During the course of my scholarly career, a fair number of people have said or suggested to me that education is an easy or boring discipline. They say things like, “Education, huh? Hm.” Upon hearing that I study in this area, they might give nothing more than a blank look or say something flat like, “Nice.” In my more defeated moments, I hear, “Is there a dissertation for that?” There is, yeah.

While I don’t feel embittered by these comments—they most often spring from an innocent lack of education (how fitting)—I do feel compelled to point out that my discipline, like most others, is profoundly difficult and interesting. This is the reason the discipline exists, after all; why study what is useless, or why need to study what is easy?

I know that education as an area of study is quite challenging and interesting for at least two reasons. First, people talk about it all the time, and to me, conversation is currency, and currency is indispensable. This is to say that topics of conversation—the things we trade with each other, so to speak—drive just about everything: what we wear, where we go, what we study, where we eat, who we marry, etc. When another person speaks, listen carefully, and you’ll get a hint as to what the next person might say.

Language travels.

The second reason I know education is difficult and interesting is that some of the brightest and most productive minds on the planet gravitated toward the field or contributed to it. Think Einstein, Dewey, Piaget, Rousseau, and Mill, to say nothing of the ancient Greeks. Yeah, Socrates got in on this too, and for good reason: it’s tough and necessary stuff!

Education fundamentally studies learning, right? OK, when did you last learn something, and how can you be sure that you learned it? Makes you think, no?

All of this is to say that education deserves a bit more respect than it currently receives. This is particularly true given the age of AI through which we’re now all living. Certainly it pays dividends to investigate what we’re giving up in exchange for increasingly relying on the machines to do our work, in so doing shifting intellectual ownership to them. Is that optimal for developmental pathways in the people you know and love? That’s another question that directly invokes education. And it’s not an easy one, of course.

But here’s a funny idea: sure, education is not “easy,” but nothing is “easy” or even “boring.” Truly. And easy and boring, I think, tend to go hand in hand, so we’ll attack one of them to debunk both sides of the myth.

Name the most boring thing in the universe. I’ll give you time. Think on it. Maybe you’ve come up with a rock, the color black, an empty room, ironing, going through customs, washing rice, or the last conversation you had with a DMV employee. But look at the thing a little closer, and you find it’s not boring at all. Let’s start here: its status as profoundly boring is profoundly interesting.

Say that three times aloud. Does your pitch change across the three vocal instantiations of “its status as profoundly boring…”? Yes, because you’re growing impatient and detecting monotony in this task. Well, why is the task monotonous? What is not monotonous? What is monotony? Wallah—more interesting things. Tear them apart.

You know what’s boring and not too hard? Watching paint dry, as they say. Well, go and do it. Are you seeing dryness in the paint, or is it merely changing color or texture? Can you see dryness at all? How about wetness? The paint looks wet, no? Well, what does wetness look like? What does water look like?

And did you choose to go into that painted room, or did someone ask you to do so—or did they tell you to do so? What’s the difference?

The takeaway here is that with a keen eye and mind, literally everything is interesting, including, most definitely, the study of education.

So I don’t know how to answer the question of whether nuclear physics is harder or more interesting than education. In fact, I don’t know what is easy or hard, boring or interesting. It ebbs and flows, really. The pertinent question is, On what level of analysis are we conversing?

Take this idea and run with it. It’s universally applicable, I assure you.

As a brief reminder, by “gifted education,” I’m speaking a bit roughly—the boundaries of every field are only estimates, anyway. In using this nomenclature, I’m referring to the study of high intelligence, high ability, giftedness, and the patterns of experience and behavior that emerge from such lived realities. This is a rich field with a storied past and a bright future, and I’m immensely proud to call myself one of its scholars and admirers.

So what is talent development? Well, basically, it’s a paradigm—this just means a school of thought with implications for research and practice—that says that talent and ability, whatever these things are, can be pushed, pulled, and shaped through educational interventions and the infusion of opportunity into places where there would not normally exist opportunity.

Now, as I see it, the talent development paradigm, successful as it has been in enhancing human outcomes all over the place for people of remarkably diverse backgrounds, is problematic in at least one big way.

The paradigm seems to overlook (or underestimate) the most fundamental and, we might say, self-evident aspect of the human condition: people differ in the degree to which they are teachable and trainable as a result of their inborn abilities. Merely saying this aloud at a conference in gifted education would attract more negative attention than one might like, I’d bet.

But why is it this way? After all, we in the field study differences in human ability, do we not? (Hence, the term differentiation in curriculum.) There it is—differences in human ability. Ability, in the abstract, is not an object, but a range, and a range signifies differences in value or quantity.

