Let's talk about why and how we can fix it growing up doing things, especially intellectual things probably came really easy to you, which sounds great, except it starts to become a part of our identity.

We start to tell ourselves, "Ah, I am the smart talented kid who can do anything with little to no effort."

We start to label other people harshly as the dumb kids.

And in the moment we can't see what the problem is.

That doesn't surface until later when we encounter challenges that we cannot overcome with raw ability alone.

Instead of starting to try, we give up.

This happened to me in my first year of university.

For the first time ever, school is really challenging and instead of trying to work through it, I gave up.

I hid behind the shield of "I could have done it if I tried," and I refused to put in effort.

I was afraid.

I compensated by picking up a bunch of different hobbies.

But the same problem persisted.

We start a new hobby and when things are new and exciting, it's easy to find motivation to get better at it.

But as soon as things become difficult, we give up.

Meanwhile, the kids that we labeled as stupid or dumb, learned how to work hard, and as every football coach says, "Hard work beats talent."

Being used to having things come easy meant that we never learned how to struggle.

As we get older, we go from being talented kids to loser adults.

But what if talent starts to work hard?

The problem I think is that deep down, we still think that we're gifted, smart, talented kids and we still think that being talented is important.

To fix this, we need to uncouple talent from our identity.

Now, every quality that we identify ourselves with, whether it be pretty or smart or athletic, is relative to other people.

Growing up, we thought we were gifted and good at school because compared to the dumb kids, everything came easy to us.

And so to shed this label, I started looking, really looking, not to people that were behind, but instead ahead of where I was.

Whenever I used to compare myself to other people, it was with envy.

I used to think, "They got lucky."

"I could have done it if I tried," or "They were privileged, there was no way I could compete with that."

But this time, I tried to be really clear and really rational.

No more excuses and no more lies. I told myself, "Compared to these people, you're nothing special."

My self-talk started to change from "You are a smart, talented individual that can do anything with no effort" to "You are a normal person that is stupid sometimes and you need to put an effort to achieve anything."

Surprisingly, it actually started to work.

Losing the label of being talented or gifted, gave me permission to fail and actually allowed me to start working hard.

Somewhere deep down, I still am that annoying gifted kid, but I do feel that I'm growing up just a little and I think that if I can do it, you can too.

Thanks for watching.