“The natural trajectory of giftedness in childhood is not a six-figure salary, perfect happiness, and a guaranteed place in Who’s Who.”
Linda Silverman – in her book Counseling the Gifted and Talented.

In her keynote address The Universal Experience of Being Out-of-Sync, Linda Silverman, Ph.D. argues that giftedness should not be defined as simply high achievement in school or recognized accomplishment in adult life.

“The fact is that achievement is very much a function of opportunity (Hollingworth, 1926), and greater opportunities for success are available to those who have greater financial resources.

“Achievement, particularly recognized individual achievement, is culturally determined. In some cultures, individuals shun individual recognition; instead, they value moral courage or collective prosperity for generations to come, and use their gifts for the good of the group.

“Another way of understanding giftedness is to see it as developmental advancement.

“In every culture, there are children who develop at a faster pace from early childhood on, are inquisitive to a greater degree than their agemates, generalize concepts earlier than their peers, demonstrate advanced verbal or spatial capacities at an early age, have superb memories, grasp abstract concepts, love to learn, have a sophisticated sense of humor, prefer complexity, are extraordinarily insightful, have a passion for justice, are profoundly aware, and experience life with great intensity.

“While these traits may or may not propel the individual to world renown, they appear to correlate with moral sensitivity in childhood and ethical development in adult life.

“Their sensitivity, intensity, awareness, and moral courage set these individuals apart from others throughout the lifespan.

“In some societies these characteristics are applauded while in others they are punished.”

On the Gifted Development Center page about the Advanced Development Journal there is a brief overview:

Are you an undetected gifted adult who needs more information on adult giftedness?

As a gifted adult, you may know you are different but not realize why.

Many gifted people experience:

* a sense of humor and creativity few others understand
* a sense of alienation and loneliness
* outrage at moral breaches that the rest of the world seems to take for granted
* being out-of-step and on a separate path

When you were a child, how many of the following characteristics were descriptive of you:

* Were you advanced in your development of speaking, reading, or other skills in early childhood?
* Were you fascinated with words or ideas?
* Did you ask a lot of questions?
* Did you have an unusual perspective of things and events?
* Were you a good problem solver?
* Did you have a good memory?
* Were you exceptionally sensitive?
* Did you have a great sense of humor?
* Were you insightful?
* Were you perfectionistic?
* Were you intense?
* Did you collect things and organize your collections?
* Were you a rapid learner?
* Did you show compassion for others?
* Did you enjoy older playmates and the company of adults?
* Were you argumentative?
* Did you have a large vocabulary?
* Did you have a creative imagination?
* Were you an avid reader?
* Did you have a wide range of interests?
* Did you like puzzles, mazes or numbers?
* Did you have a great deal of energy?
* Did you have a long attention span?

