I commented briefly here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7830507

But this really hit home for me

> One of the most painful aspects of teaching mathematics is seeing my students damaged by the cult of the genius. That cult tells students that it's not worth doing math unless you're the best at math—because those special few are the only ones whose contributions really count. We don't treat any other subject that way. I've never heard a student say, "I like 'Hamlet,' but I don't really belong in AP English—that child who sits in the front row knows half the plays by heart, and he started reading Shakespeare when he was 7!" Basketball players don't quit just because one of their teammates outshines them. But I see promising young mathematicians quit every year because someone in their range of vision is "ahead" of them.

Being identified as a child genius puts you into the unfortunate default circumstance of always competing with everybody, instead of just competing with yourself like you are supposed to do when learning and growing. You are supposed to be uniquely smart, and when other kids do something better than you you start to question yourself.

Importantly, well meaning educators try to foster the areas you test as exceptionally gifted in, when what they should be doing is teaching you how to work through and overcome areas you are weaker in -- to achieve a better cognitive balance. This can help the child break the "curse of being gifted", where effortless achievement in one area becomes a kind of short-loop positive feedback drug they focus all of their attention on and harder/less obvious areas are ignored much to later detriment.

But it's almost never done, because it's assumed that since you're gifted in one area you're gifted in them all and they'll just focus on the ones you test the highest in. You've been given a magical spark, and they want to capture that spark. The cruel irony is that quite often, the harder they work to grab it, the faster it goes away.

I think one of the problems is that many of the educators responsible for guiding exceptionally gifted children through all this were not themselves exceptionally gifted and have a poor understanding and empathy for what it's like to walk around with all this, often very uneven, nascent intelligence.

I see from many of the comments here that other really bright kids were put in competitive environments where scores and placements became a big focus of their lives: SAT scores, Putnam, IQ scores...I'm sure most of us also did state or regional competitions of some sort or another. The most important thing I learned from all that when I was going through it was that "there's always somebody better than you so don't get all emotional when you have the bad fortune to cross paths with them in the same competition."

Actually, the better lesson I learned was to not bother competing at all and just focus one challenging myself. I'm already in the top 1-2% in whatever narrow subject area according to some test, without any effort, why don't I achieve competency in something I outright suck at? If I'm so smart, I should be able to figure out how to attack and surmount any weakness I have.

I think that little philosophy has gotten me much farther than any of the areas I was identified as being gifted in as a child.