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I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework), and I let that label stick with me for far too long. I took som

I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework), and I let that label stick with me for far too long. I took some pride in how I could get the top score in a class without studying, and didn't realize that studying itself was a useful skill. I let this whole mindset drag me down through undergrad (especially once I hit the point where I really ought to have studied), and I think it made me miserable.

nico 2mo ago
Sometimes accountability is not enough. Medication and therapy might help, as it can be the case with ADHD. Many people with it fit the pattern of “smart but lazy”
- throwaway173738 2mo ago
  In education these kids are termed “twice-exceptional” because they test as gifted but have some kind of disability that makes some things challenging.
  - annzabelle 2mo ago
    Yeah, I was labeled twice-exceptional and medicated for it, but there was also this general thing where I felt like I was special for not needing to study and that it was something to take pride in, which I don't think is inherent to ADHD. I have some friends who also have ADHD and are decently smart, but they have always taken pride in being hard workers, and have come out much more academically successful than I did.
  - frickinLasers 2mo ago
    I think you might be misreading this person. If the point of homework is to learn the subject, while tests assess your understanding of the subject, why do the homework if you already have a strong grasp on it as soon as the teacher explains it? If the point of doing homework is to keep you busy, there are better things to do with one's childhood. Unless the disability you're referring to is that they never learned how to struggle (because no struggle was offered)...
    - annzabelle 2mo ago
      It wasn't necessary to learn the material, but homework counted for 20% of the grade in a lot of my classes, and if I had done more of it, I would've had a higher GPA that would've given me more opportunities later on. And, I would've practiced that skill of sucking it up and doing stuff that you don't feel like you need to do. On the other hand, I had so much free time as a child and I spend a lot of it reading or messing around with computers.
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 7 and took medication for it until 9th grade when I went off it because I didn't like how it made me feel, and I have really disliked it when I've been back on it as an adult. Strattera was better, though now I'm on Wellbutrin instead. I did a lot of therapy over the years, and never found it helpful, though I never did it with an organization focused coach. I do think a lot of it was the attitude I took towards school. I know a lot of other people with ADHD who were less arrogant and approached school in a better way because of that.
- rootusrootus 2mo ago
  I won't claim that I've ever suffered real ADHD, but after an experience I had years ago with phentermine, that stuff would have been magic when I was a teenager. Turned me into an unstoppable, focused machine. And phentermine isn't labeled for that effect, which makes me wonder what adderall would be like.
- Lerc 2mo ago
  I have come to wonder if lazy actually exists as a thing in it's own right. I too had the 'smart but lazy' label, was diagnosed with ADHD past the age of 50. One of the things I noticed was when people talk about "Sometimes you just have to knuckle down and do the thing you don't want to do". That was an ability that just came and went with me, the same task one day would be "Right I had better do that thing now" and I could do it, another day, even the idea of it seemed impossible. The fluctuations were clear enough to show that it wasn't a moral failing, or just me doing the things I wanted to do. The same thing in the same situation was just so radically different. I can see how people who have only experienced the easy side could fail to understand the difficulty, I don't think night and day would do it justice. ADHD is quite highly correlated with depression, one of the main hypotheses of why is because people with ADHD have grown up being told that the thing that is intrinsically them is a bad thing to be. A hypothesis of why not everyone with a genetic predisposition for depression becomes depressed is because there might be a form of feedback loop that makes things that make you feel bad make you feel more bad. Being critical of ADHD behaviour is an easy on-ramp to that feedback loop.
  - 4thguy 2mo ago
    This explains so much about my experiences
  - leoedin 2mo ago
    I'm in a similar boat. I don't think "knuckle down and learn something" has ever worked for me. It's more like "set things up so the learning aligns with my interests" and then... woosh! I'm off and deep into the topic. That was something I had to teach myself (nobody at school said anything other than "pay attention"). And quite often I still miss and steam off in the wrong direction.
SoftTalker 2mo ago
Yeah similar here. By the time I needed to really study (3rd year of undergrad) I faced the hard reality that I had never developed the necessary habits.
cindyllm 2mo ago
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whateverboat 2mo ago
I got labeled smart but lazy because I had dysgraphia. It took me a PhD to get rid of that label. And don't get me wrong, I loved doing the work I did in my PhD and I love the job I have now due to the PhD, but sometimes I wonder if I did a PhD and did a lot of sacrifices for it only to get rid of that label, and I might have probably been not as rich but somehow may be more happier otherwise. (And might have still done a PhD anyway, since I think I was inclined like that.) Now I am still called smart, and due to the sheer effect of having to get rid of the label, also called hard working, and I'm happy or at least quite content.
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  That's interesting. I'm considering going back to get a second bachelor's in biology or biochemistry (my first is in math) and then going to PA school or medical school. I have to wonder a bit if part of that whole plan is that I want to show myself that I can be a good, hardworking student.
  - brailsafe 2mo ago
