Page 167 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

you can practice lifting weights and get bigger muscles over time, you can also
practice certain mental patterns that deepen and enlarge in your mind.
Interestingly, it seems that practice may help you expand your working memory.
Researchers on recall have found that doing exercises to repeat longer and longer
strings of digits backward seems to improve working memory. 13
Gifted people have their own set of difficulties. Sometimes highly gifted
kids are bullied, so they learn to hide or suppress their giftedness. This can be
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difficult to recover from. Smarter people also sometimes struggle because they
can so easily imagine every complexity, good and bad. Extremely smart people
are more likely than people of normal intelligence to procrastinate because it
always worked when they were growing up, which means they are less likely to
learn certain critical life skills early on.
Whether you are naturally gifted or you have to struggle to get a solid grasp

the fundamentals, you should realize that you are not alone if you think you are
an impostor—that it’s a fluke when you happen to do well on a test, and that on
the next test, for sure they (and your family and friends) are finally going to
figure out how incompetent you really are. This feeling is so extraordinarily
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common that it even has a name—the “impostor phenomenon.” If you suffer
from these kinds of feelings of inadequacy, just be aware that many others
secretly share them.

Everyone has different gifts. As the old saying goes, “When one door closes,
another opens.” Keep your chin up and your eye on the open door.

REACHING TOWARD THE INFINITE

Some feel that diffuse, intuitive ways of thinking are more in tune with our spirituality. The
creativity that diffuse thinking promotes sometimes seems beyond human understanding.
As Albert Einstein noted, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though
nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”

DON’T UNDERESTIMATE YOURSELF

“I coach Science Olympiad at our school. We have won the state championship eight out
of the last nine years. We fell one point short of winning the state this year, and we often