I watched this clip that says on the cover screenshot "Trauma = Genius!" I previously didn't watch it but looked it up for this post because that blurb stuck with me.
I first tried to find a clip from the 1987 version of the movie Overboard where Goldie Hawn tells off the teacher. This is the best I can find; Part one and part two.
She describes the test as a means to pigeonhole the potential of children and says that cannot actually be done. I agree with that and I've written more than one piece on this site about tests, their uses and limitations and common misperceptions.
A really good friend of mine whom I knew through gifted education circles who actually sold educational materials once made a similar remark about genius and trauma seeming to frequently go hand in hand and wondered if there was a cause and effect relationship.
I don't believe there is. I do believe that extreme circumstances help people express their strengths and help other people see those strengths. I'm also familiar with the phenomenon that if you have an unusual combination of anything, that leads to "brilliant new insights" no one with "normal" experiences would come up with.
So you have thirteen professional physicists with identical degrees and identical jobs at the exact same facility. The twelve men all play golf together and exclude the one woman and she does girly knitting as her hobby.
She is the one who is most likely to come up with novel ideas about physics problems.
Stephanie Tolan's essay Is it a cheetah? uses running speed of cheetahs as a metaphor for assessing gifted and for all the ways a bright child may fail to look brilliant and a lot of it boils down to if you don't have running room to hit 70 mph and also don't have reason to do so, you never will even if you're a cheetah and theoretically could.
Trauma often provides personal challenges that allow gifted individuals to stretch themselves, to have running room to get up to speed because no one is properly protecting them the way a child should be and it provides motivation to do things you can do because you are you that other people wouldn't approve of if you had a nicer life and that no one would guess you could do.
Meatloaf got a part in, I think, the Rocky Horror Picture Show because he was the only one who could clearly enunciate all the words in a particular song piece or even fit them in at all. At the audition, he was explicitly told to not fret about being unable to get in all the words because no one could.
He was like "Why couldn't I?" And he sang it and got in all the words and that got him the part.
All people have enormous difficulty seeing themselves clearly and a lot of metrics are relative not absolute. People get hired or promoted because they are the best the company can find, sometimes in spite of not actually being everything the company WANTS.
The Fortune 500 is a ranking of the 500 largest U.S. companies by annual revenue, including both public and private firms. They aren't the biggest in the world. They aren't the ones with more than X amount of revenue.
It's a relative ranking and when I worked at Aflac, we got notice of good news that we had "flown up" this list and dramatically improved our ranking. This announcement came during a bad recession.
It's not meaningless information but it doesn't mean what it sounds like to a lot of people. We hadn't grown. We had shrunk less than other companies during a bad economic downturn.
Yes, we were doing shockingly well for a bad recession and I had insider information about important strategic moves the company made to mitigate losses. We weren't "just lucky." The company worked hard to shrink less than others during that time.
School grades can be curved. Teachers can play favorites. Kids don't necessarily know how well their scores are relative to that of classmates.
And that pattern of being in the dark about how your performance really compares to that of other people continues into adulthood. At our jobs, we know we did well enough to not be fired but we likely have little to no idea how our performance compares to that of our colleagues.
I have a form of Cystic Fibrosis as does my oldest son. We were both diagnosed around the time he turned fourteen.
With having a diagnosis, I was suddenly told by other people for the first time that I was a terrific mother. Prior to that while keeping him healthy in the face of not knowing what was wrong, I was viewed as neurotic and overprotective.
We were both BORN with this condition. It was a bigger problem when we didn't have a proper diagnosis but we were dismissed as lazy.
Albert Camus said "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." Twice exceptional people typically have "average" performance while being enormously frustrated.
My oldest son mostly made Bs in school plus one A and one C on most report cards. His brother was a straight A student.
One school didn't want to believe my straight A student was also handicapped and needed help with some things. At another school where he had spent time in special ed, a teacher said to me the school had wasted resources putting someone so talented in special ed.
When I pulled them from public school to homeschool, we initially did so through a charter school. The head honcho there was highly qualified to assess my kids for purposes of choosing curriculum and this is when I was casually informed my B student was much more gifted than my straight A student and the administrator expected to struggle to provide him with adequate challenge.
If you have both trauma and talent, I don't believe your trauma made you talented. That's like saying if you get a big bill and can somehow pay it, your big bill made you rich.
No, it didn't. It just made it clear to other people you had that much in the bank to give.
Extremely high IQs are so strongly associated with issues like ADHD, OCD and ASD that some people call those comorbidities for lack of a better word.
I believe that people with high IQs have high nutritional needs and ALL the resources I'm aware of agree that "genius" by it's very nature involves thinking differently from other people.
I believe genius is associated with different nutritional needs and higher nutritional demands for brain specific nutrients and I've never seen anyone in gifted education suggest that we need to account for that in how we feed our bright children.
Therefore odds are good that genius is also fragile if only because of this unrecognized need which is at high risk of going unmet because no one thinks it exists.
And that's likely another reason that so many people think genius is associated with mental illness and other serious personal problems.
This is not comprehensive. For example, there are also social factors where bright kids are inherently unlikely to find other children like them to befriend and that causes personal problems. But I think I've made my essential point and this is a blog post, not an encyclopedia.