    I am now and have in the past been in this sort of position, albeit not with an existing completed degree under my belt, just a simple one-year continuing-ed diploma and years of sporadic career experience. I went back to attempt to complete my CS degree on the basis that I figured I already had learnt most of what I would learn anyway and might as well both prove to myself I can do it, as well as get the credential for whatever it was worth. This was when I was ~27, and hadn't been diagnosed with ADHD yet. I discovered that I was absolutely capable in theory, but that the hard part wasn't the material, rather it was doing rote tasks to get the grade regardless of that grade's relevance in the field. I found myself completely capable of doing the homework and understanding, writing various persuasive essays, and intellectually applying myself, but failing horribly when it came to anything my brain identified as less interesting than any other subject matter, and I had effectively no control over that (unmedicated). I also had no ability to be on time, and once I realized that I was effectively wasting time and money trying to pass through the Type A Gen X career gate defined largely by the binary of having a degree/not having a degree, I opted to not continue. It wasn't about learning anything, it was about a checkmark, and I didn't and never have really internally care about checkmarks. It would be the easiest material or courses that I'd bomb the hardest at, forget to do entirely, or simply not be stressed enough to do well; basic trivia, courses where 50% of the grade depended on labs where I'd be required to draw diagrams by hand, exams that required writing Java for 3 hours in pencil. When other students were anxiously scribbling away, I just flatout wasn't worried about it and just kind of spaced out for a while wondering why I was trying to bother. Exams require anxiety in some form or fashion, and in many cases I could not provoke that in myself. In some cases, I indeed didn't do so well on an exam either because I couldn't burn it into working memory well-enough (never having learned a study practice that worked for me) or I overslept... as a 27 year old adult. Now, I'm once again out of work, considering going back to school for... something, but I have all that exposure in the back of my mind. Even now that I'm medicated and otherwise quite happy, I have doubts that I'd be able to succeed in any type of educational institute unless every facet was perfectly aligned for me. Having money on the line or an abstract incentive aren't sufficient rewards to have a functional impact; I need to find it intriguing throughout and believe it's useful, or be fighting my way out of a tangible corner, of which I'm not in and don't naturally panic about being in.
rootusrootus 2mo ago
> I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework) Same experience here. I could find just about anything else I wanted to do except homework. Spent all night coding many times. Went to school and aced all the tests, skipped all the homework, did not get good grades as a result. My dad actually arranged a visit with a psychiatrist who did an official IQ test (wooo! I'm a genius! yay!) and then told my dad I was destined to either be a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur, or homeless. LOL The joke's on them, I ended up deciding to succeed in school after all, got my BS & MS in CS, and I've had boring, predictable jobs throughout my whole career. Neither fabulously wealthy nor destitute. Oh well! Real happiness remains elusive. Even though I adore my wife & kids and have what the vast majority of the population would consider a pretty cushy job and lifestyle.
- paulpauper 2mo ago
  This is consistent with the Terman study. The large majority of subjects had productive careers and lives for the follow-up.
  - hirvi74 2mo ago
    You know, except for Luis Alvarez and William Shockley who were deemed too unintelligent to be included in Terman's study. Yet, both of them later went on to independently win Nobel Prizes.
    - shockleyje 2mo ago
      > and William Shockley were deemed too unintelligent to be included in Terman's study So I’m one of his few remaining descendants and.. funny story, though likely for the best, despite knowing his professional history and subsequent legacy of “Doc Shock” I didn’t even consider to ride the coattails of our family name. It wasn’t until a decade into my career when I found myself in a founding engineer role of a small database proxy startup, and presented with the problem of “how do I get a room full of engineers to hush up and listen” (as a conference speaker), did the idea to leverage the family name as a pseudo appeal-to-authority dawn on me. I’m happy that I took the self-made route, rather than leveraging the family name earlier in my career (and to more direct effect). Though the dramatic irony of knowing it was through my own incompetence, not through some greater moral code, that I didn’t lean more into nepotism as a career advantage will never cease to get make me laugh at my own little inside joke at the self-schadenfrende of it. But back to your quote, I can confidently say the “genius” apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in regard to Shockmeister’s sub-genius status. My only hope is that I can continue to avoid whatever apple gave him the eugenics bug. Based on my relationship with intelligence, it’s not been my sheer intelligence that’s been my greatest asset. It’s actually the inverse! I can easily reform my mental model at different levels of resolution. This means I can be both an engineer’s engineer when building, while also being able to communicate the same ideas to hundreds of people in a conference context and achieve great sales funnel conversations from that. I attribute whatever this latent predisposition to recognize potential applications of technologies strategically early to whatever led my former to his discovery. As a result, I have a great track record of spending ‘innovation tokens’ wisely, to quote Choose Boring Technologies. Concretely, the latest investment I made was in standardizing my current startup around Mise. Not because it’s a great DX, but because I believe the primitives mise provides are a key enabler for agentic development in a distributed org and team context. I _may_ be productizing a public version of our organization’s agent runtime, since I believe my choices in technologies, conventions, onboarding flow, and most importantly - positioning within the organization - provide a turnkey solution to the problem every mid-size-and-up tier CTO has with their board: having a defined AI strategy where token spend justifies due to run costs scaling with respect to engineering & product deliverables produced. Happy to answer any questions, though to be blunt, considering that Willie B (a.k.a. William Bradford) passed before I had the opportunity to meet him, I don’t have much tribal knowledge of his life to share. Though, to the credit of my immediate family’s character, he was already estranged leading up to his infamous public television appearances. I’ve been considering writing a biography on what my experience with the duality of living ‘up’ to his (positive) professional legacy while navigating recognition of the harm he caused has done to affect me, both the headwinds & tailwinds.
__mharrison__ 2mo ago
Would you have preferred another label? If so, which one? Asking because...
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  Not really sure. The ADHD/"Gifted"/Twice Exceptional labels were even worse. I really wish my parents had made sure to always praise effort more than they praised me for the exam scores I got without studying. There was more focus from them on the final exam grade than on the process of showing my effort to the school system, and it created a sense of pride in how lazy I was. I guess, don't praise your kids for lucky talents, praise them for the work they put in. I also wish that there had been more focus on participating in sports as a young child and less focus on therapy/psychiatry. As an adult I have found staying active is a much better treatment for my distractible/hyperactive tendencies than meds/therapy ever were. My mom didn't sign me up for sports because my brothers and I had so many shrink appointments, and looking back, I think she had it the wrong way around.
