Hi everyone, it’s Erik Thor here, and in today’s video, we’re talking about why the gifted but lazy myth is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The ENTP Trap: Smart, Lazy, and Distanced
The truth is, in high school, if I took the Myers-Briggs personality test, I think I would have been a textbook ENTP. ENTPs are described as people that are quick thinkers, easy learners, smart but lazy, right? They have the brains to be good at things and to do well, but they don’t have the discipline or emotional self-control necessary to really apply themselves in school.
I was definitely a person that was suffering through this. I was very addicted to this idea of myself. It is a very addictive idea to think that you’re smart but lazy. It’s such a loop because if you can convince yourself that you’re smart and lazy, anything you fail at is simply because you were lazy. It was not because you were stupid. It was simply because you didn’t really care. You were able to act cool and distanced, and you weren’t able to say, “I don’t like to study. I don’t feel like it. I don’t want to. So, I’m going to do other things.”
You tell yourself, “If I wanted to, I would have gotten an A. Absolutely.” You have this kind of tempting lie you tell yourself: “I could have if I wanted to.” It’s a tempting lie because it feels like you’ve already succeeded without even having done anything.
Why We Avoid the Struggle
Studying is really difficult, especially when you are young. You’re a child. You don’t know anything. You haven’t learned anything. You haven’t graduated, you haven’t read, you haven’t gone out into the world, and you haven’t worked, so you don’t really know anything about the world. When you don’t know anything about the world, it’s very easy to feel anxious. It’s very easy to feel stupid.
If you do anything where you might fail or mess up, or you might get a bad grade, a bad result, or struggle—for example, I struggled in sports. I found it very scary to be in sports because immediately when I did something athletic, I felt like I wasn’t good enough and I wasn’t capable. In many ways, I avoided it. I didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to exercise. I didn’t want to put myself through the hard work necessary because every time I tried, I felt stupid. I felt weak and incapable. I didn’t feel good enough, and I was constantly comparing myself to other people.
I kind of thought that skill was inborn—like I was born with this knowledge. When you’re intuitive or you over-identify with the intuitive function in Myers-Briggs, you tend to believe that you are born with knowledge and truth inside of you. You believe that you don’t need to go out into the physical world to learn, to expose yourself to things, to study, or to work at something. It’s just there. You believe that you are just magically born with knowledge and you either know things or you don’t.
How Adults Reinforce the Myth
Parents and adults are very eager to buy into this myth. My parents never wanted to think of me as stupid. As a parent, the worst thing you can do is think your kid is stupid when they’re messing up or doing something wrong. The easiest, most common excuse a parent would ever give for their kid is, “They’re just lazy.” They think, “They could have if they wanted to, but they have it in them. They have the potential. They just don’t want to.”
In a way, that is true. I genuinely believe that any kid can learn anything if they are willing to work at it, keep trying, and keep working through it. But in order to do that, you need to believe in yourself. You need to have the self-esteem to handle failure, handle mistakes, and overcome problems.
If you are messing up in school, if you don’t remember the answer to a question, or if you didn’t manage to learn something, that’s not a failure of your character or your ego. It’s not going to invalidate you as a person or your skill or knowledge. It’s just going to be a sign that says, “Oh, I still have to learn. I still have something new to learn, something more to discover. There’s still more here that I didn’t know about.”
That is the reassurance you need: embracing the process of learning, the joy of learning, and the curiosity in something.
Unrealistic Expectations and Playing a Role
Beyond that, you need the self-esteem to know that your parents are going to love you no matter what you do. No matter if you succeed or fail, they’re still going to think of you as the most wonderful child in their lives and be so grateful to have you. They’re not going to put pressure on you or unrealistic expectations on you that you need to be somebody successful, amazing, or wonderful.
I wish that was the case for me. Parents, adults, and teachers were so quick to tell me that I was intelligent. They were eager to agree with me, call me smart, and say I was so mature and gifted for my age that they really fed into these unrealistic expectations. My teacher said I was going to become the president of Sweden one day, even though we don’t really have presidents. That shows how unrealistic the expectations were.
Everyone thought I was going to make something of myself, that I had so much potential inside me. This became a silent expectation and a pressure. I thought I had to be smart. I had to sound smart. I had to be the smart person.
