11 years ago, I was told I was gifted.

The scores on the general ability test administered by the Ministry of Education had come back. I scored in the 99th percentile of my cohort.

I was just 9 and didn’t know how to react. But I was happy because my parents were happy. Like in most Asian cultures, academic excellence is revered in Singapore. Having a son who was at the top of his academic cohort was something they were proud of — I was happy that I made them proud.

Just like that, I spent the next 3 years in gifted education with some of the most talented students. Everything was designed specially for us from day 1. We had an accelerated learning programme. We had field trips and workshops which taught us skills ranging from Chinese tea appreciation to fine dining etiquette. We even had sessions in the classrooms to ensure that our emotional well-being was taken care of. I later found out that the Ministry of Education was spending 7–8 times more on us than they did on the average student. All this while we were just 10 to 12 year-old kids in primary school.

Being in the gifted programme almost seemed like we had a ticket to guaranteed success. From the teachers to friends and to family, it seemed like almost everyone was screaming “you are special” to me.

The message was amplified after the gifted programme ended as I transitioned to secondary school. I was doing badly in school. I had chalked up multiple Cs and eventually ventured into the territory of Ds and Fs — things were not looking very good for me.

Yet, teachers would often give me a pass in school each time I failed to turn in an assignment or fell asleep in class. Each teacher used a different phrase, but my school report card would essentially include the same remarks every semester: “Louis is unmotivated but has a lot of potential”.

I used my ‘giftedness’ as a crutch. It didn’t matter how I was doing in school. I told myself that my grades were not indicative of my academic ability.

Math? Physics? Chemistry? These were subjects I would not be pursuing in the future. I was doing pretty well in the humanities — that’s where I’m headed. Besides, I could get better so long as I put my mind to it. Why put all that effort in when I could take the time and enjoy myself instead?

Very gifted people, they win and they win, and they are told that they win because they are a winner. That seems like a positive thing to tell children, but ultimately, what that means is when they lose, it must make them a loser. — Joshua Waitzkin

What nobody knew about my uninspired years in school was that I didn’t put in the effort not just because I was lazy and unmotivated — students who are like that are a dime a dozen. What nobody knew was that I was afraid that the effort I put into wouldn’t translate to results. What nobody knew was that I was afraid to fail — because gifted students do not fail.

I didn’t admit this to anyone. I didn’t even admit it to myself.

Because I was so afraid to fail, I would quit, every single day.

I was the living embodiment of Steven Wright’s remark — “If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried.” I would hide the amount of effort I put into my work. If I succeeded, I made sure to downplay its role. After all, I was ‘gifted’. Shouldn’t things come easily to me? The implication was that if I needed to try as hard as everyone else, I wasn’t ‘gifted’, and that scared me more than I would have admitted.

I didn’t understand that ability is not achievement. There’s a clear difference between the two. Effort is what bridges them both. I now understand this.

Angela Duckworth said it best in her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, “that effort counts twice”. Her theory is that effort counts twice because it affects how quickly you can build skill. Achievement is what happens when the skills are applied. A diagram from her book illustrates this equation.

“What this theory says is that when you consider individuals in identical circumstances, what each achieves depends on just two things, talent and effort. Talent — how fast improvement in skill — absolutely matters. But effort factors into the calculations twice, not once. Effort builds skill. At the very same time, effort makes skill productive.”

Being identified and labelled as ‘gifted’ proved to be a double-edged sword. I gained access to educational resources even though I was undeserving. I was taught by the best teachers, whose confidence in me allowed me to live up to my potential. I had opportunities that others would die for.

Yet, I also lost my teenage years because of the self-limiting beliefs that I had developed about giftedness. I believed that I was one of the chosen ones who could go far with little work. I believed that somehow effort would taint the notion that I was gifted. I believed that failing makes me a failure.

We often think of giftedness as this wonderful, esoteric quality that separates the few from the masses. I now know it’s not true.

At least not for me.