Two child screwups: Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling
Robert Kiyosaki [author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad] and psychologist Kenneth W. Christian [author of Your Own Worst Enemy] note in my post Schooling can leave us with limitations that the standard educational system can have negative impacts on gifted and talented people. And many rebel at it.
The image is a poster for Fracture, co-starring Anthony Hopkins [imdb] and Ryan Gosling [imdb]. Both of them had fractious, difficult times in school, as they describe in a recent interview:
“I was bad at everything. I used to sit in the back of the class my whole school career. My father said to my mother, ‘There’s something radically wrong with this boy.’ He despaired of me,” says Sir Anthony Hopkins with a chuckle.
“I was always picking fights. Because I thought that was what the girls would like,” says Ryan Gosling. “I’d pick on the toughest guys because the girls liked them. So if I beat them up the girls would like me. But it never worked. I was just in so much trouble. They called me ‘Trouble’; that was my nickname.”
According to the article [Hopkins, Gosling share a 'Fracture', by Rachel Abramowitz, Los Angeles Times April 22, 2007], “They were both child screw-ups - the kind of unfocused kids who make parents weep.
“Both seem surprised and amused to know they shared an early disdain for school. ‘I became an actor because I didn’t know what else to do,’ says Hopkins. ‘If you’re creative or artistic, I think you live in another world. It’s difficult to grasp onto things.’ ”
Maybe it’s more a question of what kind of ‘things’ you comprehend and relate to, what engages your skills and passions. Engineering, the law and medicine, just to name a few areas, are not the only sort of talents people have, or are worthwhile. Thankfully, we also have artists of all kinds to enrich our lives, including people with multiple abilities in technical and scientific domains as well as drama or visual art.
As I note in my article Getting out of school alive, our self concept, recognition of our talents, appreciation for divergent thinking, respect for high sensitivity or other aspects of being exceptional — all of these can be guided and nurtured, or corroded and corrupted, by our school experiences, and stay with us as adults.
Many of the problems with school cultures and the impact on gifted children are discussed in the book Genius Denied: How to Stop Wasting our Brightest Young Minds.
- The airhead mask and self-limiting
- The ‘model minority’ push to achieve tied to depression
- Dealing with fears using The Sedona Method
- Dyslexia can be an asset
- Adult ADD - chaos and creativity