  - Itanu 2mo ago
    Wow the pride in laziness really resonates with me. I had exactly the same thing, and still suffer for it now I think. If someone scored better than me on the test - oh well, they studied for it and I didn't, so I'm still better than them really. It ingrained a sense that trying hard and working on things to get a result is less valuable than being able to simply achieve the result without effort. The problem is, nothing in the real world is really achievable without consistent applied effort. I could dunk on my peers by focusing for 45 minutes on a test, and this taught me that was all that's required to outperform. Obviously I've gained a bit more self awareness to be able to see this now, but it's still my gut reaction - to take pride in "intelligence" and dismiss "effort". After uni in the real world it was a brutal reckoning. Sit me down in an office with a task that requires more than 45 minutes of concentrated output, I'm useless. I got an ADHD diagnosis and the amphetamines help for sure, but I still don't know if I really have a condition, or I just grew up conditioned to be lazy.
  - __mharrison__ 2mo ago
tikhonj 2mo ago
I was in the same position in high school and college and then—over a decade later!—I got diagnosed with ADHD and everything made a lot more sense. Just having the diagnosis on its own made me happier because it let me understand what was happening, get some coping strategies and feel less guilty about it. (And, later on, getting treated helped even more.)
deleted 2mo ago
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al_borland 2mo ago
I had a similar experience. My college roommate, within the first week of meeting him, said something like, "you're one of those people who never studies and gets A's aren't you?" I thought back to high school and he wasn't wrong, so I figured I keep it going in college. It didn't work so well and started me off on really weak footing.
- kakacik 2mo ago
  Most folks I've seen getting kicked out of university in first 2 years were in this category. High school was easy for them, so they lacked discipline and habits to learn stuff the hard/slow/boring way once topics went complex enough. In that, and many more regards, I am happy I fall into 'above-average' category and nothing more. Especially memorizing larger texts and poetry wasn't easy (good ol' crappy rota education system in 80s and 90s in eastern Europe). Grit and discipline got me much further in life than those just coasting on natural talents. Humans really need a bit of struggle to get the best out of us. Not too much, but not too little. One of quiet ways why capitalism on long enough scale outperforms other systems. Sweeping obstacles from life is one of the worst things that parents can do for their kids, regardless if its motivated by pure parental love.
micw 2mo ago
I would even think that "smart" and "lazy" has a strong correlation ;-) If you give a smart one a task, he will look for a way to do it with lowest effort. Probably most would do it but the smart ones will find way more the shortcuts, automations and exploits. Edit: also smart people will more often ask "why" if a task makes no sense to them.
- torginus 2mo ago
  I think there's an overload of the meaning of 'lazy' that describes a person who measures twice and cuts once, basically thinks the problem through rather than just piling on it. And as you said, they might even conclude the task isn't worth doing. Since thinking is not a visible effort, these people are taken to be believed to do less work, when the truth is anything but.
eurekin 2mo ago
Have you ever gotten an IQ test?
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  Yes, my mom has never told me the score, but it led to me being put in gifted classes. I took the SAT at 12 and did well enough to make JHU CTY's SET program. So in terms of raw brainpower it's there, but I've never really been able to apply it consistently for whatever reason and have ended up very average. Still haven't really come to terms with that in my late 20s. I've got a perfectly good life but I have this vague "what if" about if I had applied myself more.
  - eurekin 2mo ago
    Supposedly having over 125 (130-ish) can affect "normal functioning", it's very counterintuitive, but I'd recommend to just go through common psychology checks for that case.
torginus 2mo ago
> I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework), and I let that label stick with me for far too long I just never understood why the secondary education system is set up to make smart and lazy people succeed without effort while the hardworking, but less gifted kids struggle. It just gives you an impression that life is much easier than it is, and you can BS your way through it. It sends the wrong message both ways. Skills that are useful/meaningful IRL certainly are much harder to acquire. Being smart won't get you a date, wont get you fit, play an instrument, learn to draw, program, wont allow you to fix the crooked cabinet door etc. It just sends the wrong message either way. The 'smart but lazy' adults who stayed that way, who I've encountered IRL have been maliciously manipulative work avoiders, or straight up losers with superiority complexes.
- gsinclair 2mo ago
  An alternative design for an education system is quite a challenge. You say it allows smart but lazy people to succeed. In truth, it allows many kinds of people to succeed. And “the hardworking but less gifted kids struggle” doesn’t ring particularly true, unless you mean something quite strong by “less gifted”.
  - noir_lord 2mo ago
    As with all things human it's a continuum and the education system (at least as it existed when I went through it which was to be fair decades ago) wasn't always great at getting that message across. I had a friend in my year, bright enough but where he excelled was in putting in the work, he studied harder for GCSE's (our secondary school educational qualifications) than basically anyone I've ever met studied for anything. I still frequently outscored him on tests/coursework and did in final exam results and I did basically no work beyond reading the books and homework was an alien idea, the only real differences between us was I read for fun outside of what was assigned by school and I had a much better memory where he ground away at the assigned material but reading for fun would simply not have occurred to him. Sadly an exam usually only captures a single metric, the final score - it in no way captures the effort put into that score and it's really not fair (in a general sense) that two people can get the same score and put in wildly disparate levels of effort. But there isn't a Universal Law of Fairness, he had a stable loving home with two parents and I did not, that wasn't "fair" either but I realised early sometimes life simply isn't. Though stepping out of structured education into post-secondary education where you had to actually study came as a spectacular shock to the system because I had no framework to build on - having coasted my entire way through school putting in minimum effort.
