Scott Barry Kaufman

I just remember being taunted and being told things like, oh, you're too stupid to go on to fourth grade, you idiot, that sort of thing.

But yeah, it was really painful.

It almost instantly seduced me into loving the science of IQ intelligence.

And I forgot that I was supposed to be on this vendetta.

I forgot.

It made it very hard for me to process auditory input in real time.

And so I was a couple milliseconds behind everyone else.

I would hear things and then I would have to, in my head, cognitively process it.

Like listen to it over again while everyone else was already on to the next thing.

You know, it's very easy to look at someone and just judge them as dumb because they're slower than someone else.

And that sort of processing speed issue is one that I confronted first and foremost as a kid.

And I believe the official diagnosis was I was too immature to go on to fourth grade.

And I remember thinking to myself, my gosh, I must be really immature if I'm too immature to go to fourth grade.

That's really bad.

They say things like he's off to the side often, like socially isolated.

He seems to be in his own world.

I guess they viewed all that as some form of worrying disability, you know, that I sort of was off on my own planet over there.

It really amplified this feeling I already had of that I was different.

I remember even from first to third grade, I felt like a huge outsider from the other kids, but then making me repeat third grade and then having all my friends go on and they kept me there, it amplified it to a very, very large degree.

I remember feeling really, really low self-esteem