This is really how we socialize ourselves into a specific personality type or how we take on a role. For me, this became the role I had to play and try to be. I was playing at being the ENTP, playing at being the smart kid, playing at being the gifted but lazy kid, even though I was no better or worse than any other kid. I was just developing at my own pace in my own way.
Asynchronous Development and Learning Styles
The truth is everyone develops at their own pace. Early achievement and success is no guarantee for late success or achievement. You can do well when you’re 11 and do worse when you’re 12. This has to do with asynchronous development. We develop at different paces. Some people have their growth spurt at a certain age and others do not.
There are so many factors here that we don’t even recognize when we compare children against each other and make them compete for the highest grade. We don’t recognize that each child has a different starting point and a different learning process. We all need different things to figure something out. When a teacher explains how to do math, they fail to recognize that different kids need different explanations and different ways to solve the problem. Not every kid will learn the exact same way, but we enforce the same structures.
Studying for the Joy of It
I was lucky in many ways that school was the way it was. I was lucky most of all because I did a lot of personal reading and learning outside of school.
The thing with being “smart” is that you think you do well at school and get a good grade because you’re intelligent. You don’t think about the fact that you actually had to study or work hard for it. As a kid, I didn’t even realize that studying is what makes a person get a good grade. I thought that wasn’t how it worked.
What I didn’t realize was that I actually did a lot of studying. I thought I never did homework, but I actually did. I just never called it that. For me, I loved to learn for its own sake. I went to the library a lot. I read a lot of books about history. I read in English at an early age. I spent a lot of time on the internet on Wikipedia. Because of that, I learned a lot. That made school easier for me, because I learned for its own sake and because I found it fun, not because I would get a good grade.
While other kids were doing homework because they should, because they had to, or because their parents told them to, my parents kind of let me do whatever I wanted. When I could do whatever I wanted, I’d still get bored. I’d think, “What do I want? I’m bored. I don’t have anything to do. Well, I guess I’ll read.” That’s kind of how it worked for me. I found my own way to learn, study, and do things.
The University Crash and the Reality of Hard Work
I never really learned how to study. For me, the challenges came later in life when the source material got more difficult. When I started university, that’s when everything crashed. I had never learned how to study, or how to work through a failure or a bad grade.
At university, that is so important because eventually the course material just gets too difficult. If you haven’t learned how to study, you’re going to be so far behind because you’re learning it so late in life.
I developed my executive functioning quite late in life. Some kids develop executive function later. Your brain develops at a different pace, and different parts of your brain develop at different times. For me, what took a really long time to arrive was the ability to emotionally discipline myself to sit down and do something that was difficult—something that would take time, require repetition, and require hard work.
It was only when I started learning programming and writing software that I really had to put myself in a situation where I had to work at something. Programming is so difficult. When you’re coding, it’s a tough process. Say you’re looking for a bug in software: you don’t know why it’s happening, so you go through all the lines, read everything, compile, edit, change, and try things out, but nothing works. Nothing fixes it. You can spend days throwing yourself at that problem, feeling like you’re getting nowhere. You can feel so much anxiety in this.
Still, you have to go through with it. Then, when you finally find the answer—maybe after spending a month trying to fix something—it feels so easy. It feels like you were so stupid, that you could have just found out immediately, and that you should have known that was going to be the problem. You feel like you wasted so much time getting there, but you didn’t.
That whole month taught me emotional resilience and hard work. It taught me to keep trying at things, even if it’s difficult, to keep working at it, to keep doing my best, and to manage those feelings of anxiety, shame, inability, and doubt. When I was learning programming, I kept telling myself, “I don’t have what it takes. I’m too stupid. I don’t know anything.”
That’s how we all feel when we’re starting at something difficult.
Breaking Free from the Ego and Identity
The more often you feel stupid, the more often you’re going to be a person that challenges themselves. A person that fails a lot is a person that takes a lot of risks. A person that feels everything is easy and happens magically is a person that doesn’t really take risks.
It’s so important to recognize that the gifted but lazy myth is a self-fulfilling prophecy because you’re avoiding everything that is hard. You are choosing to do everything that is easy for you. You’re prioritizing everything that feels innate, effortless, and simple, and you’re avoiding everything that is challenging, difficult, or takes hard work. You’re building up an image and an identity around being smart and lazy at the same time. You need both of these words—the positive word and the negative word—because they make up the boundaries of your ego, your self-perception, and your identity.