adithyassekhar 2mo ago
It’s quite telling how most of us have had the same experience, proud of being able to ace without the effort, the smart but lazy comments, all ended up here on the same website. I just don’t know what it is telling but it’s telling something.
alexpotato 2mo ago
Also fell into this bucket for a short while. In hindsight, I realized it was b/c I hadn't found subjects in high school that really resonated with me (although HS science was cool). When I got to college I majored in computer science (academics) and discovered paintball (physical/social) and threw myself into both with abandon. I would do my CS homework as soon as it was assigned b/c I just loved solving the problems so much that I couldn't stop myself. For paintball, it became an obsession that eventually turned into a job after college. Again, it was something I loved so much that it just seemed like a natural thing to work really hard running big tournaments. Why wouldn't I work hard on something that resonated with me so deeply. This reminds me of a quote from Joe Rogan (who I know is somewhat controversial) that encapsulates this perfectly: "In high school I thought I couldn't focus. I realized I can't focus on things I don't care about. I can focus for hours on things I'm into."
- ydat 2mo ago
  > In hindsight, I realized it was b/c I hadn't found subjects in high school that really resonated with me My most frustrating experience was barely lazing my way through calculus I could not care about only to be working on a personal project years later where I really wish I paid attention.
- buellerbueller 2mo ago
  Sometimes, even controversial people are right. Not just the "broken clock is right twice a day" kind of right, but actually right. We should endeavor to separate the message from the messenger, and evaluate the message on its own merits.
globular-toast 2mo ago
This was me down to a tee. I took pride in not doing a single piece of homework during the last years of school yet getting top marks regardless. When I got to uni it was a bit of a shock to realise everyone was suddenly at least as intelligent as me. But I remained lazy. I still got top marks because I was doing computer science and enough of it interested me that I wanted to do well. It all changed during my PhD, though. It's not enough just to be intelligent. You've got to actually deliver. That means doing a lot of writing and corrections I didn't particularly want to do. I became deeply unhappy and came close to giving up. But I persevered (which seems to be a family trait). Post-PhD I'm a different person. I pride myself not on being intelligent but on being useful and actually getting things done. I meet loads of "smart but lazy" types all the time. They start 100x more things than they ever finish. I can't comment on their happiness, but I know I'm much more happy being able to tick things off and make other people happy rather than trying to wow people with my so-called intelligence.
noir_lord 2mo ago
Makes the transition from secondary (high) school to post-secondary school education particularly brutal since you've never really had to work for something and have no idea what good habits look like. Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy. College (UK meaning not US) came as a brutal reality check.
- moate 2mo ago
  >>Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy. Don't tell my boss, but yes it is.
rags2riches 2mo ago
I recognize this to some extent, but not to the same degree as some others in this thread. School and all other forms of obligations were just annoyances to avoid with minimal effort. Took me many years before I could find my own motivation to pretty much anything that wasn't immediately fun or engaging. And I was really picky with what I found fun to do.
HexPhantom 2mo ago
This is painfully familiar. Being able to coast through school can actually delay learning one of the most important skills school is supposed to teach: how to struggle with something for a while without interpreting the struggle as a verdict on your ability
pmarreck 2mo ago
Same exact issue. And as other responses to you mentioned, the transition to college was thus absolutely brutal. I ended up having to take multiple leaves of absence from Cornell (the longest- 5 years, during which I enlisted for 4 years in the USAF in California- this actually helped me a lot), and despite entering in 1990 I only graduated in 2000. One of the shorter leaves left me so depressed that I think I was close to suicidal (the only way I can describe it is like wearing poop-shaded glasses that you cannot take off... I also noticed that I cared as little about other lives as I cared about my own, which is something I still think about whenever I hear about family annihilation/suicides, etc), but something kept me going and I pulled out of it. On the bright side, I saw the potential of the Internet not only before my peers but before basically everyone (I was always a huge computer nerd), so that has aided my career. For the action-RPG gamers out there, ADD is a hell of a rough minmax perk lol Oh and I have a toddler son now- don't get me started on how much more difficult parenting seems to be
darkwater 2mo ago
Given the amount of replies you are getting, I think you are not alone. In fact, I was the same kind of kid as well and really, what I regret more is not learning to study, which made me a college drop-out. But that's it. I'm pretty happy and satisfied with how life turned out to be for me, but I totally understand your position. In my case I have a daughter that's showing already the same signs I had when I was her age and what I'm trying to do is to stay gently on top of her and create the habit of studying, because given the same brainpower, she will go farther if she learns to study well. And coming back to you, I don't know you or your age but I think you can - maybe - still turn around the "miserable" part. What's miserable for you, now?
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  The miserable bit is more past tense. Back in college I desperately wanted to have the academic success that my friends were having but I had never built that groundwork of organizational habits and consistency. I remember not doing any of the homework for my measure theory course, and getting an uncurved 50% on the midterm. I went into the professor's office hours to ask if I needed to drop the course, and he told me I had actually gotten a B and I was above the class average. There was this deep sense that I could've been a star student if I could just get my shit together. Nowadays I'm generally happy and living a great life in a New Zealand mountain town. But, whenever I talk to anybody back home who's more academically successful, I really have this jealousy and I tell myself that I could've done that if I'd just tried. It's this combo of ego and self hate that's really toxic.
m463 2mo ago
now, parents are supposed to say "good effort" not "you are smart"

