Profoundly Gifted Survival Guide

It's a really enchanting feeling to be a big fish in a small pond. How special! How proud! Even some of isolation and loneliness have a sweetness in their melancholy, which we embrace unawares.

It is a somewhat different feeling to be a shark in an inflatable wading pool.

C.S. Lewis, in the ending to The Horse and His Boy, wrote,

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" said Corin. "I shan't have to be King. I shan't have to be King. I'll always be a prince. It's princes have all the...
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It's a really enchanting feeling to be a big fish in a small pond. How special! How proud! Even some of isolation and loneliness have a sweetness in their melancholy, which we embrace unawares.

It is a somewhat different feeling to be a shark in an inflatable wading pool.

C.S. Lewis, in the ending to The Horse and His Boy, wrote,

"Hurrah! Hurrah!" said Corin. "I shan't have to be King. I shan't have to be King. I'll always be a prince. It's princes have all the fun."

"And that's truer than thy brother knows, Cor," said King Lune. "For this is what it means to be a king: to be first in every desparate attack and last in every desparate retreat, and when there's hunger in the land (as must be now and then in bad years) to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in your land."

To be profoundly gifted means you make the breakthrough invention that you can't sell because nobody can understand it, let alone part with money. It is to make the academic breakthrough that your own advisor meets with ridicule. In an age of Fear of Missing Out, it means that you are the most brilliant person some others have ever met... which means, unfortunately, that you have the biggest target painted on your back of anyone they've ever met.

To be human is to be gifted; every person is made to be prophet, priest, and king. But in the esoteric phenomenon of profound giftedness, we should remember Alan Perlis's words about computer programming: "The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland, but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman."

This book might have been called, "A Hitchhiker's Guide to Alice in Wonderland." And it may be a glimpse into a unique world few people understand.

The immediate (intended) audience is the adult profoundly gifted population, partly because across the range gifted children pick up on books for adults very, very quickly. It may hold some fairly direct interest for those across the very wide gifted range, from moderately gifted to highly and exceptionally gifted as well as profoundly gifted: some of the phenomena addressed extend well beyond the confines of profound giftedness. Apart from those interested in the psychology of giftedness, it may interest those wishing to research giftedness, profound giftedness, child prodigies, Renaissance men, and geniuses.

It may also interest both those who live between or across cultures and worlds, such as missionary's kids and third culture kids, and those who think differently, and are not (in terms of the "Aspie" / Asperger's community or now simply the autism spectrum) "neurotypical." For this kind of community, the distinction surrounding "Theory of Alien Minds" may represent a Copernican shift that is cardinal in communicating with almost all of the rest of the world.

If you are curious, you are invited to read it.