The ENTP label is like all labels, roles, and personalities: a developed mask you rehearsed and practiced over time because it protected your brain from feelings of ignorance or not knowing. It helped you get through studying, teachers’ expectations, parents’ pressures, and desires. It held your fragile mind together.
We use these explanations for who we are, this mindset, these beliefs, and these ideas to tell a story about who we are and why things are the way that they are. But this story keeps us from seeing the truth: we all have to learn certain things, learning is a step-by-step process, and you will have to sit down and work through each detail eventually.
Choosing What Is Easy vs. Confronting Reality
You can’t simply talk your way out of any situation. I tried. I was able to charm some teachers to give me good grades, but there were some teachers that I could not charm, and there were certain things I couldn’t work my way through.
I think about my path through school. I came to specialize in languages, rhetoric, and humanities subjects because hard subjects were impossible to cheat. I couldn’t fake my way through a math exam, but I could fake my way out of language. If I got a bad grade on a writing assignment, I could always say it’s because the teacher had a different personal taste than I did. But if I got a bad grade on a math test, it was because I didn’t understand the source literature and I didn’t understand math.
In many ways, I chose what was easy. I chose easy subjects in school, subjects where I would pass magically without having to study. I chose rhetoric. I chose to rely on my voice because that came naturally to me, and I chose to avoid things that were difficult for me.
The gifted but lazy stereotype really ruined me by giving me impossible standards and expectations for what I had to achieve in life. I thought I had to be a published, successful author by the age of 18. I had to become an elected politician. I had to do so much. I had so many ideas for myself about what I had to be, what I had to do, how fast it was going to work, and how easy it was going to be because I was so gifted and had so much potential. Everyone had told me that.
I didn’t realize over time that hard work is no guarantee for success, and talent is no guarantee for success. You can work hard at something and still fail, struggle, and encounter resistance. The real world gives a sense of resistance that the intuitive world doesn’t. In the intuitive world, everything is easy and clear. In my head, I can imagine a perfect drawing of a horse, but that doesn’t mean that my hand can draw it. We have to confront ourselves with this sensing function, and we have to find a balance here. If we don’t, we will only ever be good at things in theory and never in practice.
Negotiating with Reality
We still have to negotiate who we are with the universe. I can make YouTube videos and hope that they’re going to blow up, but the universe is still going to say, “No, sorry, that’s not it. That video wasn’t it. That video was not going to go viral,” no matter how hard you worked at it, no matter how good you thought it was, or how impressive. That’s not going to happen, and it might never happen because it might not be in your cards. You never know if a risk is going to pay off or not.
You have to bargain with the universe here and find what really fits you. What can you do that only you can do, that the world needs, that the world rewards, and that the world will appreciate? That’s how you negotiate with reality.
It can feel as if you don’t really want to do that—that reality is some kind of cold or cruel gatekeeper standing in the way of your success, your ideas, or your potential. But in reality, reality is a beautiful, wondrous place with so much to learn and discover—more than we ever knew.
Anything we think to ourselves that we can do, should do, or that could be for us—anything we imagine for ourselves—assume that the world has something even greater in store for you than that. Assume that there is something even more beautiful, even more amazing than whatever it is that you think that you deserve or that you are entitled to because of your intelligence.
When I say more, I don’t mean more in the sense of more money, more success, or more viewers. I mean more as in a chance to do something that is going to be deeply fulfilling and rewarding. There is nothing fulfilling or rewarding about staying in your intuition forever. The intuition and the imagination provide a sense of a reassuring lie or a fantasy, but reality provides the truth. The truth is much bigger and much more beautiful than anything we ever imagined.
Your hardships, your struggles, and your failures might just be preparing you for meeting the love of your life, finding joy or contentment, or learning to appreciate the small things in life and recognizing how the small things can be big things.
Even if you don’t blow up on YouTube or become the president of Sweden, you still have the chance to make just as big of an impact somewhere else in the smallest of shapes, just like the butterfly can create a storm on the other side of the world. You never know how the things that you do in your day-to-day life might impact the world around you.
environmental smart and stupid, smart or lazy—these are all fabricated ideas in our head. They’re just adjectives. They don’t mean anything on their own. The only thing that matters is what is the truth. That’s my point.
Thank you so much for watching, and see you all in the next video.
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