I recall, as a late teenager, friends of my parents coming to stay. They had a young son of seven you might call a whiz kid. To say he was a smarty pants was an understatement. It was my job to show him around. He had memorized whole encyclopedias and I spent a great deal of gritted smile time trying not to throttle him. Why am I telling you this you I wonder?

I just needed to tell someone. Seriously I have just seen this report that shows that we can be inspired by very high performing young prodigies if they excel in an area different from what we are focusing on. So you may try harder at your French lessons if you read about a child who could read music at two.

In Suggestibility: How to be an Einstein I cited research that shows we improve IQ scores when being exposed to a type of person (such as an image of a group of professors-bright looking people) but we take an intelligence dip when exposed to just a one off exemplar such as Einstein.

It’s easier to relate and therefore be affected by a type rather than what may be seen as a one off genius. The whizz kid article seems to suggest that we can be influenced by remarkable aptitude as long as we relate it to another sphere. So the aspiring young boxer hoping to emerge as a sporting prodigy could be spurred on by the young musical genius and so forth.

If you never feel bad about yourself,” says lead author Camille Johnson of Stanford, “you never feel the need to change yourself or do more.” Hear hear! See this low self-esteem article

Of course it is good to feel fine about yourself so that you can move on and focus outwards on life but realizing that there is more you could be doing isn’t a damaging dip in precious self esteem but a wake up call to improve oneself. If that little whiz kid can do it then so can I!

Mark.