What Makes You Intellectually Different?
Personality, culture, access, and expectations muddy the waters
Did you notice? I cross-posted a Sunday article by Deborah Ruf, Ph.D., that hit three sweet spots for our community: 1) professionalism, 2) communication abilities, and 3) gifted through the lifespan. Intellectual Differences Among the Gifted offers a lot if you are curious about who you are, what your superpowers are, and why you seem to experience more changes, more questions, more struggles, and more achievement than others.
Dr. Ruf publishes on Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday. Tuesday and Thursday posts feel like a seminar with the expert, and it helps to slow down and make notes to appreciate how it applies to your personality, culture, access to training and job opportunities, and expectations. Sunday is different and feels like a chat with a mix of colleagues and new faces you just met —all with feet up around the fire pit at the resort where you are participating in a professional convention.
So let’s talk and hear from you. What did you get from the article? How did it help you understand what makes you intellectually different? Does different mean exceptionally wonderful and desired? Does different mean you don’t want to talk about it?
Here are my field notes. Please share your thoughts and note-making if you found something immediately useful or enlightening.
Specialty Fields: “As complexity increased within a specialty field, so does the average IQ,” Ruf writes.
My experience with more than 600 specific professions includes a lot of drilling down to specialties and more complex specialties within a field. Some professions have more than 300 specialty certifications and continuing education requirements within them, such as nursing or software engineering. This section of the article helped me understand why I’m fascinated with the more complex specialties and why generic-sounding names do not stir passions and curiosity. Generic-sounding names take too much effort to understand. Take the name accountant. On the surface—boring! Dig deeper and discover that there are more than 27 different professional societies where an accounting degree is just the start. Go deeper into the specialties, and that’s where we find the higher IQ people, such as forensic accounting.
Boredom and Bucking Authority: Many in our community reveal feelings of restlessness and loneliness if they are not with professional colleagues as well as friends outside of work who are not as fast, perceptive, sharp, curious, and creative as they are. This started in adolescence, and Dr. Ruf helps you understand where and why this happened.
Professionalism and Career Choices: “Achieving a professional-level career necessitates not only high intelligence but also access to adequate financial resources, connections, and a supportive family environment,” Ruf writes. Well, then, what are you? Are you Level One, Two, Three, Four, or Five in the Ruf books and explanations? How does that relate to the career choices you made and the professional path you are still on?
Communication emphasis: Are highly intelligent people socially challenged nerds and geeks? “Actually, only some highly intelligent people are what we would call nerds and geeks, who are uncomfortable in social settings. Levels Three, Four, or Five gifted people usually find social interactions to be fairly easy if they are verbally strong or possess an “evenness” between their verbal and nonverbal abilities,” Ruf writes. Then what happens in Levels One and Two? To get the whole picture of all five levels and what that means to you, personally, and then to your parents, siblings, and teachers in your life, you must get into the archives for Dr. Ruf’s Substack and notice the dedicated information for each level.
Is this your first exposure to Deborah Ruf, Ph.D.?
Are there others who have covered the three bases of professional, communicator, and gifted adult to your satisfaction?
Who do you talk with or who do you read to help you navigate the complexities of your life, your career choices, and your projects after age 45?
Do you feel like you're on the edge of something amazing, and you just can't figure out what it is? That's where I come in. My name is Georgia Patrick. I work with curious, intense, understanding professionals—still in practice and retired—to tap into their full potential and get extremely clear on their gift (their value) to individuals actively seeking such wisdom. It starts with an email. Maybe later, a short call to make sure I understand you.
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