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Nice to hear from you again, amateur!

Apologies in advance--I'm probably going to miss some of your questions in my response. If so, and if they are critical ones, please point them out to me.

What I hear from your post is a few big questions: does giftedness decline with age/has your personal giftedness declined with age? Is it too late to "fulfill your potential"? What should you do with your life now?

Obviously, no one here is going to be able to comprehensively answer these questions, especially the last one, but let me give the first two a try. But forewarning--the answer is going to be yes, no, and it depends!

1. Does giftedness decline with age?

Keeping in mind that these are group data, the data on measures of cognition pretty consistently have found that certain measures of cognition do decline after childhood, others increase, and still others fluctuate or remain relatively stable. Some of the cognitive skills that decline on objective measures include working memory and fluid reasoning, which both reach their peaks on objective measures (e.g., the WAIS and Standford-Binet cognitive measures) around age 23 or so. From there, they decline slowly until about age 30, slightly less slowly until age 40ish, go through a steeper decline shortly after that, and then settle into a slow decline into old age, with dropoffs from there on out associated mainly with specific disease processes. Research has also identified aspects of intelligence that continue to develop with age, mainly in the category of what is called crystallized intelligence, and what Sternberg identifies as wisdom, both of which describe types of cognition that utilize accumulated knowledge and experience, integration of those accumulations, and the ability to recognize and act on large-scale patterns that unfold over lengthier time periods and more diverse contexts. This type of cognition generally increases over the lifespan, with the steepness of incline flattening mainly secondary to other types of cognitive decline late in life.

The net result of curves for these two large classes of intelligence (fluid, generally declining throughout adulthood, and crystallized, generally increasing throughout adulthood), is that the most productive years of life intellectually are the middle years (not a revolutionary finding!), when both types of cognition are relatively strong.

I will also add that executive functions, which I think we have previously discussed, typically grow throughout the developmental period, reaching a stable plateau around the late 20s, or more like 30ish for learners with neuroatypicalities that affect frontal lobe development (such as ADHD). As a side note, one of the benefits of later frontal lobe maturation appears to be better retention of creative-divergent thinking skills into adulthood, which may explain the overrepresentation of neuroatypicalities among creatives, entrepreneurs and game-changers in various fields. Post-30s improvements in EF performance are likely more due to increasing crystallized intelligence (acquired compensatory skills).

2. Is it too late?

First, what are incredible things? I read an article recently (linked elsewhere in this forum) lambasting gifted education as a waste of time in part because "only" 12% of GT students had achieved what the author described as eminence (terminal degrees, patents, tenure, startups, etc.). I had two immediate thoughts: 12% is a whole lot better odds than the general population, so quoting this statistic as a measure of the failure of GT programming is hardly a convincing argument! But more importantly, why did she presuppose that there was no eminence in becoming an unknown but effective partner, parent, caregiver or friend? If we each think back to a key and transformational figure in our lives, on whom we reflect with gratitude, how often is that person conventionally "eminent"? Aren't most of the critical people in each of our lives relative unknowns to the rest of the world, but extraordinary to us?

A little personal anecdote: elsewhere I have shared that I too was a serial degree-collector into my young adulthood, as a result of which I finally found myself enrolled in an educational institution among my age-peers for the first time on my third round through graduate school--in the field in which I have ultimately remained professionally. Does this mean that I had wasted the previous years of education? After all, one might say that the years gained through radical acceleration were offset by meandering through a number of different fields for an equivalent number of years. I did not start developing expertise in my current field until I was comparable in age to persons (college-educated, granted, so not exactly normatively average) most would consider to be lower in cognition. I did not even begin foundational studies in my field until then (having previously had exactly one intro-level survey course). And now? I certainly won’t claim to be famous, but most people who know my work describe it in very positive terms. More importantly, I do something I love doing, which has meaning to me, and which I can see benefiting others. I have satisfying relationships of mutual respect and affection, professionally and personally. Have I achieved anything that would make the 24-hour news cycle? Nope. But I’m pretty sure that the people who benefit directly from my work experience it as more impactful than anything on the world stage.

Your journey will, naturally, be different. I give you this little snippet from my life simply to illustrate that there are many paths, schedules and approaches by which a multipotential individual such as yourself may grow, develop, and find a place in life rich in value, purpose and relationship. The narrative thrust on us by many elements of our society suggests that there are only a few entry points to “success”--but this is a narrow, rigid and limited view of both success and entry points--and clearly contradicted by the many persons, both well-known and little-known, who have started new and creative chapters at different stages of life. (google famous (musical instrumentalist of your choice) who started later in life) (consider any career military serviceperson who starts over with an entirely new career after 20 years in the military, or stay-at-home parent who starts a new vocation after the children are grown)

All the best.