So people are definitely different in terms of ability—in terms of what they can achieve in task-bound environments, let’s say. Right. I’d be surprised if that statement knocked your socks off. We know, for instance, that some people can just do things mathematically, or athletically, or socially, that we can’t. And the most important point here is that they can do those things without training. That is, they can do them naturally.

How many hours of training would have to be given to a youngster who plays chess to expect him to triumph over Magnus Carlsen? The answer is more hours than we’ve got time for.

We must admit that teaching and training have limitations because the competencies displayed by some people simply exceed our collective capacity to teach and train. It’s doubtful we’ll teach Michael Jordan to play ball, Terence Tao a shortcut in additive number theory, or Albert Einstein manipulation of mental objects.

When Jordan dunks and our jaws together hit the floor, no one learns from him, per se, nor does he teach us. Rather, we simply watch. And there’s a big difference.

We have little reason even to believe that these individuals, by virtue of their inexpressibly strong competencies, could teach anyone at all. This is because, we presume, their abilities, being so advanced and so unique, cannot be translated into training at all—into a curriculum or program, for instance.

Some things only inspire awe, not analysis.

I believe it’s best to accept this, and in fact accepting such a thing opens the door to a certain kind of scholarship, perhaps, that is more productive than the futile effort—and counterproductive effort, in some cases—to capture the gifts in these individuals and nurture them along until they blossom into talent, just as the talent development paradigm proposes.

What if our intervening in the natural affairs of cases such as this one is doing more harm than good?

I should emphasize that in making the above statement, I don’t mean to say we’re not skilled educators. No—we’re highly skilled, and we’ve progressed in the field mightily in understanding the nature of human talent. Contributions like the Talent Development Megamodel, for instance, are both brilliant and useful, and should be regarded as such.

But I remain unconvinced that every person can or should be “developed” according to models such as that above. In others words, some part of the person, and perhaps that part of the person precisely responsible for their own natural and untrained ability, is not amenable to education and thus cannot be a suitable candidate in the talent development paradigm.

Once again, this is not a failure on the part of scholars in gifted education; it’s a statement of admiration and wonder for individuals whose competencies we still cannot meaningfully account for. And as I suggested above, it may be the case that these individuals themselves also cannot account for them, even though they have the competencies.

Ask Jordan how he dunks the ball from the free throw line.

The observable behavior, the internal competency, the feeling of poise in the person as they grasp the ball, the pen, or the mic—we don’t know what that is or how it came into being.

No, we don’t know.

Beneath the talent development paradigm seems to rest a statement like this: “Every observable competency can be attributed to or explained in terms of the development of talent.”

That’s where I see a problem—the development of talent. Maybe some gifts—some human abilities—don’t develop in the way we are most acquainted with. So is “development” the most appropriate way to interpret some of these extraordinary examples of talent? I suggest not.

There is a meaningful percentage of human ability, I contend, that is not amenable to educational interventions. This means, as I just described, that some things don’t quite develop, really, at least in the way we’d expect or predict. Instead, they just are. At the very least, they change in a way that is conceptually different from what we in the field describe as development.

I also happen to think this particular level and expression of ability is even more prevalent than we might think. This is not to say there are Jordans, Carlsens, or Einsteins running around all over the place, but it is to say that, yes, there are many people who can do what those people do or did, or something approximating it.

So just because we see great ability in a young person—in any person, in fact—that doesn’t mean we should deploy educational resources to maximize or optimize it.

Perhaps it’s best to simply let those existing abilities fly, for they have a life course of their own.

So take a look around. Notice the expressions people make when they exchange dollars for that latte they like. Notice how sometimes, people smile as they turn their body away from the person they’re conversing with, while other times, they smile and move toward the person participating in the conversation.

What is behind a smile?

Notice, too, that people make a little noise right before they speak so as to say, “I’d like to speak now,” or, “It’s my turn.” This might sound like a deliberate opening of the mouth or smacking of the lips. That’s intentional, you know.

Notice, finally, how people drop hints that they would like to end a conversation with you. This is the funniest of all, and the most awkward.

As the person subtly and yet unmistakably pivots their body away from you, they might say, “Alright…,” “I should…,” or, “Cool, man…” But the best strategy of all is just two to three seconds of silence with sustained eye contact, immediately followed by a grin. Make sure to get that grin right—it’s lethal. It says, “This attentional bond we now share is about to break.”

So keep your eyes open, and look around. Come back to me when you find something.

It won’t take long.

