Speaking as someone who grew up 'gifted': yes. And I still struggle with it. Growing up 'smart' made me stupid. I had tests and things, I was marked for inclu

Speaking as someone who grew up 'gifted': yes. And I still struggle with it. Growing up 'smart' made me stupid. I had tests and things, I was marked for inclusion in the TAG program. I got poor grades not because I wasn't smart enough to do the work, but because the work bored the hell out of me and I refused to do homework and thus allow it to intrude upon fun time away from that tedium (I suspect I also dealt with some undiagnosed ADHD; it runs in the family). The problem though is that when everything comes easy, and you're never given much opportunity and encouragement to challenge yourself, then you also become prone to getting frustrated and confused whenever something isn't coming easily. You're not accustomed to that kind of failure, to not just knowing off the bat or at least being able to pick it up on the fly. So you give up on things a lot. When you get out into the real world, you wind up with a complex. That stuff that made you 'smart' isn't actually that useful outside of certain areas, so on a 'regular job' you're still functionally useless. As a kid in the 90s, at the beginning of the great tech boom, the .com crash still on the horizon, you were inundated with messages that said that because you were smart and knew computers you were somehow just on a free ride to be the next Bill Gates. When the reality is that most of the kids who did go that route wound up broke in '99, and the rest just never got that far in the first place. I genuinely worry that the current startup culture and the push for 'start an app!' programs in schools are headed the same way. Selling tech and 'being smart' as an automatic win at life, which isn't true at all, and 90% of those kids finishing 'accelerated learning' courses in programming will be lucky to grow up writing backend code for a medical insurance billing provider.