Not Quite a Genius by Nate Dern

Author:Nate Dern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Part 3

Not Quite a Genius

Not Quite a Genius

In elementary school, I didn’t feel like one of the smart kids. Chris Shrek was one of the smart kids. He never had trouble with big words when he read aloud in front of the class, and he always finished his multiplication quizzes before anybody else. I wasn’t bad at school, but I wasn’t great at school. I was just fine at school, and I was fine with being fine at school.

Then one day we all had to take something called the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and I tested in the ninety-ninth percentile. The main consequences of this were that I had to leave regular class to go to Gifted and Talented classes with Chris Shrek and the other smart kids, and my parents maybe realized I was smarter than some of my goofy antics had previously led them to believe.

“Nathan is a little genius,” I remember my mom saying to a relative on the phone. And to a cashier at the supermarket. And also to a stranger at a gas station.

After getting told that I was Gifted and Talented by teachers at school, and after hearing my mom tell people that I was a genius, I slowly started to think of myself as one of the smart kids. I liked being one of the smart kids. Each time you got a good grade, it was like the teacher was patting you on the head and calling you a good boy. Good grades are to students as doggie treats are to dogs. See? When you’re a smart kid, perfect analogies like that just come to you. It’s great.

I struggled in college and it made me think maybe I wasn’t one of the smart kids after all, and my twenties seemed to confirm that doubt. My twenties were a slow and steady mental ass-kicking of again and again being taught life lessons that ended with some version of the epiphany, “Huh, guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was.” And you can keep having that epiphany, because you can always be a little dumber than you thought you were the day before. Zeno’s paradox, except instead of halving distances, you’re surprising yourself with incremental increases in stupidity. It’s fun.

This lesson was beaten into me through the variety of ways I failed at day jobs. Since I didn’t immediately get my dream job out of college—like I assumed was a sure thing for a lil’ genius like me—I conditioned myself to say “day job” when referring to whatever source of income I had at the moment, a subtle way of indicating that while yes, this particular line of employment is what I’m doing to pay the bills, I have far grander ambitions that I expect to be realized soon. I recommend you try it the next time someone asks you what you do. “What do I do? Well, for my day job, I’m the CFO of a midsize plastic-plant company that specializes in inoffensive office decor.

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