Every day, we have a staggeringly large number of perceptions. We describe these things we call perceptions as funny, sad, surprising, happy, interesting, good, bad, puzzling, abrasive, weird, troubling, unsettling, thrilling, memorable, outstanding, and eye-opening.

Each and every day, moreover, we traverse the landscape that is planet Earth, processing its contents through the lens that is our perceptual apparatus. We bring this thing everywhere we go. I don't care how forgetful you are; believe me, you’ll remember to take your perspective when you run out the door.

But as with just about every story on experience, there’s more to it than meets the eye, for perception is at once a system of total freedom and total imprisonment. Though it’s a bit frightening to admit this, you couldn’t escape your perspective even if you tried—even if your life depended on it.

Sure, there are possible exceptions, like the person who is in an altered state of consciousness. There are also things like sensory deprivation chambers that are designed to interfere with natural processes of perception or sensation. For the purpose of argument, though, let’s disregard these atypical cases.

When you get right down to it, it simply is the case—must in fact be the case—that in every moment and every possible moment, your perceptual system is switched to “ON.” Again, let us ignore, for the purpose of discussion, unusual facts that might challenge this idea. The universal rule remains intact.

So what is to be said, then, about the idea that the perceptual system with which we were all endowed at birth both frees us and holds us back? The idea here is pretty straightforward, but it’s a very, very powerful one.

In the most fundamental sense, you choose what you see. In fact, you are what you see. And because what you see is what is, you choose—you dictate—what is real. That’s a big idea, as it implies that your reality is dependent on what you see, not on what is out there in reality. Again, in some fundamental sense, your circumstances depend upon what you see, not vice versa.

Stay with me.

This idea is reminiscent of the central thesis that emerged out of Stoicism: your individual judgment is what matters most in terms of triumphing over adversity. In the eyes of the Stoics, the difference between a blessing and a tragedy—between positive and negative—is not primarily in the circumstances themselves, but rather in your perspective. Once again, through your perceptual system, you shine a light onto the circumstances, infusing them with the character of your perspective. That is what’s real.

The importance of perspective can also be seen through modern approaches to the treatment of mental disorders, whether OCD, depression, or ADHD. In this vein, CBT-trained clinicians teach patients that their “frame of mind,” or the cognitive relationship they strike with their internal experience, has an enormous impact on their recovery from the mental illness with which they are struggling. Indeed, it can make all the difference: perspective taking and the behaviors that emerge from the adoption of new beliefs literally alter the architecture of the brain.

So it should come as no surprise that the idea of perspective is important. There are few limits to its applications, and that’s a wonderful thing.

But there is a more suffocating side to perspective as well. Since your perspective is more or less the same as reality, there simply is nothing more than it—there is, it seems, nothing outside the walls of your perspective. You’re stuck in this room, forever. The room might be expanding in size, sure, but you’re not leaving anytime soon. In fact—and I know many seasoned clinicians who would endorse this statement—try to escape from that metaphorical room, and you will guarantee yourself a life of misery.

Sure, you can “see” from another perspective and exercise empathy, and indeed I would encourage you to strive to do so. That is a virtue that the Stoics would have approved of any day of the week. But you still can’t unplug those eyeballs and step outside of that perspective. You were born wearing sunglasses, and they’re not coming off. Psychologically speaking, it turns out it’s best to do up the sunglasses with a nice coat.

So wear those sunglasses, and wear them well. They’re yours, after all, and quite literally only yours.

As one can imagine, raising David is not exactly a walk in the park; he’s more than merely a handful—he’s six handfuls.

For parents who raise or raised a high-potential, talented, or gifted child, that tends to be the way it is. In fact, I’ve conversed with many such parents, and virtually in all cases do they report that their child was more work, more demanding, more difficult, more complicated, and more insanity-inducing than their more neurotypical children. This is not ironclad, not axiomatic, but it’s a good rule of thumb for sure.

Not surprisingly, as similar as gifted and talented children are in terms of their intensity, depth of character, or fixation on moral and ethical issues, they’re also remarkably different from one another, both internally, i.e., in terms of their interests, personality traits, disposition, etc., and externally, i.e., in terms of their externalizing behaviors.

It stands to reason, then, that gifted and talented children are as different from each other in personality as their neurotypical counterparts. This is to say that high intelligence—high ability—does not prescribe a course for the development of natural human interests and inclinations. In other words, the nine-year-old chess prodigy still may wish to play Fortnite, watch Modern Family, or play on the slip n’ slide. I suggest we leave it this way.

This means that in addition to a great and natural diversity of interests and inclinations, as would be found in any person, in the gifted, parents have to contend with heightened intensity and ability itself, among other things. It goes without saying that these features of the child must be properly recognized and nurtured as well.

