maybe I'm like Inspector Gadget. The titular character, but the real protagonist is my niece and her dog.

That's entirely plausible. It's fairly normal even. Thats still well over 10 million people and it's common for people to be in the 95th percentile then go to college and be completely average.

With the barriers to entry that Lemmy has it's not that unlikely. It's like an incel going onto 8chan and saying, we can't all be the most edgy people we know.

According to this website there are only around 40-70k daily active users (monthly vs semiannual). If you look at total users we're sitting on about 1.3 million with 11 million posts per day and 23 million comments per day.

So 0.015% of the world population on an obscure site which is not mainstream accessible.

EDIT: Just because you were one of the smartest people in your class doesn't mean you are "smart." I would argue that it says more about the other kids in your class than it does you, most people are fucking stupid.

And I gotta say I really appreciate it!

Did I write this last night in my sleep?

I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.

Advanced classes means slightly less stupid. This makes me think of Beijing University. A lot of kids who were considered the brightest and the best in their little towns their parents would go into debt and borrow money from others in the town to send them to Beijing University.

When the kids arrived they'd discover they weren't as smart as they thought they were and they'd flunk out despite studying as hard as they could. And instead of returning home and embarrassing their parents in front of the other townspeople they'd kill themselves.

It's wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did.

That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (not to excuse your parents, if applicable). It’s not the same thing at all, but I learned much better people skills from living with a boyfriend who had abandoned his treatment for and didn’t tell me about his paranoid schizophrenia than from anyone else. He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.

When you are working with people with a very different perspective on the world that you can’t change, and neither party feels entitled to acceptance because of family, you need to learn how to treat others respectfully and with dignity to succeed.

I also work in healthcare. The science was challenging, but achievable with effort. The hand skills took practice and repetition. But the people skills are truly never mastered.

I’ve been in my field for 17 years and it’s still a daily fire walk trying to avoid setting expectations too high, setting expectations too low, or somehow inadvertently inviting litigation with the wrong choice of words. The same verbiage doesn’t work on everyone, and you have about 20 seconds to decide which variation of unreasonable you have to sidestep on every person.

I feel like I am fortunate to have employment and not worry as much as many people about affording groceries and the mortgage. And yet, I really hope my children don’t choose patient care for their career.

I was a nerdy girl and was always pushed out by teachers. My male teachers for obvious reasons but i had a younger female programming teacher and she hated the fact I existed and took attention away from her.

likewise, i have always been the family tinker/inventor. invented a hydrogen/oxygen fuel cell when i was 8 before i learned they already existed better than i had invented. i went to school, took engineering classes. the intro to CAD teacher was an ableist douche (long story) and publicly stated that it was his intention to weed out anyone he felt was not "worthy" of being in our "noble" (ranked four hundred something nationally) engineering program via his computer drafting program and since grading was almost entirely subjective (75% of each project was for "style" whatever that meant) he got to do that.

i changed majors next semester. haven't stopped building shit. i'm tired, but i'm supposed to finish rebuilding my bike today. i'm going to hang the drapes instead.

Most programming classes are bullshit. You come out with basic knowledge of practices that aren't used in real production. They teach you how to write code, but they don't teach you how code is written in most businesses.

Outside of actual gaming programs in colleges, new developers are generally bewildered and end up making stuff that's hard to maintain.

We had a professor sit in with us for a few months once to get the gist of what was needed so he could form classes around game deveopment.

One of the asian ones is a frog in a well. Though it carries more the connotation of Dunning-Kreuger,, though more due to environment and experience vs a mental condition.

It took me many years to realize.

I learned to read and write very young, and so the literary part of school was always super easy. This caused me to neglect studying overall, and when I moved to high school in the city, I was just average lol