For a variety of reasons, gifted students sometimes struggle to make a career choice. First, if you’re good at a number of different things, you could be dealing with what’s called multipotentiality…meaning that you have too many choices, and it’s hard to pick. Second, when you’re very smart, parents, friends, teachers, etc., might have a lot of expectations regarding what job you should have. Everyone assumes you want to be a doctor, or a physicist, or an engineer, or something else that requires a lot of education, and usually makes a fair amount of money and is pretty prestigious. With all these opinions, deciding what you want to do can be very tricky.

So what is a young person to do? How do you select a path? Dr. Kelly and I heard Jaime Casap, Google’s Chief Educational Evangelist, speak at a conference a while back, and he said something that really stuck with me. He said that students should not be thinking, “What do I want to be?”, instead they should be asking themselves, “What problem do I want to solve?”

Let that sink in a minute. “I want to make sure kids don’t go to bed hungry,” “I want to make cars go faster,” “I want to make sure our water is safe to drink,” “I want to help information flow faster,” “I want to cure cancer” – these are all worthwhile goals to pursue. They are a purpose to propel you forward. A lot of the research regarding gifted adults says that they need to find things to do in life, be it a job or a hobby, that they find fulfilling. They don’t feel happy just doing something because it makes them a lot of money, or because it meets others expectations, it needs to give their life meaning.

You may have heard the phrase “follow your passion,” but the thing about passion, as anyone who’s been in a romantic relationship can tell you, is that flares brightly, and then it tends to wane. Passion can be brief. Purpose is something different. Purpose requires knowing where you want to go, setting goals, and pursuing those goals. It requires the commitment of time, energy, and resources. It also demands a certain amount of self-awareness, because understanding these things about yourself is not usually a quick and easy process.

As you’re thinking down the road and wondering which career might be right for you, we encourage you to talk to a career counselor, who can ask where your interests lie, what your talents are, and what gives you purpose, and then help you with the self-awareness part. Then remember, most people will change jobs between 8 – 15 times in their lifetime, and many of the jobs you might eventually hold have not even been thought of yet. Twenty years ago, “Google’s Chief Educational Evangelist” was not a thing! Your purpose may change, your goals might evolve, and new careers may materialize, but as long as you keep your sights on what keeps you happy and fulfilled, you should be just fine.

The Silence is Deafening

I recently listened to Celeste Headlee, radio host and author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations that Matter, give an interview on NPR. She made some wonderfully valid points about how we have lost the art of conversation, and how we talk to hear ourselves talk, not to listen with an open mind. In this day and age of people only talking to other people who agree with them, or yelling at the people who don't, Headlee's book is exceptionally timely. When was the last time you had a frank discussion with someone about a sensitive topic that was not necessarily easy, but was important?

Many gifted students are passionate about ideas, the world, social justice, dinosaurs - you name it. The fact that they care so much about virtually everything is great, and the fact that they want to share it with everyone they know is also great. What they don't know how to do - and what we need to teach them - is to engage in two-way discourse and debate so that they are not just sharing what they know, but that they are learning from others. Others who have different values, cultures, and experiences, so that conversations are a two-way street, where all of the participants gain from speaking with each other - not at each other.

Celeste's Ted Talk "10 Ways to Have a Better Conversation" specifically addresses 10 important tips for people to keep in mind to make dialogue a more satisfying experience for all the participants. Some of the most important, particularly for our students, include: don't lecture (if you don't want someone to present an opposite point of view, write a blog); don't equate your experience with theirs (it's not about you); stay out of the weeds (no one wants to know every single detail about every dinosaur, no matter how fascinating you find it); and listen (listen to understand the other person, not just to prepare a response). 

Bright kids excel at the intellectual, but not always at the social and emotional. This makes the social aspect of being present with the other person and hearing their view, and the emotional aspect of hearing not just what a person says, but what they're feeling, a particularly tricky proposition. If we can share, absorb, and teach these skills, hopefully we can go back to talking to each other, listening to each other. If we can't, she's right - the silence will be deafening.