If many of these characteristics fit you, you are probably a gifted adult.

~~~

Achievement / Underachievement

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the book Outliers: The Story of Success, thinks people become outstanding – “outliers” on the upper end of intelligence, ability and achievement curves – only through many hours of concentrated effort.

See video in my High Ability site post Outliers and developing exceptional abilities.

A webinar by SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted): “Understanding and Treating Anxiety, Depression, Bipolar Disorder and Underachievement in Gifted Children, Adolescents and Young Adults” – presented by Jerald Grobman, M.D. – noted many social and emotional issues that may compromise the realization of advanced potential.

See a video excerpt from the webinar in my post Adult underachievement – not living up to our high potential.

[Photo from Davidson Institute for Talent Development / Young Scholars page]

gifted adults, gifted adult information, gifted adult personality, psychology of giftedness, high ability, high aptitude, advanced development

As profiled in a Today Show bio, “She made the jump to college at age 10. And by age 14, Sabur was earning a bachelor’s of science degree in applied mathematics summa cum laude from Stony Brook University — the youngest female in U.S. history to do so.

“Her education continued at Drexel University, where she earned an M.S. and a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering.

“Sabur has taken up teaching math and physics courses at Southern University in New Orleans. She has been playing clarinet with orchestras since her solo debut at age 11.”

[From article posted on www.aliasabur.com]

In an interview in 2005, Sabur said talked about her achievement attitude: “Things have been not exactly smooth along the way, but that’s how it is when you do something that no one else has really done before… not honestly so much with the actual work and the class work and practicing and performing, but with everything else along the way.

“I mean, there are a lot of people who told me that I couldn’t do what I’ve done. And if I had listened to them, then I wouldn’t have done any of it.

“I would say that if you have a goal, you should fix it in your mind and not let anything stop you on the way. Because no matter what you try to do, people will tell you that you can’t or you shouldn’t. And especially for other girls, who are really discouraged in the sciences, that you can be just as good at it or better than boys.

“You can’t let people bring you down. That’s basically all there is to it.”

[CNN SUNDAY MORNING April 17, 2005]

Related book: Child Prodigies From Around the World Vol. 2 Including Prodigies Of Medicine, Humanities, and Psychology, Biographies, Education, Other Little Known Facts From the Early 1700s Until Present Time.

~~

“This is a ridiculous thing to say,” she admits, “but I never liked being a teenager. I never felt comfortable being in a group of giggly girls. I always felt embarrassed and frightened by it.

“I couldn’t quite handle the high school thing, and I wanted to leave as soon as I could. So I suppose I never really wanted to explore it, whereas I did want to be a woman. Some of the teen flicks can be great, but it wasn’t the story I wanted to live in.”

She added, “Apart from Natalie Wood’s character in ‘Rebel Without a Cause’ [1955], where she plays a teenager, I just couldn’t imagine doing it. I wish I could have. I think I would have been a much better person for it.”

[Interview mag., Dec/Jan 2008; photo from 'Atonement']

Many other talented and creative people “couldn’t quite handle the high school thing” and felt like outsiders, finding their teen years to be difficult and emotionally challenging.

“The passage through adolescence was a lonely, involuted time for me,” said writer Maxine Kumin. “I had no one to eat lunch with, and took my sandwich to the locker room, where I pretended to be busy writing an article… I took refuge in scholarship…

“At Radcliffe, epithets with which I had been branded — bookworm, greasy grind, brain trust — became a badge of honor.”

[From book: Jane Piirto. My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers.]

“Maxine Kumin (born June 6, 1925) is an American poet and author. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1981-1982.” [Wikipedia]

Anthony Hopkins was dyslexic and hated rugby, and so was treated as an outcast in his native land – but he claims the treatment from his peers gave him just what he needed to become a movie star:

“It gave me the fire and anger to become an actor. I wasn’t afraid of anything. The acting covered up the loneliness.” [imdb.com 1.30.01]

As a teen, Nicole Kidman towered above most of the others in her class and has said she thought of herself as “the ugliest person alive on earth.”

On weekends, when most kids were at the beach, Kidman was often alone on the stage of the school theater. “I would just lock myself in there,” she says.

“I thought it was fantastic having that stage all to myself. I’d be teased about going off to the theater instead of the beach with everyone else. I felt like an outsider, but it is character building not to be a pretty child who just bats her eyes and gets her way.”

[Cosmopolitan, Jul 1991]

One of a number of my posts about her: Nicole Kidman on fame, and actors as highly sensitive people.

~~

Rooney Mara

Lisbeth Salander is one of the most intriguing and powerful characters in literature, and both Rooney Mara in the new movie of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Noomi Rapace in the 2009 Danish version, bring to life a richly complex and dynamic young woman.

The “extra intelligent and intense” of my title is a reference to the book: Enjoying the Gift of Being Uncommon: Extra Intelligent, Intense, and Effective, by Willem Kuipers.