Now we’re looking at a multivariate equation. And it has to be fed every three hours.

So what is the parent to do about the raw intensity and ability of the gifted child in combination with the natural mix of interests and inclinations that all parents must contend with?

Good question, and it’s one we’re working hard on in the fields of gifted education and educational psychology.

And now let’s widen the discussion a bit to consider parenting as an institution. You know, parenting is the most important job in the world for which there lacks a job description. I guess a quick and dirty one would be, “Keep it alive, while staying alive yourself.”

How can the parent be expected to parent, teach, and nurture—to productively direct, really—the inclinations and abilities of the multi-talented child who might display a staggeringly diverse set of such abilities? Again, this is to say nothing of the ordinary variability parents have to deal with just from raising a child. There’s no universal guide, manual, or tutorial. In some fundamental sense, you’re on your own.

One of the most important questions of all in the field of gifted education concerns exactly this: How can parents be equipped to productively direct, as I said above, the inclinations and abilities of children who are so multi-talented, intense, and strong-willed by nature? What exactly is to be taught to parents, and by whom?

These are questions to which we don’t yet have complete answers. We’ll explore a bit more on this soon.

I tip my hat, sincerely, to all those parents out there who are raising a high-ability or high-potential child. Please do rest assured your case is one worth fighting for.

You see, in those days, I was convinced that the most useful of all the classes I took—of course, I still regarded these courses as mostly useless—were English, Spanish, science, business management, and perhaps Microsoft Word. By contrast, I thought the family and consumer sciences were wasteful, mere play, and unworthy of my time. The prevailing consensus at that time was that baking class was a vacation during the work day. And we made it that way.

In my somewhat clouded judgment, I figured the languages were useful because clear and convincing speech is a timeless and irreplaceable skill. I decided that business management was another useful course, as it was conceivable I might pursue a career in sales, for instance. And Microsoft Word appeared useful because computers were everywhere. I know—a penetrating analysis.

While my ideas weren’t totally misguided—yes, The Catcher in the Rye, Death of a Salesman, and Animal Farm are seminal and beautiful texts that should be consumed by every literate person, and the art of effective leadership is nearly universally applicable—there is now something subtly and yet profoundly useful about what I learned in health class, baking class, and music class. And it has taken a decade for me to wise up to this fact.

Utility, then, is precisely what I mean when I say that those subjects—the ones I formerly disparaged and insulted—now hold more relevance and usefulness to me than the other subjects I arbitrarily declared useful all those years ago in my youth, an oasis of equal parts inexperience and overconfidence. Again, I’m referring to subjects like English, Spanish, science, management, and Word. By contrast, “Who gives a <blank> about cornstarch?” was my best attempt at a synopsis of baking class.

I’ll put it this way: today, you’ll much more likely find me consulting a recipe than interrogating the meaning of propaganda as it was depicted in Animal Farm. Likewise, you’ll more likely find me consulting the web to find a list of ultraprocessed foods than recalling Planck’s constant. I also now play the drums, but I can’t read sheet music. If only I’d been taught.

These undoubtedly useful things were taught to me in an organized fashion—with an organized reason—by a competent and kind teacher for whom I had less-than-due respect, and I simply wasn’t paying attention.

So let me stick my neck out a bit and admit that sometimes, the things we judge to be useless become, with time, the most useful and necessary things of all. And so it is with the things we once worshiped—the things to which we ascribed great and enduring importance. Many of these things fade in importance, too. Trust me, if next week you returned to your high school, it wouldn’t matter where you sat.

So pay some respect to those teachers and classes you so carelessly dismissed in your youth.

And then learn to cook.

On the surface, this might seem an ordinary or meaningless remark. But I think there’s more to it.

Take a look at the language I use to describe this experience, bearing in mind that this is precisely the way in which I experienced it: “It occurred to me.” Right—it occurred to me, meaning I didn’t direct it to come into being; it simply came regardless, leaving behind a marker of my interest, or lack thereof.

What, then, is the realization to be gleaned here?

Well, if sitting in a lecture—or being anywhere, for that matter—I can observe or notice from some “distance” the emergence of interest, perhaps as if I were a bystander on the street observing a barking dog, does that not imply that the interest and I are not one and the same? Yes, I think it does imply this.

Would it also therefore not imply that I could, if I chose, totally relinquish my non-interest in the above lecture? That is, who is to say that the interest is mine—that I am responsible for it? Once again, I make no claim to having spawned or invited it into my experience. Yes, this I take to be true as well, at least on some level.