nico 2mo ago

Sometimes accountability is not enough. Medication and therapy might help, as it can be the case with ADHD. Many people with it fit the pattern of “smart but lazy”

throwaway173738 2mo ago
In education these kids are termed “twice-exceptional” because they test as gifted but have some kind of disability that makes some things challenging.
- annzabelle 2mo ago
  Yeah, I was labeled twice-exceptional and medicated for it, but there was also this general thing where I felt like I was special for not needing to study and that it was something to take pride in, which I don't think is inherent to ADHD. I have some friends who also have ADHD and are decently smart, but they have always taken pride in being hard workers, and have come out much more academically successful than I did.
- frickinLasers 2mo ago
  I think you might be misreading this person. If the point of homework is to learn the subject, while tests assess your understanding of the subject, why do the homework if you already have a strong grasp on it as soon as the teacher explains it? If the point of doing homework is to keep you busy, there are better things to do with one's childhood. Unless the disability you're referring to is that they never learned how to struggle (because no struggle was offered)...
  - annzabelle 2mo ago
    It wasn't necessary to learn the material, but homework counted for 20% of the grade in a lot of my classes, and if I had done more of it, I would've had a higher GPA that would've given me more opportunities later on. And, I would've practiced that skill of sucking it up and doing stuff that you don't feel like you need to do. On the other hand, I had so much free time as a child and I spend a lot of it reading or messing around with computers.
annzabelle 2mo ago
I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was 7 and took medication for it until 9th grade when I went off it because I didn't like how it made me feel, and I have really disliked it when I've been back on it as an adult. Strattera was better, though now I'm on Wellbutrin instead. I did a lot of therapy over the years, and never found it helpful, though I never did it with an organization focused coach. I do think a lot of it was the attitude I took towards school. I know a lot of other people with ADHD who were less arrogant and approached school in a better way because of that.
rootusrootus 2mo ago
I won't claim that I've ever suffered real ADHD, but after an experience I had years ago with phentermine, that stuff would have been magic when I was a teenager. Turned me into an unstoppable, focused machine. And phentermine isn't labeled for that effect, which makes me wonder what adderall would be like.
Lerc 2mo ago
I have come to wonder if lazy actually exists as a thing in it's own right. I too had the 'smart but lazy' label, was diagnosed with ADHD past the age of 50. One of the things I noticed was when people talk about "Sometimes you just have to knuckle down and do the thing you don't want to do". That was an ability that just came and went with me, the same task one day would be "Right I had better do that thing now" and I could do it, another day, even the idea of it seemed impossible. The fluctuations were clear enough to show that it wasn't a moral failing, or just me doing the things I wanted to do. The same thing in the same situation was just so radically different. I can see how people who have only experienced the easy side could fail to understand the difficulty, I don't think night and day would do it justice. ADHD is quite highly correlated with depression, one of the main hypotheses of why is because people with ADHD have grown up being told that the thing that is intrinsically them is a bad thing to be. A hypothesis of why not everyone with a genetic predisposition for depression becomes depressed is because there might be a form of feedback loop that makes things that make you feel bad make you feel more bad. Being critical of ADHD behaviour is an easy on-ramp to that feedback loop.
- 4thguy 2mo ago
  This explains so much about my experiences
- leoedin 2mo ago
  I'm in a similar boat. I don't think "knuckle down and learn something" has ever worked for me. It's more like "set things up so the learning aligns with my interests" and then... woosh! I'm off and deep into the topic. That was something I had to teach myself (nobody at school said anything other than "pay attention"). And quite often I still miss and steam off in the wrong direction.

SoftTalker 2mo ago

Yeah similar here. By the time I needed to really study (3rd year of undergrad) I faced the hard reality that I had never developed the necessary habits.

cindyllm 2mo ago

[dead]

whateverboat 2mo ago

I got labeled smart but lazy because I had dysgraphia. It took me a PhD to get rid of that label. And don't get me wrong, I loved doing the work I did in my PhD and I love the job I have now due to the PhD, but sometimes I wonder if I did a PhD and did a lot of sacrifices for it only to get rid of that label, and I might have probably been not as rich but somehow may be more happier otherwise. (And might have still done a PhD anyway, since I think I was inclined like that.) Now I am still called smart, and due to the sheer effect of having to get rid of the label, also called hard working, and I'm happy or at least quite content.

annzabelle 2mo ago
That's interesting. I'm considering going back to get a second bachelor's in biology or biochemistry (my first is in math) and then going to PA school or medical school. I have to wonder a bit if part of that whole plan is that I want to show myself that I can be a good, hardworking student.
- brailsafe 2mo ago
  I am now and have in the past been in this sort of position, albeit not with an existing completed degree under my belt, just a simple one-year continuing-ed diploma and years of sporadic career experience. I went back to attempt to complete my CS degree on the basis that I figured I already had learnt most of what I would learn anyway and might as well both prove to myself I can do it, as well as get the credential for whatever it was worth. This was when I was ~27, and hadn't been diagnosed with ADHD yet. I discovered that I was absolutely capable in theory, but that the hard part wasn't the material, rather it was doing rote tasks to get the grade regardless of that grade's relevance in the field. I found myself completely capable of doing the homework and understanding, writing various persuasive essays, and intellectually applying myself, but failing horribly when it came to anything my brain identified as less interesting than any other subject matter, and I had effectively no control over that (unmedicated). I also had no ability to be on time, and once I realized that I was effectively wasting time and money trying to pass through the Type A Gen X career gate defined largely by the binary of having a degree/not having a degree, I opted to not continue. It wasn't about learning anything, it was about a checkmark, and I didn't and never have really internally care about checkmarks. It would be the easiest material or courses that I'd bomb the hardest at, forget to do entirely, or simply not be stressed enough to do well; basic trivia, courses where 50% of the grade depended on labs where I'd be required to draw diagrams by hand, exams that required writing Java for 3 hours in pencil. When other students were anxiously scribbling away, I just flatout wasn't worried about it and just kind of spaced out for a while wondering why I was trying to bother. Exams require anxiety in some form or fashion, and in many cases I could not provoke that in myself. In some cases, I indeed didn't do so well on an exam either because I couldn't burn it into working memory well-enough (never having learned a study practice that worked for me) or I overslept... as a 27 year old adult. Now, I'm once again out of work, considering going back to school for... something, but I have all that exposure in the back of my mind. Even now that I'm medicated and otherwise quite happy, I have doubts that I'd be able to succeed in any type of educational institute unless every facet was perfectly aligned for me. Having money on the line or an abstract incentive aren't sufficient rewards to have a functional impact; I need to find it intriguing throughout and believe it's useful, or be fighting my way out of a tangible corner, of which I'm not in and don't naturally panic about being in.

