One of the things that I'm most grateful to my parents about is that they refused to skip me ahead any grades in school. That was on the table, and they turned

One of the things that I'm most grateful to my parents about is that they refused to skip me ahead any grades in school. That was on the table, and they turned it down. It wouldn't have done me any favors socially, and would have been a disaster for my athletic career. And if there's a place for learning hard work and perseverance, particularly for the intellectually gifted, sport is the place for it. IQ might make the cerebral aspects of the game easier, but it's no substitute for getting in the gym and working, taking the thousands of shots, practicing the footwork and other techniques until they are baked into muscle memory, and learning to push yourself further when you think your tank is empty. Essentially my parents just worked out an arrangement with my teachers to let me do my work as quickly as I was able, and then not give me any shit about reading afterwards. The only issue was a particularly dense teacher that was perplexed why I showed no improvement on the standardized achievement tests... I'd maxed out the reading comprehension level on the test the previous year, so there was nowhere up to go...