OK, so we give it up; the interest is no longer mine. All seems well and good, but a great problem arises here, logically: am I interested in the lecture?

That’s a tough one, isn’t it? If you’re so inclined, please do work it out.

And it must have been some lecture!

So why recoil instantly when a person asks you what you’re capable of doing—whether you’re any good?

We’ve all felt this way. As soon as attention is directed toward us and our competencies, we seek to deflect it—toward something or someone else, as if to say, “Let me escape the limelight because I don’t deserve it” or, “I’m not what you think I am.”

I’m not trying to say we’re all Zuckerberg at the desktop, rewriting the foundation of the Internet in self-educated fashion. No. But everybody can do something that others in the room can’t, and that’s more than enough to feel the effects of the above deflection, a proclivity so subtle and automatic that we hardly notice it.

The point of intrigue is that you do very much deserve the attention—some attention—because what you do is notable by definition. And I mean that technically, that is, quantitatively. The proof is in the results you consistently deliver to your business—the one that’s about to absorb $25M from the Valley’s best. On a normal distribution, you’re performing well beyond the ninety-ninth percentile. That’s worth some recognition, no?

Psychologically speaking, the most talented people of all are often also the most modest, the most self-sacrificing, the most racked with anxiety, and the most self-critical. So uplift these people with some kindness and words of encouragement.

And then uplift yourself. Again, you’ve got something special inside you as well, and it, too, deserves a healthy dose of recognition.

The letter I’d written to the person who had years earlier successfully won my complete admiration now presided over this moment in a way that I can’t quite describe. I glanced at the page.

“Jared - Keep investing in yourself. Good luck. - Warren E. Buffett” is what I found near the bottom, directly beneath my writing.

The most illustrious and otherwise remarkable businessman around had collected a letter from me, read and processed it, and then formulated a response. He wrote my name—my name—in ink. I personally had captured his undivided attention, if for a fleeting moment.

Since Warren Buffett has now retired from his role as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, I want to reflect briefly on the reasons he long ago ascended to full and total idol status in my mind and why I will forever stand by the man on just about any topic, for any reason, period.

He’s ethical—like, habitually, routinely, strategically, and compulsively ethical. He makes it clear both publicly and privately that he’d much prefer to be a virtuous person than an astute investor. He seems to be anchored to an unshakable and highly developed moral foundation that informs his every move.

It also appears that for him, acting morally and ethically is a victory in itself—a psychological accolade to be honored and protected. He’s got thousands of such accolades at this point.

He’s original. He’s a boy-from-Nebraska-turned legendary business tycoon who adopted a few basic ideas extremely early in his career and hasn’t wavered from them since. He drinks Coke, eats McDonald’s, drives a Cadillac, and plays bridge seven nights a week. And despite the fact that the corporation he built is worth a trillion dollars, there are less than thirty at headquarters—the same group that’s been there for decades. He still goes in five days a week, at ninety-five. Most people are dead fifteen years by that point.

He’s got no investor relations or human resources department because no such thing would be useful at Berkshire. He makes multi-billion dollar deals with nothing more than a handshake because he insists on transacting only with people who tell the truth like their life depends on it. (No, that’s not a gimmick.) When the whole world suggested it was odd he didn’t maintain a business presence on Wall Street, he said, referring to Omaha, “I like the lack of stimulation.”

He’s wise. This goes without saying: “It takes twenty years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it”; “It’s only when the tide goes out that you discover who’s been swimming naked.” And, on the importance of patience: “You can’t produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.”

He’s funny. When asked about retirement on a stage with Bill Gates in the ‘90s, he said, “I hope to retire about five years after I die.” When an audience member at a speaking event at Georgetown University referenced his now-famous remark that he tap dances to work, he nodded but cautioned, “Don’t ask me to demonstrate.” And here’s one for the books, observable in many public appearances at the very start of the show: “Testing…one million, two million, three million…OK, alright.”

I didn’t mention that he also generated a five-million-percent return across sixty years. For context, that’s pretty good. And pretty long.

Congratulations on a one-of-a-kind career and life, my friend, and thank you for everything.

It was a decade ago, I estimate, on one now-momentous fall day, right around now. I was standing in the relatively unadorned kitchen of my grandmother’s house trying to sneakily catch a few potent whiffs of the recently cut turkey.

Suddenly, my trance was broken by the voice of an uncle of mine, who asked, “Jared, want some nog?”

Visibly confused, I responded, “What’d you say?”

“Would you like to try some nog?”

“What’s that?” I asked, still confused but willing to listen further.