rootusrootus 2mo ago

> I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework) Same experience here. I could find just about anything else I wanted to do except homework. Spent all night coding many times. Went to school and aced all the tests, skipped all the homework, did not get good grades as a result. My dad actually arranged a visit with a psychiatrist who did an official IQ test (wooo! I'm a genius! yay!) and then told my dad I was destined to either be a fabulously wealthy entrepreneur, or homeless. LOL The joke's on them, I ended up deciding to succeed in school after all, got my BS & MS in CS, and I've had boring, predictable jobs throughout my whole career. Neither fabulously wealthy nor destitute. Oh well! Real happiness remains elusive. Even though I adore my wife & kids and have what the vast majority of the population would consider a pretty cushy job and lifestyle.

paulpauper 2mo ago
This is consistent with the Terman study. The large majority of subjects had productive careers and lives for the follow-up.
- hirvi74 2mo ago
  You know, except for Luis Alvarez and William Shockley who were deemed too unintelligent to be included in Terman's study. Yet, both of them later went on to independently win Nobel Prizes.
  - shockleyje 2mo ago
    > and William Shockley were deemed too unintelligent to be included in Terman's study So I’m one of his few remaining descendants and.. funny story, though likely for the best, despite knowing his professional history and subsequent legacy of “Doc Shock” I didn’t even consider to ride the coattails of our family name. It wasn’t until a decade into my career when I found myself in a founding engineer role of a small database proxy startup, and presented with the problem of “how do I get a room full of engineers to hush up and listen” (as a conference speaker), did the idea to leverage the family name as a pseudo appeal-to-authority dawn on me. I’m happy that I took the self-made route, rather than leveraging the family name earlier in my career (and to more direct effect). Though the dramatic irony of knowing it was through my own incompetence, not through some greater moral code, that I didn’t lean more into nepotism as a career advantage will never cease to get make me laugh at my own little inside joke at the self-schadenfrende of it. But back to your quote, I can confidently say the “genius” apple doesn’t fall far from the tree in regard to Shockmeister’s sub-genius status. My only hope is that I can continue to avoid whatever apple gave him the eugenics bug. Based on my relationship with intelligence, it’s not been my sheer intelligence that’s been my greatest asset. It’s actually the inverse! I can easily reform my mental model at different levels of resolution. This means I can be both an engineer’s engineer when building, while also being able to communicate the same ideas to hundreds of people in a conference context and achieve great sales funnel conversations from that. I attribute whatever this latent predisposition to recognize potential applications of technologies strategically early to whatever led my former to his discovery. As a result, I have a great track record of spending ‘innovation tokens’ wisely, to quote Choose Boring Technologies. Concretely, the latest investment I made was in standardizing my current startup around Mise. Not because it’s a great DX, but because I believe the primitives mise provides are a key enabler for agentic development in a distributed org and team context. I _may_ be productizing a public version of our organization’s agent runtime, since I believe my choices in technologies, conventions, onboarding flow, and most importantly - positioning within the organization - provide a turnkey solution to the problem every mid-size-and-up tier CTO has with their board: having a defined AI strategy where token spend justifies due to run costs scaling with respect to engineering & product deliverables produced. Happy to answer any questions, though to be blunt, considering that Willie B (a.k.a. William Bradford) passed before I had the opportunity to meet him, I don’t have much tribal knowledge of his life to share. Though, to the credit of my immediate family’s character, he was already estranged leading up to his infamous public television appearances. I’ve been considering writing a biography on what my experience with the duality of living ‘up’ to his (positive) professional legacy while navigating recognition of the harm he caused has done to affect me, both the headwinds & tailwinds.