In her article (a guest post on my High Ability site) 3 Things To Learn From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – A Gifted Trauma Survivor, psychotherapist Lisa Erickson writes about the connections of this character with gifted teens and adults, noting that “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.”

Rooney Mara studied at George Washington University for a year, then transferred to New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, where she studied psychology, international social policy, and nonprofits. [Wikipedia]

She uses her intelligence and other personal qualities in making her character so compelling, and comments about Lisbeth:

“The thing that I found most interesting was that she could be as off-putting as she is, but at the same time she’s also quite innocent and childlike. She’s this genius and she’s brilliant, but at the same time she’s kind of naive and emotionally stunted. So I think that sort of makes her very unpredictable; you don’t really know what you’re going to get, what’s going to pop out of her.”

Much has been written in reviews about her ‘goth’ appearance in the movie, but Mara thinks “She’s not a badass, she’s not a punk. I hate it when people call her a punk or goth, because to me that’s just the antithesis of what she is.

“I think in order to be punk or goth, you have to be part of a group or part of a subculture, and her whole thing is that she never wants to draw attention to herself. She dresses the way she does because society has constantly, throughout her entire life, told her that she’s worthless.”

She notes how personal for her this role is: “It would probably be smarter of me as an actor to pretend that I don’t relate to her and that I’m completely different than her, but that’s just not true. I would certainly come off as a much better actor if I did that, but the truth is that I do really relate to her.”

From Rooney Mara: Lisbeth Salander Of ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ More Than Just A Role by Jordan Zakarin, TheHuffingtonPost.com

The interviewer above refers to Mara as “naturally shy” – perhaps one of the qualities she relates to in the character.

Rooney Mara

In another interview, Mara was asked if she liked Lisbeth.

“I do really like her. I think most people really like her. I also think part of the reason she’s so great is that you don’t always agree with what she does yet you still like her. I think that’s really why she’s so interesting.”

[Would Lisbeth like you?]

“I don’t know. I feel like if we were stuck in a room together not a lot would happen. We’re both shy and quiet and not very good communicators.”

[From Rooney Mara Interviews with Boston Globe.]

Both tough and vulnerable

Mara also has said of Lisbeth: “She is described as an anorexic waif. At the same time, she has this superhuman strength. She looks quite tough. But she’s quite vulnerable.

“She’s this brilliant hacker and wise beyond her years, and at the same time, she’s emotionally stunted at 12 years old and naive in a lot of ways. She is full of all these contradictions. And we never wanted to make her just this angry and violent person.”

[From 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo': An Interview With Rooney Mara, Daniel Craig, and David Fincher, by Louise Roug, Newsweek Magazine.]

Obsessive and perfectionistic

Mara thinks she and Lisbeth are “very similar in a lot of different ways. We’re both obsessive and perfectionists. We’re both contrarians. Neither of us likes to be controlled. I’m someone who overthinks everything and really needs to investigate every part of something before I’m ready to do it in front of other people, and he [her director David Fincher] really allows for that. That’s the part of me I think is very similar to Salander.” [From The Contenders: Rooney Mara's 'Tattoo' studies, By Sam Adams, Special to the Los Angeles Times.]

Complexity, paradox

As portrayed by both of these outstanding actors – Rooney Mara and Noomi Rapace – Lisbeth Salander also reminds me of some of the writing of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced me-high chick-sent-me-high-ee) – one of the major creativity researchers on personality and creative expression.

In one of my Creative Mind articles, I include a quote of his:

“If there is one word that makes creative people different from others, it is the word complexity. Instead of being an individual, they are a multitude.

“Like the color white that includes all colors, they tend to bring together the entire range of human possibilities within themselves. Creativity allows for paradox, light, shadow, inconsistency, even chaos –and creative people experience both extremes with equal intensity.”

From my post The Complexity of the Creative Personality.

~ ~

“I liked him. He was kind of skinny and wiry and full of energy.” Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, about meeting Steve Jobs in 1969.

“Jobs doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement.” Joe Nocera

The bio ‘Steve Jobs’ has topped Amazon’s list of 10 best-selling books of 2011.

Listening to author Walter Isaacson in his interview with Charlie Rose, one of his comments that caught my attention was this [paraphrased]:

The deep emotionalism surprised me. He’d be talking and I looked up and there were tears… He was talking about the ad campaign ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’ and he got very emotional.

[See my post The Apple “Think Different” campaign - includes the TV commercial.]

Video: excerpt of Charlie Rose interview of Walter Isaacson (10/25/11). See the longer interview at CharlieRose.com.

Here is a quote from Isaacson’s new bio of Steve Jobs, by Joe Nocera, then a writer for Esquire, describing Jobs’ intensity at a NeXT computer staff meeting:

“It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting because Jobs doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement.

“One moment he’s kneeling in his chair, the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him.

“He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion.”