With an endearing yet slightly mischievous smile, my uncle motioned at me to come toward him at the fridge, so I did, positioning myself near him by my grandmother’s fridge, which could not have been younger than my uncle himself. But the evening was about to get a whole lot newer and a whole lot brighter than a pre-war GE appliance.

My uncle grabbed a glass from the cabinet and poured into it a golden, viscous liquid that slowly but assuredly filled the glass.

Obviously repulsed, I asked, “What is that?”

“Nog,” he replied with glee. “Try it—you’ll like it.”

So I took a sip of this still-suspicious golden motor oil. And that was it. I’d been taken—utterly converted in an instant, with no reflection possible or necessary. It was love at first taste: an enduring, unbreakable marriage between the taste buds and the nog. I’m glad he showed just a little bit of persistence in that moment. And he was too.

So try some nog this season. I do sincerely hope you find it as delicious, as unmistakably and piercingly tasty as I still do to this day.

And pay those strange uncles who just show up to these holiday get-togethers some respect. After all, they have something to offer.

Happy Thanksgiving.

As a testament to the special admiration I have for the work of Mr. Harris on meditation and related mysteries of the mind, let me attempt to uplift his notion that on the functional level, we can actually explain—account for—so little that transpires in the mind. The mind just does its own thing in what appears to be a black box. Let me illustrate this point with a two-part question that hopefully flusters as much as it informs. I’ll leave it to you to evaluate the implications.

What will your next important idea be, and when will it come?

As with truly anything, giftedness can be defined in a number of ways. For instance, at the educational level, it might imply differentiation in course materials or acceleration in grade level. At the psychological level, it might mean feelings of intellectual loneliness, extreme introversion, or asynchronous development. At the neuroscientific level, it might indicate heightened activity in the frontal lobe or amygdala, efficiency in neural processing as measured by glucose expenditure, or interconnectedness between disparate brain regions. And we could define it in ten other ways as well.

In this society, with our highly developed systems of language, seemingly unlimited processing power, and appetite for opining—look at what I’m doing now—definitions simply abound. But the good in this is that our greatest truths lie in our most basic definitions. So let us look more clearly at giftedness as an idea.

However defined, giftedness universally denotes competence in some form, which can be understood basically as the ability to do something well or with skill (Oxford Dictionaries). But look at this definition more closely: the ability to do something. What is that thing, then?

Clearly, competence can exist across myriad domains spanning academic disciplines and more general human activities: mathematics, biology, philosophy, percussion, drama, botany, teaching, fundraising, writing, speaking, running—truly, you name it. It stands to reason that competence can adapt itself to any place, any situation, any thing at all that can be mapped onto a performance scale. That helps to explain our obsession with measurement.

Here’s the main point: if competence shares much of its definition with giftedness, then so too must giftedness exist across a staggering range of human action; where there is potential for measurable competence—the emergence and realization of human ability—there is, at the very least, potential for giftedness.

Then we turn to statistical and psychological anomalies that can’t easily be classified in terms of what we know about competence. Michael Phelps, Michael Jordan, Isaac Newton, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin, David Blaine, Martin Scorsese.

If we were to ask what all these figures have in common, we would enter the realm of historiometry, or the statistical study of genius, and its close counterpart eminence, or the study of human creative achievement. Both are profoundly interesting fields that reveal the dizzyingly vast array of both intrinsic and non-intrinsic variables relevant to the lives of the most productive and prominent personalities of all time.

Let me then answer the question I posed above: What do all these figures have in common? One answer is intensity—we’ll cover this another time—while another is the g factor of intelligence.

Introduced by Charles Spearman in the 1920s and later popularized by Arthur Jensen in the 60s and 70s, the g factor predicts that there is an underlying and measurable human ability that weaves a thread through all human tests of cognition. This is precisely why it is the most general human ability of all—if in fact it can or should be classified as such. This is also why it is in some sense the holy grail of psychometrics, or the scientific study of human traits and attributes.

As we wrap up, consider how you would define your own unique competence. If a stranger asked you to describe what you’re capable of doing without respect to a particular task or domain, how would you respond? That is, how do you know that you’re just competent, just able, generally speaking? What is that thing inside you that carries the signature of competence?

And, how might you draw that thing out of yourself in the most opportune of moments?

That’s a different question.

How do you find the right word to express yourself across a great many situations—and how do you determine which word is right, once you’ve selected it? And what exactly is that feeling of confirmation you get once you’ve arrived at the right word? Come on, everyone knows that feeling. Do you ever express it to anyone, or is it simply an internal triumph: “Excellent; I remembered ‘vociferously’ today.” What is your criteria for word selection, and what faculty inside you enables you to make a selection at all? Is it easier or harder for you to find the right word than to find the right beans at Whole Foods? If it’s tougher, why? And according to what scale?

