If You're Smart, You Became that Way

Most people say I'm a smart guy.  Most people think I was born that way and all smart people are born that way.  That is never the case, even when people pretend that is true.  You are born stupid and only become smart through working at it.

I remember tough neuropsychology tests in college.  I was a top student in my class.  Like all tests in similar courses (that is, non-math courses), I read the material before class, listened and took notes at every class.  A few days before a test I would review the readings and notes and make a set of questions that I thought would appear on the test along with my answers on a stack of index cards or at least some notebook pages.  I did not stop studying the cards until I knew them all, often walking around from class to class with a stack of index cards in my hand.  (I suspect the best part of my learning was done by my fingers while making the cards.  The act of writing, the feel of the cards and their placement in the deck.)

I hated that redheaded female classmate.  She would just breeze into to the test and say, "Ah!  I had no time to study at all for this!  My mother was sick, I've been sick, I've been working so hard and fell asleep at 7 last night and couldn't study."  She always had a long sob story to get some attention.  She was very self-centered.  When the grades came back, hers were about the same as mine - maybe better half the time.  She pretended like she was naturally so smart that she could do as well as me - the guy who always had the index cards in his hands.

I was so jealous.  Here's a girl who can read the book once and pass the test.  There were guys like this in my physics class too.  And some nerds in my computer science class seemed to whip out code in an afternoon that took me a week to write.

But all of these stories of natural genius college kids are untrue.  They are just trying to build up their own ego while they put yours down.  These kids are so smart that they know what's written in a book they never read?  Do they live on Mt. Olympus?

The next semester I worked in the same lab as the redhead.  Then, as now, I code at all hours so I would often come into the lab at 10PM or 11PM.  Guess what I found?  The redhead studying her ass off for the test the next day.  Papers and scribbled everywhere.  The first time I saw this she instantly knew she her secret was uncovered and her cheeks became as red as her hair.

The nerdy programmers?  Later I found out that their rich parents had gotten them a $3,500 computer and programming courses starting 4 years before college.  They shouldn't have even taken the course they should have taken harder courses to challenge themselves and grow, but slacked and took an ego-boost review class instead and shoved it in every rookie coder's face.

Like most smart people, I thought I was stupid and I needed to take every step and use every minute to catch up to everyone and pretend like I'm a smart person. This is the Imposter Syndrome that achieving individuals share.  To me, it was born from a paranoia, a fear of failure, and a willingness to succeed.  I don't think of this as bad, hard to live with sometimes, but it is the grindstone that sharpens the sword of your mind and helps you succeed.

The difference between natural and acquired learning was made clear to me when I applied for graduate school and took the standard GRE test, similar to the SAT.  I scored around 600 out of 800 on my verbal SAT n high school, without study, but scored 780 on my verbal GRE - which is much harder - by using an enormous stack of cards.  Was I naturally 45% smarter because of my tremendous natural brain growth from 18-22?  Of course not.   I always had the potential to be smart but I needed to work at it to reach my potential.

Women like to turn this universal syndrome into sexism - and as soon as they do, then sexism exists in their minds and it is very effective.  They don't even need a man in town to be sexist to them.  Sexism can exist in a vaccuum of 1.  It's the same with racism.  Sexism and racism exist, but much more within us than outside of us.  Provincialism, language-ism, religion-ism, whatever, they mostly hold you back only if you let them.