Giftedness

Mmm posting this after reading two other people's blog posts about being gifted.
I remember the first time I talked about gifted program with someone else was with gc over msn. The convo went something like:
gc: ok tell me someone whom you think is gifted.
me: uh isaac?
gc: have u seen how much bio books did he read during sec 3 and 4?
me: lol
Nvm the main point is I got pwned into thinking giftedness is so 'common' as to say.

Effort
As of now most of the people that I see are seen as 'gifted' because they have put in a lot of effort into whatever they were doing. It is hard to really see if there are any who is born with a natural edge as compared to other people, so from what I see is that it all comes through hard work.
Hard work since young, continuously doing practices, going through scoldings, extra classes, which laid down that strong foundation. And this foundation allowed many to achieve what we see now. Sometimes it's as though 'gifted' is an excuse made up by people who only see others' achievements but not how much effort they put in behind the scene. So I guess a large portion of giftedness should be attributed to the effort that was put in.

Skill
Though of course I agree different people have different ways of learning, and different levels of understanding the same thing. Hence some tend to get things faster, or able to find easier methods to solve the same problem.
I've got friends who can understand concepts very quickly, who can come up with their own methods of solving problems, who can derive other concepts from one given concept, etc. These are probably something both acquired since young and developed from young as well.

Pro?
Ever since sec 4 I acquired the title of 'chem god' (probably strengthened with SJChO results). The thing is, I'm not gifted in chem either. All the knowledge (or should we say information) I have, I started acquiring since sec 1 and 2. It's like 99% of the library books I borrowed in sec 1 and 2 were about chem, periodic table, blah blah. It's more of I'm like a memory bank that takes in all the information, and use these information when doing problems to sometimes 'cheat' my way out. Other than that my learning speed is probably slower than the more 'pro' people. It's just that I got an early start, after sec 4 I'm on par with most people again, and now I'm slowing down. But I suppose I do get most of the chemistry concepts pretty ok, except the calculations which I need a longer time to digest. Oh, and my 4 year's worth of wikipedia information still gives me that slight edge above many people, though it's getting less and less useful.

Depression
My comment on domi's blog lacks elaboration, so here it is. The first point about depression is that teenagers who are seen as 'gifted' as still developing mentally, physically and also in their analytic skills. Sometimes people see them as very capable in doing work that requires maybe logic, or finding a pattern, and so overestimates their ability. It may be true that gifted people have stronger analytic skills and such, as teenagers these skills are still developing. If others put too much expectations on them, thinking that they can solve a certain problem when they cannot, this will put pressure into the gifted people. That's why they can get frustrated and fall into depression, because they try to meet the expectations of people who overestimates the abilities they are strong in, but not strong enough. It's not about gifted people being overconfident in their own abilities, but more of other people overestimating these people's abilities.
The second point is, yeah, dependent on the type of people that we look at. Those who see things more optimistically and who can take pressure with ease will find comparison with others as a form of healthy competition. Those who are pessimistic about things and succumb to pressure easily will find competition with others very depressing.
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mm that should be enough for a blog post.