The next time you order a coffee, ask yourself the above questions. Be sure to report back.

I’m referring to the internal representation of information, to use the words of eminent neuropsychologist Russell A. Barkley. Oftentimes, present inside me is a raw intellectual desperation coupled with a measurable inability to summon, grasp, and then direct a piece of information that is relevant in one particular moment.

I’m successful sometimes, I admit, but infrequently, and certainly not without struggle. For the life of me, I can’t recall—make use of—what I know that I know. “Maybe it will come to me later,” I might say. It’s the spirit of approximation: I have just about everything I need, cognitively speaking, to proceed in this moment. That’s the essence of the experience of ADHD with respect to the internal representation of information.

For the time being, then, I must go on as if I knew that thing—as if I had located that thing in the mind—but boy what a feeling of unpreparedness and cognitive vulnerability does that create.

This lapse also necessitates a highly practiced form of improvisation. (You may have noticed.)

I’m speaking of a highly developed, highly polished, and highly prepared—forgive the contradiction—form of improvisation that comes about because the aforementioned cognitive blindspots cannot be eliminated or counterbalanced. I know I can rely on this trick within me, but for how much longer will it remain a reliable partner in crime?

Let me be more precise, lest I convey the wrong idea. It’s not as though I’m deliberately setting out to dupe, trick, or manipulate. No. Rather, out of necessity—due to the glaring cognitive blindspot that has made itself comfortable in the space that is my mind—I simply must play the part that is a whole and poised person.

That’s what it means, after all, to go out there into the world with the resources—the cognitive processes—that make up your mind, while they wait to be deployed. The trouble, you see, is that in my mind, the resources are scattered. Worse, they’re sometimes unresponsive—dormant, you might say. I try to pour a cup of water, but the hand won’t travel toward the glass.

How about prioritization? Perhaps you’ve heard of this. Well, there’s significant impairment here, too.

Often, no matter how hard I try, I cannot discern—make a case, find a reason, have, feel, and own the confidence—that one action ought to be taken before the other. I’m searching for a linguistic affirmation for each item on the agenda, yet the brain cannot supply the necessary attribute for each. Needless to say, this moment is one of great frustration and paralysis. Often it’s minutes, too, not seconds. The story is similar here: somewhere, lurking in the depths of my mind, there is a vacant seat. Who to fill it—and how?

Here’s to being (mostly) prepared, informed, and generally in sync with the ebbs and flows of human information across the whole of society.

Stay tuned for more.

That’s going on the calendar.

I rise from bed at 6:30 AM. The carpet feels warm on my feet. It was professionally cleaned just before I moved into my apartment.

The light is beginning to poke through the shades, so I raise them. I’m always surprised by how aesthetically pleasing my shades are. You'd kill to have those shades.

I head into the bathroom, where I brush my teeth and ready myself for the day. Sometimes the running water is too cold, so I wait a moment for it to get warmer. It takes longer than it did in my previous apartment.

I dress myself quickly and then enter the kitchen, where I’m met with a Frigidaire Gallery series refrigerator. It looks nice, and I’m amazed that such affordable rent here in Indiana yields such a nice appliance. The fridge is set to 36 degrees via the slider that exists on the inside of the door. It responds to minor adjustments in temperature pretty quickly.

I’m off to the gym, and when I return, the ceiling fan I switched on just before I left in the very morning makes a nice humming noise. It’s nice to step outside onto the balcony at this point because it’s not too hot yet. The artificial turf out there feels nice on the feet. Wayfair did it again with that one—although they literally won’t relent with the product offerings via email. I hate to check email.

I realize I’ve got little food in my place and resolve to make a grocery order. Instacart comes to the rescue in an instant, at any time, in any place, on any device, for any reason. The app allows me to simply return to the order I last placed and do so again, for greater convenience. The order is set to arrive within a few hours—I opted for the “Fast” delivery option.

For items I can’t get using Instacart, I turn to Alexa, who places an order for me through Amazon. She, too, can simply return to a previous order I made and place it again for me. That’s quick too.

I head out of the house to campus, which is about a fifteen minute journey by foot, to one of the main university buildings. Every building on campus takes Apple Pay. I can’t even recall if I took my wallet with me. What’s the difference.

The walk to campus is a bit long, and sometimes my knees hurt as I trudge up the hill. I summon a Veo scooter using the app and it sends me heartily up the hill to my final destination for the morning studies. Parking that thing is a breeze, too: I simply step off, pull out my phone, clear the dozen-plus notifications, take a photo of the scooter, and then go about my day.