__mharrison__ 2mo ago

Would you have preferred another label? If so, which one? Asking because...

annzabelle 2mo ago
Not really sure. The ADHD/"Gifted"/Twice Exceptional labels were even worse. I really wish my parents had made sure to always praise effort more than they praised me for the exam scores I got without studying. There was more focus from them on the final exam grade than on the process of showing my effort to the school system, and it created a sense of pride in how lazy I was. I guess, don't praise your kids for lucky talents, praise them for the work they put in. I also wish that there had been more focus on participating in sports as a young child and less focus on therapy/psychiatry. As an adult I have found staying active is a much better treatment for my distractible/hyperactive tendencies than meds/therapy ever were. My mom didn't sign me up for sports because my brothers and I had so many shrink appointments, and looking back, I think she had it the wrong way around.
- Itanu 2mo ago
  Wow the pride in laziness really resonates with me. I had exactly the same thing, and still suffer for it now I think. If someone scored better than me on the test - oh well, they studied for it and I didn't, so I'm still better than them really. It ingrained a sense that trying hard and working on things to get a result is less valuable than being able to simply achieve the result without effort. The problem is, nothing in the real world is really achievable without consistent applied effort. I could dunk on my peers by focusing for 45 minutes on a test, and this taught me that was all that's required to outperform. Obviously I've gained a bit more self awareness to be able to see this now, but it's still my gut reaction - to take pride in "intelligence" and dismiss "effort". After uni in the real world it was a brutal reckoning. Sit me down in an office with a task that requires more than 45 minutes of concentrated output, I'm useless. I got an ADHD diagnosis and the amphetamines help for sure, but I still don't know if I really have a condition, or I just grew up conditioned to be lazy.
- __mharrison__ 2mo ago

tikhonj 2mo ago

I was in the same position in high school and college and then—over a decade later!—I got diagnosed with ADHD and everything made a lot more sense. Just having the diagnosis on its own made me happier because it let me understand what was happening, get some coping strategies and feel less guilty about it. (And, later on, getting treated helped even more.)

deleted 2mo ago

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al_borland 2mo ago

I had a similar experience. My college roommate, within the first week of meeting him, said something like, "you're one of those people who never studies and gets A's aren't you?" I thought back to high school and he wasn't wrong, so I figured I keep it going in college. It didn't work so well and started me off on really weak footing.

kakacik 2mo ago
Most folks I've seen getting kicked out of university in first 2 years were in this category. High school was easy for them, so they lacked discipline and habits to learn stuff the hard/slow/boring way once topics went complex enough. In that, and many more regards, I am happy I fall into 'above-average' category and nothing more. Especially memorizing larger texts and poetry wasn't easy (good ol' crappy rota education system in 80s and 90s in eastern Europe). Grit and discipline got me much further in life than those just coasting on natural talents. Humans really need a bit of struggle to get the best out of us. Not too much, but not too little. One of quiet ways why capitalism on long enough scale outperforms other systems. Sweeping obstacles from life is one of the worst things that parents can do for their kids, regardless if its motivated by pure parental love.

micw 2mo ago

I would even think that "smart" and "lazy" has a strong correlation ;-) If you give a smart one a task, he will look for a way to do it with lowest effort. Probably most would do it but the smart ones will find way more the shortcuts, automations and exploits. Edit: also smart people will more often ask "why" if a task makes no sense to them.

torginus 2mo ago
I think there's an overload of the meaning of 'lazy' that describes a person who measures twice and cuts once, basically thinks the problem through rather than just piling on it. And as you said, they might even conclude the task isn't worth doing. Since thinking is not a visible effort, these people are taken to be believed to do less work, when the truth is anything but.

eurekin 2mo ago

Have you ever gotten an IQ test?

annzabelle 2mo ago
Yes, my mom has never told me the score, but it led to me being put in gifted classes. I took the SAT at 12 and did well enough to make JHU CTY's SET program. So in terms of raw brainpower it's there, but I've never really been able to apply it consistently for whatever reason and have ended up very average. Still haven't really come to terms with that in my late 20s. I've got a perfectly good life but I have this vague "what if" about if I had applied myself more.
- eurekin 2mo ago
  Supposedly having over 125 (130-ish) can affect "normal functioning", it's very counterintuitive, but I'd recommend to just go through common psychology checks for that case.

torginus 2mo ago

> I got labeled "smart but lazy" at a pretty young age (high test scores, didn't do any homework), and I let that label stick with me for far too long I just never understood why the secondary education system is set up to make smart and lazy people succeed without effort while the hardworking, but less gifted kids struggle. It just gives you an impression that life is much easier than it is, and you can BS your way through it. It sends the wrong message both ways. Skills that are useful/meaningful IRL certainly are much harder to acquire. Being smart won't get you a date, wont get you fit, play an instrument, learn to draw, program, wont allow you to fix the crooked cabinet door etc. It just sends the wrong message either way. The 'smart but lazy' adults who stayed that way, who I've encountered IRL have been maliciously manipulative work avoiders, or straight up losers with superiority complexes.

gsinclair 2mo ago
An alternative design for an education system is quite a challenge. You say it allows smart but lazy people to succeed. In truth, it allows many kinds of people to succeed. And “the hardworking but less gifted kids struggle” doesn’t ring particularly true, unless you mean something quite strong by “less gifted”.
- noir_lord 2mo ago
  As with all things human it's a continuum and the education system (at least as it existed when I went through it which was to be fair decades ago) wasn't always great at getting that message across. I had a friend in my year, bright enough but where he excelled was in putting in the work, he studied harder for GCSE's (our secondary school educational qualifications) than basically anyone I've ever met studied for anything. I still frequently outscored him on tests/coursework and did in final exam results and I did basically no work beyond reading the books and homework was an alien idea, the only real differences between us was I read for fun outside of what was assigned by school and I had a much better memory where he ground away at the assigned material but reading for fun would simply not have occurred to him. Sadly an exam usually only captures a single metric, the final score - it in no way captures the effort put into that score and it's really not fair (in a general sense) that two people can get the same score and put in wildly disparate levels of effort. But there isn't a Universal Law of Fairness, he had a stable loving home with two parents and I did not, that wasn't "fair" either but I realised early sometimes life simply isn't. Though stepping out of structured education into post-secondary education where you had to actually study came as a spectacular shock to the system because I had no framework to build on - having coasted my entire way through school putting in minimum effort.