These references sound like the unusually intense levels of emotional, physical and other capacities that Polish clinician and theorist Kazimierz Dabrowski detailed in his theory of personality development, and termed Overexcitability.

He particularly addressed high ability, gifted and talented people, and said, “Almost 97 percent of the highly creative suffer from different kinds of overexcitabilities, neuroses, and psychoneuroses. So, neurotics and psychoneurotics are a mine of social treasure.”

More stimulatable

Stephanie Tolan, a writer and advocate for extremely bright children, notes the original Polish terms overexcitabilities or excitabilities can be translated more literally as “superstimulatabilities.”

She summarizes, “It’s a stimulus-response difference from the norms. It means that in these five areas a person reacts more strongly than normal for a longer period than normal to a stimulus that may be very small. It involves not just psychological factors but central nervous system sensitivity.”

She describes the Psychomotor form of Overexcitability or Excitability: “This is often thought to mean that the person needs lots of movement and athletic activity, but it can also refer to the issue of having trouble smoothing out the mind’s activities for sleeping. Lots of physical energy and movement, fast talking, lots of gestures, sometimes nervous tics.”

From her page Dabrowski’s Over-excitabilities – A Layman’s Explanation.

Sharon Lind, a gifted education and parenting consultant, notes in her article Overexcitability and the gifted, “A small amount of definitive research and a great deal of naturalistic observation have led to the belief that intensity, sensitivity and overexcitability are primary characteristics of the highly gifted.”

“Often when overexcitability is discussed examples and concerns are mostly negative. Remember that being overexcitable also brings with it great joy, astonishment, beauty, compassion, and creativity. Perhaps the most important thing is to acknowledge and relish the uniqueness of an overexcitable child or adult.”

Also see a longer discussion of the topic by Casey on her Raising Smart Girls blog: Overexcitabilities and the gifted – Living With Intensity

See quotes by her about J.D. Salinger “searching relentlessly” for peace in my post What do you do with your intensity?

Being intense is not always positive.

Casey refers to one of the reference books on the subject: Living with Intensity: Understanding the Sensitivity, Excitability, and the Emotional Development of Gifted Children, Adolescents, and Adults.

The Amazon summary notes: “Gifted children and adults are often misunderstood. Their excitement is viewed as excessive, their high energy as hyperactivity, their persistence as nagging, their imagination as not paying attention, their passion as being disruptive, their strong emotions and sensitivity as immaturity, their creativity and self-directedness as oppositional.”

Also see much more on the Dabrowski page listed at the bottom.

The iconic 1984 Macintosh commercial conceived by Chiat/Day and directed by Ridley Scott was nationally aired on television only once – during the 3rd quarter of the 1984 Super Bowl football game.

Creative Obsession

The photo above (by Norman Seeff) is Jobs with the original 1984 Macintosh, which was not made to be opened by the owner, but Isaacson says Jobs thought the main circuit board looked ugly, that the chips were not arrayed nicely, so it had to be re-manufactured. One of his staff noted that no one would see it; Steve said “But we will know.”

Attention to even “invisible details” is often part of the obsessive perfectionism – or, from another vantage point, passion for excellence – that drives many major filmmakers, too.

One example is James Cameron (the Terminator series, Aliens, Titanic and many others), whose attention to detail for his movie Avatar included employing a university linguistics professor to create a functioning language for the tribe of blue aliens on Pandora.

But one of the dark sides of obsession for Cameron and others can be engaging in negatively perfectionistic behavior, or being a destructive workaholic.

Both were also reportedly aspects of Jobs’ life and achievement.

Of course, as with most behavior, there is no absolute border between productive and pathological.

Therapist and creativity coach Eric Maisel, PhD notes in his article In Praise of Positive Obsessions that clinicians may define “obsession” as an intrusive thought, recurrent, unwanted, and inappropriate.

Maisel writes, “Defined this way, it is obviously always unwelcome. But suppose a person is caught up thinking day and night about her current painting or about the direction she wants to take her art?”

From my post Creative Obsession

Passion

In her post Do You “Believe Beyond Reason?” (on her blog – see her site), creativity coach Jenna Avery notes that “passion” is an over-used and often bland idea, and it should be something much more.”

She writes, ‘Let’s start asking, “What do you BELIEVE BEYOND REASON?” What do you believe in so deeply, so permanently, so passionately that you can hardly keep yourself in your skin because you are exploding with joy when you consider it?’

Isn’t that what we want to feel as creators?

~ ~

Book: Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson.

Audiobook:  Steve Jobs: The Exclusive Biography, Narrated by Dylan Baker, Walter Isaacson.

My sites on ‘central nervous system sensitivity’: Highly Sensitive // Highly Sensitive / Facebook

Related pages, posts

Dabrowski / advanced development

Dabrowski Excitabilities – Michael Jackson

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“The Creative Adult is the Child Who Survived” – From the facebook page of Artizen Magazine

A couple of related posts:

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Healing and art: SARK and others on abuse and creativity

3 Things To Learn From The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo – A Gifted Trauma Survivor, By Lisa Erickson, MS, LMHC

~ ~

