I May Be an Imposter

September 3, 2025

I was reading a book and I found this:

Having been praised for what they [people] are (talented and gifted) rather than for what they do, they tend to focus on keeping this impression intact, rather than exposing themselves to new challenges and the possibility of learning from failure.

the book the quote is from is How to take smart notes: one simple technique to boost writing, learning and thinking, page 51. It's about Zettelkasten and i haven't yet finished reading it. But, this sentence alone made me think of how many times, during school, my teachers said to my parents: "he's gifted, but he doesn't commit". Meaning, in a way or another, he understands things faster, but I'm not making any effort to put all of this to practice, by doing homeworks, or to study a subject in full detail.

This judgement from my teachers hunted me during my school days and is probably still having an effect on me nowadays. I can recall an exam at university where a teacher said, during an exam, "you showed much more smartness during lessons, with your questions, but the exam was terrible". Lol.

Why I was not committing? My theory is that school (and expecially high school) was boring as fuck, and I haven't enjoyed a single moment there. I see the same pattern in my 8 years old daughter: she refuses to do homeworks because they are boring. I tried every possible trick to make her study, with no luck. She claims that holidays are holidays and one should not study during holidays or outside school hours, which is an intelligent argument for a 8 years old. No luck trying to explain that the more you practice, the more you exercise, the better you get at some thing. This "reward" (being better) doesn't interest her. And also, she has the highest possible marks. In a sense, she says, i proved how good I am, why you want to torture me with summer homeworks?

Another sentence from the book that hit me is from the previous page, 50:

Seeking feedback, not avoiding it, is the first virtue of anyone who wants to learn, or in the more general terms of psychologist Carol Dweck, to grow.

Do we not commit because we are afraid of feedback? One thing I understood about life is that, no matter how hard you try to avoid it, you'll eventually face a failure. How you react to this failure is what makes the difference. Do you learn something from it? Do you ask for feedback to your peers?

I don't think that me and my daughter are the types of person that refuse to seek for feedback. Feedback, in the sense I see it, is very important once you start having a career, if you want to become a better professional, but at school the feedback usually comes back as grades, and they're definitive, they don't allow any type of correction before that grade is written. So, my idea is that we are just the types of people that want our minds to be free. We know that we can get anywhere (externally required) with low effort, and we deliver exactly this low effort. But, for the things we really like, we don't even measure effort.

Enough of this rant. There was no point to prove, no real argument to assert. It's just a bit of introspection. Hope you found here some questions for your inner self, too.