adithyassekhar 2mo ago

It’s quite telling how most of us have had the same experience, proud of being able to ace without the effort, the smart but lazy comments, all ended up here on the same website. I just don’t know what it is telling but it’s telling something.

alexpotato 2mo ago

Also fell into this bucket for a short while. In hindsight, I realized it was b/c I hadn't found subjects in high school that really resonated with me (although HS science was cool). When I got to college I majored in computer science (academics) and discovered paintball (physical/social) and threw myself into both with abandon. I would do my CS homework as soon as it was assigned b/c I just loved solving the problems so much that I couldn't stop myself. For paintball, it became an obsession that eventually turned into a job after college. Again, it was something I loved so much that it just seemed like a natural thing to work really hard running big tournaments. Why wouldn't I work hard on something that resonated with me so deeply. This reminds me of a quote from Joe Rogan (who I know is somewhat controversial) that encapsulates this perfectly: "In high school I thought I couldn't focus. I realized I can't focus on things I don't care about. I can focus for hours on things I'm into."

ydat 2mo ago
> In hindsight, I realized it was b/c I hadn't found subjects in high school that really resonated with me My most frustrating experience was barely lazing my way through calculus I could not care about only to be working on a personal project years later where I really wish I paid attention.
buellerbueller 2mo ago
Sometimes, even controversial people are right. Not just the "broken clock is right twice a day" kind of right, but actually right. We should endeavor to separate the message from the messenger, and evaluate the message on its own merits.

globular-toast 2mo ago

This was me down to a tee. I took pride in not doing a single piece of homework during the last years of school yet getting top marks regardless. When I got to uni it was a bit of a shock to realise everyone was suddenly at least as intelligent as me. But I remained lazy. I still got top marks because I was doing computer science and enough of it interested me that I wanted to do well. It all changed during my PhD, though. It's not enough just to be intelligent. You've got to actually deliver. That means doing a lot of writing and corrections I didn't particularly want to do. I became deeply unhappy and came close to giving up. But I persevered (which seems to be a family trait). Post-PhD I'm a different person. I pride myself not on being intelligent but on being useful and actually getting things done. I meet loads of "smart but lazy" types all the time. They start 100x more things than they ever finish. I can't comment on their happiness, but I know I'm much more happy being able to tick things off and make other people happy rather than trying to wow people with my so-called intelligence.

noir_lord 2mo ago

Makes the transition from secondary (high) school to post-secondary school education particularly brutal since you've never really had to work for something and have no idea what good habits look like. Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy. College (UK meaning not US) came as a brutal reality check.

moate 2mo ago
>>Reading the material before the test/exam and then getting high enough marks that everyone leaves you alone so you can go play with computers/chess was not an effective long term strategy. Don't tell my boss, but yes it is.

rags2riches 2mo ago

I recognize this to some extent, but not to the same degree as some others in this thread. School and all other forms of obligations were just annoyances to avoid with minimal effort. Took me many years before I could find my own motivation to pretty much anything that wasn't immediately fun or engaging. And I was really picky with what I found fun to do.

HexPhantom 2mo ago

This is painfully familiar. Being able to coast through school can actually delay learning one of the most important skills school is supposed to teach: how to struggle with something for a while without interpreting the struggle as a verdict on your ability

pmarreck 2mo ago

Same exact issue. And as other responses to you mentioned, the transition to college was thus absolutely brutal. I ended up having to take multiple leaves of absence from Cornell (the longest- 5 years, during which I enlisted for 4 years in the USAF in California- this actually helped me a lot), and despite entering in 1990 I only graduated in 2000. One of the shorter leaves left me so depressed that I think I was close to suicidal (the only way I can describe it is like wearing poop-shaded glasses that you cannot take off... I also noticed that I cared as little about other lives as I cared about my own, which is something I still think about whenever I hear about family annihilation/suicides, etc), but something kept me going and I pulled out of it. On the bright side, I saw the potential of the Internet not only before my peers but before basically everyone (I was always a huge computer nerd), so that has aided my career. For the action-RPG gamers out there, ADD is a hell of a rough minmax perk lol Oh and I have a toddler son now- don't get me started on how much more difficult parenting seems to be

darkwater 2mo ago

Given the amount of replies you are getting, I think you are not alone. In fact, I was the same kind of kid as well and really, what I regret more is not learning to study, which made me a college drop-out. But that's it. I'm pretty happy and satisfied with how life turned out to be for me, but I totally understand your position. In my case I have a daughter that's showing already the same signs I had when I was her age and what I'm trying to do is to stay gently on top of her and create the habit of studying, because given the same brainpower, she will go farther if she learns to study well. And coming back to you, I don't know you or your age but I think you can - maybe - still turn around the "miserable" part. What's miserable for you, now?

annzabelle 2mo ago
The miserable bit is more past tense. Back in college I desperately wanted to have the academic success that my friends were having but I had never built that groundwork of organizational habits and consistency. I remember not doing any of the homework for my measure theory course, and getting an uncurved 50% on the midterm. I went into the professor's office hours to ask if I needed to drop the course, and he told me I had actually gotten a B and I was above the class average. There was this deep sense that I could've been a star student if I could just get my shit together. Nowadays I'm generally happy and living a great life in a New Zealand mountain town. But, whenever I talk to anybody back home who's more academically successful, I really have this jealousy and I tell myself that I could've done that if I'd just tried. It's this combo of ego and self hate that's really toxic.

m463 2mo ago

now, parents are supposed to say "good effort" not "you are smart"