When Smart Is Not Enough: Growing Up Gifted and Learning to Let Go

When my brother was younger, he was formally assessed, identified as gifted, and given Saturday morning classes with other children like him. Children who processed things faster, and needed more than the standard curriculum could offer. Children who were “overachievers”. 

I never took that test to allow me to be in the “overachievers” club. But maybe I did not need to either. My teachers suspected I too was gifted, as did my family. In school, I was always the one who finished early, who asked thought provoking questions, who came home with results that made people say things like “she has so much potential”. That phrase, so much potential, would follow me for years, quietly shaping what I thought I was supposed to become.

The distinction between my brother and me is not just a family anecdote. It reflects something real about how giftedness is identified and what that identification means. Formal testing gives a child a label, a programme, and a structured context and identity for their abilities. Informal identification on the other hand, the raised eyebrow of a teacher or the proud repetition of a grade at the dinner table, gives a child something different: a reinforcing role. I became the smart one. And like any role, it came with expectations I had not chosen and could not easily put down.

The pond gets bigger...

For most of my school years, the role fit. I was near the top of my class without trying particularly hard. A quick summary, a few hours of reading, and I was done revising. Studying, in the way other students described it with the revision schedules, the late nights, the repeated practice was something that happened to other people. I did not know yet that what I was experiencing was not a sign of exceptional ability so much as a sign of an easy environment.

Research on what psychologists call the Big Fish Little Pond Effect shows that academically talented students who move from standard classrooms into more selective environments, where everyone around them is equally capable, often experience a measurable decline in academic self-concept (Zeidner & Schleyer, 1999). The fish does not get smaller. It’s the pond gets bigger. And the effect can be exhausting.

For me, the pond expanded at university. Suddenly I was surrounded by people who had also been the smart one in their school and their town, even their country. People who studied hard and had developed real academic discipline. And I, who had built an identity around effortless achievement, was average. I was no longer the person everyone expected. My identity felt like it had shifted. 

The grades that had once come easily now required effort I had not learned to give. When I got a poor result, I felt something that took me a long time to name: not just disappointment, but a kind of confusion. If I was not the smart one, who was I?

The Label and What It Costs

What nobody tells gifted children (formally or informally identified) is that the label can become a trap. Research has found that gifted young people sometimes mask their abilities or develop alternative identities to gain social acceptance, and that the assumed identity of the gifted child can become something they are afraid to take off (Marsh et al., 1995). But the reverse is also true. When the performance of giftedness becomes impossible to sustain, when the pond gets too big, some children do not know who they are without it.

Long-term follow-up studies of children identified as gifted have found that none continued their childhood advantage into adult achievement in any straightforward way (Freeman, 2006). Giftedness in childhood, it turns out, is not a fixed quantity that transfers neatly into adult life. It is a snapshot of ability in a particular environment, at a particular age, against a particular reference group. Change the environment and the snapshot changes too.

I did not know any of this at nineteen. What I knew was that I was in a country I had not grown up in, studying in a language that was not my first, cooking and cleaning for myself for the first time, and also trying to be the person everyone at home still believed I was. I was trying to be too many things at once.

Choosing good enough

Somewhere in those years, something shifted. I started dancing and I did ballet, contemporary, jazz, hip hop, burlesque… I threw myself into it with a seriousness I had never applied to anything academic. Six years, five styles, and a completely different relationship with what it means to be good at something.

Dancing taught me about effort in a way that school never had. There was only practice, repetition, failure, and small incremental improvement. And I loved it precisely because it asked something of me that studying had not. It asked for real, sustained, embodied work.

Meanwhile, I made a decision that I think saved me from a more difficult path. I stopped trying to be the best student in the room and started trying to be a good enough one, for me. Not failing and having an average grade was enough. I released the grip on excellence that had never really been mine to begin with, it had been other people’s expectations wearing my name.

This is not the conclusion most gifted child narratives arrive at. The expected story is about pressure, perfectionism, burnout, the adult who can never feel successful because nothing measures up to what they were told they would be. That story is real, and the research supports it. But it is not the only one nor the only way.

What the label leaves out

Looking back, what strikes me most is not the gap between childhood potential and adult reality. It is the narrowness of what counted as potential in the first place.

