Told by family & friends I'm smart starting from age 5

I know this feel.
miniiainal kids were fucked witht hat whole "self esteem" "everyone gets a trophy" shit.
If you actully want to do well in universty you can with effort. Which classes are you having trouble with? You can do this like practice writing 25 minutes a day every day by copying very old books. If you have trouble with math you have to learn how to study for math (bascilly the same way you study for a forgion language)

There's no reason for me to lie to you, but it wouldn't matter even if there were because you're an adult now; you don't have to take what other people tell you at face level and live by their words. You're at the point where you should be filtering and analyzing info and deciding conclusions for yourself. Mind you, I'm not saying to ignore others because you know what's best all the time, because other people will always have valuable things to say to you. Not every other person, of course, but other people in general. Listen and take what's useful.

And you're right. It sucks and it's really hard to reorientate yourself after internalizing things a certain way for nearly two decades and then getting flipped on your head and realizing everything you knew was wrong. The early 20s are a make-or-break time for most people for this very reason. Over the next ten years or so, your brain is going to keep trying to solidify itself, because as you've probably noticed, adults hate being wrong. Our brain is wired in a way that it has a million excuses and sweet little lies every time we're faced with the possibility of being wrong, and it's SO EASY to just obey your nature. But don't, because baseline humans are shitty, uncivilized monkeys. The world sucks enough already, so we don't need more monkeys. Focus on changing what you can change and accepting what you can't.

And yeah, I know it isn't new advice. A lot of good advice is easily dismissed as cliche because we've all heard it a thousand times, but it's often only stuck around as long as it has because there's some validity to it. Jow Forums isn't the place for lengthy lectures on life and frankly, a lot of it will be wasted until you have relevant experience anyway, so I won't into detail, but I do want to say that you should be open-minded when it comes to "old" or cliche advice. Might be useful, might just be good experience thinking critically. Both are good.

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OP, I had a similar upbringing and I can somewhat relate to how you feel.

Growing up in a rural community, people have VERY low standards for what they consider "smart".

I would have everyone tell me how smart I was just because I was passing piss easy public school assignments and bringing home good report cards. Family would brag about this, and their friends and coworkers would say how successful I will be and what I should do career wise etc etc. I had developed an ego at an early age because of this, and felt like I was a genius. I convinced myself that I didn't need to study for tests or put in any effort to actually learn new things. I knew everything and all the other kids were fucking idiots. well this was true to extent. kids were really dumb in my county/state. We ranked the LOWEST in terms of test scores nationwide.
I was consistently a straight A student up until the 3rd Grade, where I actually flunked and had to repeat and got held back.

Instead of blaming myself, I blamed my teacher. I felt like she had a grudge against me, and hated me so she flunked me on purpose. That had to have been it. There's no way a genius like me could have failed any other way, right!

But in reality, it was my fault. And that same ego would follow me to my early teens until I finally snapped out of it and realized I wasnt as smart as everyone said I was.

The truth was, I was surrounded by fucking morons, and underachievers so doing just the bare minimum academically made me shine combined with ass kissers bolstering my ego and giving me false confidence.

Now im a college droput and all around brainlet who works a shit minimum wage job I hate and probably won't do anything of merit in his life.

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Like OP, I don't think you're a brainlet.
You both just got kind of fucked over by people kissing your ass, and not giving you a sense of accountability.

You can achieve academic success, but you'll have to work for it unlike people that have actual high IQ's.

Same story for me as this and op, everyone told me im smart but I didn't feel like it, i didn't believe them. I still had trouble with math and still do, made it to precalculus and repeated it after i failed a summer accelerator course. Never passed it, went to college took the same precal, dropped the class. We may be good at some classes purely from intuition, english class especially. I now try hard as fuck to understand programming and cant get an entry level job anywhere. Am a wagie for the meanwhile

>wow user you plugged in that computer on your own? you must be a genius!

>my son's a computer genius! you could get a job for that!

OP I don't know what to call that either but that is almost EXACTLY me. Only difference is I'm 22 now.

I get your OP

I lived in an area of town where everyone was a 1st/2nd/3rd gen immigrant

I was a 3rd gen and that was really rare, so naturally, I was the "smartest" at school but that was because everyone else was so fucking dense in comparison

I never learned to study or ask for help because I was just top of the class by default

>you can achieve academic success, but you'll have to work for it unlike people that have actual high IQ's
wtf is this shit... your idea of a """smart""" person is someone not putting any effort into anything? Intelligence is not knowledge. All of you in this thread seem like clowns that don't realize studying for more than 5 minutes doesn't mean you're dumb. There isn't a single person - genius or otherwise - who has ever been good at math without studying endlessly. The actually dumb people can't do it no matter how much they work, that's the difference.

>actually smart kid
>get picked on all the time
>ego not boosted
>still smart
>make six figures
>hope everyone fucks off and kills themselves in 30 years like Al Gore said

and here he sits atop his thrown of shit. Please stop posting. It's dangerous to show how pointless it is to try to make it. Here you still are.

Fuck off, retard. You could never comprehend how my browsing experience is far superior to yours, but here's a slice.

/>[^\n]+\n\n/
/^[>\d\n]*([^\n]{1,100}\n\n)+[^\n]{1,100}$/

Similar-ish case here. Always had an high IQ, got tested for 129-132 at a psy, never studied in school, always understood everything naturally. Now the problems started towards the end, i got lazy as shit. Still passed my finals though, but not much more than passing. Then i just did nothing, started getting into financial markets, did a pre-med semester but quit, building myself up a goldfarm but quit, git shit jobs but quit, etc. Always pretty much stopped when i had to start putting effort into things. 21 now and currently i'm a neet searching for a job to gather up some money for building my life up and then study, by now though lacking the support of my family that always praised me as a kid. It's bad parenting, fucks you up.