[High IQ] My personal experience as an intellectually gifted person

hello there and welcome to my channel I'm intellectually gifted person and I would like to talk a bit about my personal experience with intellectual giftedness to start I'd like to make it clear that being an intellectually gifted person is not all that extremely special intellectual giftedness is defined it depends a bit on the definition but it's defined in my case as being among the two percent of people who has the highest IQ so this means actually that one in 50 people is intellectually gifted by definition so it's quite a lot of people second intellectual giftedness

doesn't mean you're a genius and it certainly doesn't mean you know everything there's a big difference between knowing and understanding knowing is encyclopedic knowing and isotropy you by heart but doesn't guarantee you understand things now what does it mean in daily life what does it mean in how I function and how did I come to doing a supervised test with Mensa so all my life since I was a small kid actually I did kind of feel a bit different I was probably what you could call an emotional sensitive kid and my fields of interests and

my way of functioning I have always been a bit different than the law especially in my case for men it's not that I have had the kind of very obsessive interests in one specific domain which is more like of the autistic spectrum it's not that either but I have always been interested in why things are as they are how things work together how people actually function why they do what they do etc a bit this psychological philosophical cite all that together and I've always found that for instance when I was a kid in school etc

the kids around me were kind of rude and crude and I was also interested and preoccupied and a lot of things that they wouldn't even put attention to I was very preoccupied and scared and interested in the Cold War I was worried about the extinction of animals about contamination pollution I also like Star Trek and what I loved about Star Trek was more the philosophical part of it because the early series with the original Captain Kirk many of the stories were actually a kind of investigation in a philosophical theme for instance how to end warfare

or how good and evil come together and how they work together and how they could be separated maybe or maybe not and stuff like that I had high grades in school also I don't think every intellectually gifted person necessarily has high grades in school it can very well be the opposite also in my case I had very high grades because I was trying to be loved by my parents I was looking for the love I didn't get actually by my parents not in a way that I felt I was loved I'll get back to that

later through high grades which did gave me a kind of admiration and contentment of my parents but it's not at all the same as love not at all well I'll get back to that later so I'm convinced there's a lot of intellectually gifted kids who have low grades at school for various very good reasons for an intellectually gifted person school is actually boring and it's kind of badly explained what they're trying to explain because it's all destined to a kind of brains that are more or less different than yours I grew up adolescent adult and

to put it in one word it was all confused on the one hand I felt like most people were really really stupid that's how I felt it on the other hand however I also felt that most people compared with me or actually quite how should I put it sure of themselves and you know going through life like that while I was really a lot more hesitating and insecure and uncertain and always doubting and thinking and stuff like that so in a certain sense I had this negative idea about people and in the other sense I

had this kind of positive idea about people that they were kind of better than me and I really had a lot of confusion about it I couldn't get it together really I also always wanted to help people I saw that actually they were suffering from stuff that they could avoid and I tried to explain them and convince them their reactions were mostly or always negative and I couldn't get my head around this either you know so in the end I kind of ended up with a kind of general idea that either they were crazy or

either I was crazy but something was not right at the end of my 30s began of my beginning of my 40s I passed by a few IQ tests on the internet and I did these tests the curious thing was that the the very first one or two or something I wasn't especially good at them I wasn't bad at them but I wasn't especially good at them but then I started to realize what they were about and what actually was asked from me in order to have a very good result in these IQ tests so I

did a few more and actually to put it in short but I'll make another video about that also I had to think dumb that's how I had to put it in my in my head when I had an IQ test before me I will have the tendency to explode in all kinds of possibilities and complex kinds of answers and I would have to think no no no think dumb think dumb there are there's a pattern here you have to add something to the pattern that goes together with it think dumb what would the dumb else

would be and I did that and that was always correct so I found out I was actually very good that these IQ tests so I inscribed for supervised IQ tests in Mensa in Brussels and I went to this IQ test and I really had something I don't care if I have an IQ of 70 or 170 whatever I just want to know because maybe there there will be a kind of not maybe an answer but the kind of guideline a kind of direction where this damn difference I have with most other people comes from so

I did the test and I came back home and I didn't really know if I did it very well or well or very bad I thought rather okay and then a few days later came a letter from Mensa and as I said they said I was accepted in Mensa and I was intellectually gifted and I had an IQ of 133 european thank you so this came actually has in a certain sense a complete surprise and then again not and my very first reaction to this was you see it's not me who's crazy it's you on

those aspects of life where we do not agree but probably I have the more intelligent insight into it which now in hindsight I find it and a bit you could say arrogant or exaggerated or something like that it's not really like that I think now I think now more in terms of differences at the same level instead of higher and lower you know different approach is different and neurobiological ways of functioning stuff like that that's how I see it now but at that time that was my first reaction and it put me to re-evaluate the

whole of my previous life since I was 2 3 years old up until that point and I really did a a very very Saro job of remembering reliving all those experience and all that confusing stuff and all that and looking at it in the light of this intellectual giftedness but especially in the light of neurobiological differences in the light of I really am different my brain works in a different way than the most people and whether it's higher or lower or better or worse that's not a question it's different but at least it's not always

worse so in a lot of things I must have had also some kind of I must have been right also when we didn't agree like me and society or me and other people or stuff like that me and my parents or stuff like that so I went through whole my whole life looking at it and it really brought up a lot a lot of stuff emotional stuff and I started thinking about people and myself and my family and society and life and a lot of things in another light not exactly in the light of giftedness

or not giftedness but in the light of this difference and I wrote a book about it for various reasons first of all for the personal reason of doing this psychological emotional very thorough profound deep and also disturbing in positive and negative ways work of reliving my past and re-evaluating everything in the light of this discovery at my early 40s it's like I went back in time and I told to myself as a very young kid look you have a different brain and now you know this go on with your life and I looked at my

life from this perspective and it's really helped a lot for a lot of things there was a lot of frustration and anger that came out a lot of sadness and feelings of injustice and stuff like that but also after all a kind of real catharsis a kind of real putting everything back together it's like I reconstructed my whole life this whole building that had been built up until my 40s I just deconstructed it all until I had just loose pieces on the floor and then I put it back together taking into account this neurobiological difference

and that's what this book is about so I'll put a link here below because the second reason I wrote this book is I didn't just read it write it for myself I wanted to write it also for all those people who maybe were like me in confusion and this is why I published the book because I could have written the book and put it in my drawer but that's why I published the book and it was a kind of more or less a difficult decision because it's a very very personal testimonial I tried to be

extremely honest with myself and put it all there and I felt especially in the field of intellectual giftedness there was and still is an extreme lack of disk of testimonial there are lots of people who have lots of ideas about intellectual giftedness but there are very few poignant radically almost deeply felt testimonials about the personal experience of how it can be how it is and I think it can be very helpful and very healing it's not as if you're going to read a book like that and up everything solved but it I really am convinced

that if we would share these kinds of books and that was what I wanted to do be one of the people that would share a kind of testimonial like that that it could trigger processes and loosen up things that are crusted together deep in our psychologies so as I said the link to my testimonial my book is below and I'll be making a lot more videos about all these themes and other themes also thanks for watching and see you in the next videos bye