As someone who was not a child prodigy, but still closer to one than to normies, I can say that achieving results easily in childhood leads to not developing good discipline and persistence that are crucial in the adult world.

There are more factors that are not easily accessible for both ends of the spectrum, like access to good, personalized education, amount of trauma, and proper psychological support. But the 'discipline' part is what affected me most.

On the other side, maybe those who are more disciplined become real prodigies, and burn brightly because of the lack of social knowledge on how to support them and help to become highly developed adults.

This observation about discipline is perceptive but I have also seen variations of it dozens and dozens of times on HN.

Tons of former gifted kids on here. The gap between assumed potential and actual reality apparently has to get blamed on someone, and that person is the kid themselves.

FWIW I do it too.

That resonates with me. Both in the lack of discipline as the adults in my world basically defaulted to, "You're so smart, keep it up!" And -- very much related -- the fixed mindset I developed not knowing until later how to actually study, learn, and practice. It lasted quite long unfortunately as I was a functioning undisciplined, fixed mindset person who could still one-shot stuff reasonably well.

I recall being told by an English teacher in high school once that because it was so easy for me to write something passable, I wasn't trying hard enough to write something excellent. Wish he pushed me harder on that.

I'd add that in addition to lack of discipline, other factors that might develop are fear of failure, lack of risk-taking, etc

As someone like you, this isn't the case, because it _entirely_ depends on environment/culture. Not just for you and me, though it's more extreme for us.

Discipline is not the most correct word. Motivation is a better description for the behavior.

As the smartest child in the room you live in a world where the answers always came easy, at least the answers to questions and expectations on above average terms. This sets the elite children up to try less hard on everything because they know in advance they are always going to cross the finish line well before everyone else without effort or preparation.

I can remember being one of these kids myself. My motivation was just wanting to be productively employed and not bored in class, for example employed in a minimum wage high labor job instead of sleeping through honors advanced chemistry. At least then I was challenged.

I also remember leaving visible signs of accomplishment to the attention starved sociopaths. That attention seeking behavior always felt beneath me, infantile even.

I do remember occasionally, very rarely, encountering other elite children who were also not interested in attention seeking behavior. The greatest commonality was excessively low neuroticism. You had no fear, even in very physical terms, which resulted in thrill seeking activities. Many of these people would end up joining the military even after attaining access to elite universities.

These people were never without extended focus or discipline but about half the time were poor performing at academics, as is the case with certain learning disorders like dyslexia.