If I can’t find a parking spot for the scooter, Veo directs me to one via the app. If I need water on the way to my journey, there’s an app for that as well. But surely the product offerings would be a burden. Skip that.

After three to four hours of studying, I’m back at my place. I walked this time. 72 degrees and low humidity feels nice in my apartment. The central air ceiling vent is directly above my desk at home—another fantastic Marketplace purchase—so it consistently delivers a soothing breeze to the forehead. I don’t know what I’d do without it.

Dusk begins to encroach, and so too does the need to eat. I turn back to that glorious fridge, with its beautifully brushed stainless staring me right in the face. It matches the oven. I’d bet my management company bought them in bulk.

After a meal provided by Aldi and delivered by Instacart, I resume my reading in the evening. I chose to crack open a real book this time, which makes me an outlier. While reading, when I come across a word whose meaning I don’t know, I consult Alexa. For a more thorough dive into the meaning, I’d consult GPT. I’ve rigged it up so that I don’t have to use my fingerprint to unlock the phone each time. That was a pain.

So is two-factor authentication, or managing saved passwords. How about DoorDash, Netflix, Spotify, Venmo, automatic reminders, expedited (and free) shipping, tap-to-pay, raise-to-wake, auto shut-off, and mobile delivery? Better yet, how about all that inside the same hour?

Maybe a bit of self-analysis is due here.

Alexa, wake me up at 6:30 AM.

Or, how about this: How frequently during your time in high school did the term “smart” circulate in conversation? Did it occur on a daily basis? An hourly basis, even? You may have noticed that those who wielded the term so regularly in these settings did so with a conviction that was contagious and self-fulfilling; in a sense, their declaring this served, amazingly, both to make a statement and confirm the veracity of the statement just made. Clearly, this makes little sense.

Still, smarts—or something approximating it—are out there, as are differences in ability and personality between the people we encounter. Equally clear is that we can, at least on some level, identify those smarts in our friends and acquaintances using nothing more than rationality and a healthy dose of intuition, to say nothing of IQ tests, recommendations from educators, and exhaustive qualitative assessments of behavior, cognition, and affect.

What has always been a bit unnerving and even bothersome to me is that '“smart” as a term is, even among those well-versed in the scientific literature on giftedness, not easily defined. This may be because there are so many definition inputs; the human being is, you might say, the most intricate construction in the galaxy.

I should emphasize that in making this point, I don’t intend to dismiss the theoretical and empirical progress that has been made on the issue of definition for this term, as we in the field have already completed far more masterpieces than I could read in a lifetime—works that are rich, practically and theoretically useful, and edifying to those who consume them. It excites me, moreover, that we have dedicated ourselves to the craft of studying human ability and development. I sincerely hope much more work like this is done.

I only intend to say that what remains to be done, investigated, asked, answered, and otherwise pondered is staggeringly vast and is expanding in size daily. I suppose that’s a function of the nature of epistemology: the more you know, the more you don’t know. Socrates said something like that eons ago, and it rings true today louder than ever.

I would kindly and humbly encourage readers, when they next use the term “smart,” to then ask themselves what the term actually means—what they precisely mean when they insert it into conversation. The truth, I think, is that even the most knowledgeable and trained among us don’t quite know what it means, where its hazy boundaries lie, and how best to process its implications. So, let us show humility and curiosity in this domain by seeking to know—and speak—with clarity and precision.

It’s very nice to meet you! I write as a PhD student at Purdue University studying giftedness, i.e., the spectrum of high ability and the patterns of behavior associated with this construct. I’ve decided to launch a Substack page so that I can both document my thoughts and engage with the growing scholarly community on the platform, in particular those studying giftedness as well.

As far as my interests are concerned, they’re quite broad, and you’ll see this reflected in my musings. As mentioned above, I’m most interested in the patterns of behavior associated with high ability. In particular, I study the acutely intense and internal—often private—experiences of the most severe forms of giftedness in the human population. Or, as my doctoral advisor terms it, I study the most “elegant” forms of giftedness.

Don’t be fooled into thinking this page is narrowly focused, though. You’ll see material outside the study of high intelligence as well, including reflections on language, metaphysics, meditation, what it means to be “smart”—that’s a core focus of mine—the experience of anxiety, mental disorders and their respective internal signatures, and the corrosive effects of social media on virtually everything.

Please do join me in thoughtful reflection on topics of interest to this audience or any other. I sincerely look forward to your engagement, and thanks very much.

Jared Nussbaum