I was identified as gifted because I did well on the things that schools measure, mainly memory, comprehension, speed of processing, and the ability to produce correct answers on demand. My brother was formally tested on similar dimensions. But neither of us were assessed on curiosity, resilience, creativity, the capacity to learn something entirely new in a completely unfamiliar context, or the ability to build a life across six countries without a roadmap.

Traditional intelligence tests may not fully capture an individual’s capabilities, and giftedness involves a balance of analytical, creative, and practical intelligence that standardised assessments are ill-equipped to measure (Kuznetsova et al., 2024). The child who is identified as gifted is the child who happens to be good at what is being measured. Many children who are not identified are gifted in ways the system does not have tools to see.

I was lucky. The informal identification I received gave me confidence without completely defining me. My brother’s formal identification gave him a community of peers and a structured programme. Its own kind of gift, and its own kind of pressure. Neither path was straightforwardly easier.

What I wish someone had said to both of us is this: the point of being good at something is not to remain permanently at the top of a ranking. It is to find out what you want to do with it and then be willing to be a beginner at something else entirely.

If any of this sounds familiar

The experience of growing up gifted and then finding the adult world more complicated than expected is more common than it looks from the outside. Research with highly gifted young adults has found recurring themes of existential loneliness, stress from feeling pulled in too many directions, and perfectionism experienced simultaneously as a drive and as a burden, with imposter syndrome explicitly named as one of the most significant challenges they face (Bosman et al., 2023). Studies also show that perfectionism and imposter syndrome are closely linked in gifted individuals, with self-esteem playing a mediating role between the two (Dimitrovska & Popovska Nalevska, 2024).

If you recognise yourself in any of this, a few things that the research, and my own experience, suggest are worth considering.

• Name the role, not just the feeling. The discomfort many formerly gifted children feel in adulthood is not simply anxiety or inadequacy. It is often the specific pain of an identity that no longer fits. Naming it that way: “this is about who I was told I was, not who I am”, can create a useful distance from it.

• Separate effort from worth. One of the most lasting effects of early effortless success is the unconscious equation of ease with ability. If something is hard, it must mean you are not good at it. Unlearning this takes time, but it is one of the most important shifts available. Struggle is not evidence of inadequacy. It is evidence of being in the right-sized pond.

• Allow yourself to be a beginner. Gifted children are rarely given permission to be bad at something without it defining their fundamental value. Finding an activity where you are genuinely a beginner, and staying with it anyway, rebuilds a healthier relationship with effort and failure.

• Consider talking to someone. If the gap between early expectations and adult reality has become a source of persistent distress, perfectionism, or imposter syndrome, it is worth speaking to a therapist familiar with high-ability individuals. The challenges are real and specific, and they respond well to targeted support.

Sometimes that looks like a pirouette. Sometimes it looks like average grades and a very full life.

Further resources:

• High Potential, article on Medium.

• Gifted Unleashed, podcast on Spotify.

• The Survival Guide for Gifted Kids by Judy Galbraith, Free Spirit Publishing, book.

References

• Bosman, A. M. T., Davids, E. L., & Bos, L. T. (2023). The psychological world of highly gifted young adults: A follow-up study. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-023-00313-8

• Dimitrovska, G., & Popovska Nalevska, G. (2024). Self-esteem as a mediator between perfectionism and impostor syndrome among gifted students. International Journal of Research Studies in Education, 13. https://doi.org/10.5861/ijrse.2024.24112

• Freeman, J. (2006). Giftedness in the long term. Journal for the Education of the Gifted, 29(4), 384–403.

• Kuznetsova, M., Tikhomirova, T., Lysenkova, I., & Malykh, S. (2024). Giftedness identification and cognitive, physiological and psychological characteristics of gifted children: A systematic review. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1411981.

• Marsh, H. W., Chessor, D., Craven, R., & Roche, L. (1995). The effects of gifted and talented programs on academic self-concept: The big fish strikes again. American Educational Research Journal, 32(2), 285–319.

• Zeidner, M., & Schleyer, E. J. (1999). The big-fish-little-pond effect for academic self-concept, test anxiety, and school grades in gifted children. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 24(4), 305–329.

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This article was written by Laura Bilbao Broch and edited by Clarise Castleman, with graphics produced by Ishika Joshi. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.