Читать книгу Open Innovation - Pascal Latouche - Страница 35

Young Cindy was what we would call today a child with very high potential who always made personal choices dictated by her own will. Her school childhood revolved around many activities beyond school. As a lover of singing, piano, guitar and Rhythmic Gymnastics, she did not lack in activities. To say the least, this workload was never a problem for Cindy!

She confessed to me that her academic journey was disconcertingly easy. She was bored. She almost never opened books and yet was quite frequently top of the class. The exams were almost always successful: “I barely opened my books to take the baccalaureate, I passed with flying colors…”. I’m no expert, but I do know that kids with these abilities often have difficulties in their social relationships. So I took the liberty of digging a little deeper into the consequences of this academic ease in Cindy’s life.

When you’re at the top of the class, when you’re always first, when the vast majority of your classmates are struggling to understand what the teachers are saying, it’s sometimes hard for you to make friends. It was with great spontaneity that Cindy told me that she had few friends at the time and that bothered her greatly.

“I went from one extreme to the other, … so I had lower grades, but I had friends.” Her solution was therefore to step back from her studies, or even make no effort at all, in short, to do everything that could undermine her first position. “I was a dunce, but at least I had friends.” She succeeded rather well if I believe the not very linear, even somewhat surprising, student journey.