Her father cites one example showing how uncommon she is: “When she was just three years old we were sitting in a cafe and she turned around and said ‘you can’t feed the swans here’ and we asked her how she knew that. She had read it on the door of the cafe, but the letters were backwards. We knew then that she had something special.” //

But an article reports that “In one of the most extensive studies carried out, research found that out of 210 gifted children followed into later life, only three per cent were found to fulfill their early promise.

“Professor Joan Freeman, said that of 210 children in her study, ‘maybe only half a dozen might have been what we might consider conventionally successful. At the age of six or seven, the gifted child has potential for amazing things, but many of them are caught in situations where their potentials is handicapped.’”

Continued in post: Higher IQ than Hawking – But what challenges may Victoria Cowie face?

She has commented, “As a teenager I was very anxious. I had a lot of energy and passion that I wanted to channel into creative things, and I always felt like I wasn’t achieving enough.”

[From my post Mia Wasikowska on teen anxiety and energy.]

Psychotherapist Belinda Seiger, PhD, LCSW, addresses intensity and excitability in her article Mindful Intensity :

If you are a person who has heard statements like, “you’re just too much,” “you think too much,” or “you’re too sensitive,” your whole life, this article is for you.

Perhaps you perceived such comments as indicators that something was wrong with you, or you weren’t even sure why people were saying these things to you.

Continued in High Ability post Mindful Intensity – which links to her longer article.

Of course, that was a long time ago – but do current schools encourage creative people?

“Montessori taught me the joy of discovery…It’s all about learning on your terms, rather than a teacher explaining stuff to you.” Game designer Will Wright

That may be one kind of school that does, but what about mainstream institutions?

In her article Accessing Genius, creativity coach Sharon Good declares, “It has become clear to us that much of our genius is squashed at an early age. School curriculums are standardized in the interest of conformity and control and rarely address diverse talents and learning styles.”

Continued in my Creative Mind post Does school support your creative growth?

eeing a TV bio of Taylor Swift a while ago, I was very struck by her self-assurance and belief in her abilities from an early age, and her assertiveness to realize her exceptional musical talents.

In her recent performance on the CMA Awards (the 44th annual Country Music Association Awards), she impressed me even more with her confident presence and grace – and talent.

In fourth grade, she won a national poetry contest with her poem “Monster In My Closet.” At eleven, she went to Nashville to try to get a record deal by distributing a demo tape of her singing to every label on Music Row..

She started writing songs and playing 12-string guitar at age twelve. At fifteen, she “rejected a development deal with RCA Records because the company refused to allow her to record her own songs.” [Info from Wikipedia.]

A profile in The Week magazine (March 20, 2009) notes, “Taylor Swift is determined to avoid the pitfalls that have tripped up other precocious stars, says Matt Allen in Q.

“The key, says the 19-year-old country music phenom, is to stay focused on her art and to always remember that the myriad distractions that attend fame and wealth are just that—distractions.

“Such determination has been apparent since she was a musical prodigy growing up in Hendersonville, Tenn. “When I was 13, I was told that country music didn’t appeal to anybody other than 35-year-old women. I decided to prove them wrong.’

“So Swift began grinding out songs, playing guitar so relentlessly that her fingers bled. She turned down invitations to dances and other typical teenage activities if it meant missing a gig.

Home schooled and avoiding destructive habits

“She graduated high school with a 4.0 grade-point average after finishing her junior and senior years in just 12 months of home-schooling. Swift still leaves nothing to chance, saying she neither drinks nor smokes—nor is she tempted to.”

A recent interview in The Independent [UK] adds more:

“I don’t drink because I don’t really feel like it. It’s not like I judge people who do [or that] I don’t hang out with people who drink. I just don’t really feel like it. Plus, it’s not [been] legal.”

Does she not like being out of control?

“I think that the reason I haven’t really experimented with drinking is because I don’t like to feel like I might say something that could hurt somebody’s feelings. Or I might come off in a way that I can’t control. Maybe I should just lighten up!” she says, smiling.

“But for me, I just kind of do what feels right.” She insists that, “I don’t live by all these rigid, weird rules that make me feel all fenced in. I just like the way that I feel like, and that makes me feel very free.”

Songwriting, she says, her eyes shining with bliss, is her other liberation. “I write songs to figure out how to feel about something. And then that helps me get past it. I’ve been writing songs since I was 12, and when I started I would write about how my days at school were really lonely. And I would get through those days by saying to myself, ‘It’s OK cos I can write a song about this later, and then I’ll feel better.’

“I’ve applied that saying and that phrase and that thought process to my entire life and every single intense shocking, nationally televised curveball that has happened.”

[From Taylor Swift: 'Maybe I should just lighten up' By Craig Mclean, The Independent, 24 October 2010]

here are other examples of highly talented young women with focus, drive and assurance.

Maybe you can think of examples.

~ ~

Related section: Teen / Young Adult Talent

Taylor Swift homeschooling, home-schooling products, homeschooling books