The Vibrant Child Inside Every Genius

Many characteristics that we witness in children seem to have unfortunately been lost in many, if not most adults - like curiosity, openness to new ideas, and unrestrained creativity. Perhaps high IQ people are like children who never lost these characteristics.

High IQ people, like children, are highly curious and ask far more questions than those around them. They are less likely to simply accept facts that are given to them and often question the answers they find. Asking the primal question “WHY?” is a very important part of being a normal human.

Indeed, it is when children stop asking questions that the true loss of innocence begins. Think about a three or four-year-old. The question WHY often dominates their exploration of the world around them and their conversations with others. Unfortunately, the answers that they receive are often not conducive to learning. Sometimes the answers are polite “Daddy’s busy right now. Ask me again later”… or the answer can be harsh “I’m busy. Don’t bother me.” or worst “You’re too young. You wouldn’t understand”. The answers they receive may be nice or rude, but after receiving responses like this twenty or thirty times, the children finally do learn something that is life altering. They learn NOT to ask questions anymore. Eventually, they learn and believe that they are too stupid and accept and internalize that fact. Then after enforcing this belief for a few more years, we send them off to kindergarten and wonder why they have problems learning.

It is because we may have inadvertently taught them to stop questioning and trying to learn about the world and people around them.

Perhaps high IQ people are those who as children received different types of answers. Perhaps High IQ people are those that remain curious, because they were never taught that they were too stupid to understand. Perhaps High IQ people think outside of the box because they were never placed in one and told to stay there. Perhaps High IQ people were children who were invited to play with ideas as earnestly as they played with their toys and they never lost their intellectual innocence, or had it beaten into submission or taken from them.

Perhaps all children are born with much higher IQ than we suspect and that, unfortunately, most children are taught not to ask “WHY” and not to bother mommy and daddy with such stupid questions. Children learn what they have been taught and when you encounter adults who are narrow-minded (or close-minded), unthinking, and incurious, consider what they must have been taught when they were young and how well they learned those lessons.

High IQ people may be more child-like in some ways, simply because they never had those curious, marvelous, insightful, unrestrained characteristics taken away. They may have simply never lost them… and that is part of what makes them different from others, or special.