The weirdest thing was that "conscientious kids" had better outcomes than "cheerful kids". I would have thought the conscientious kids would be more likely to burn out. But I guess it depends on how they coded kids as conscientious vs cheerful.
I haven't yet read any of the links (except for skimming the thread starter) but, while this is interesting, I don't personally find it weird at all. A conscientious kid is learning to work hard, whereas one who is cheerful but not conscientious may be learning that life is always going to be easy and pleasant. Going out on a limb (and it really is a shaky one...), I might suggest that conscientiousness might be correlated with having a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset, and then (further out on the shaky branch) I would expect the former to be more conducive to long-term good outcomes.
Come to think of it, it must be known how conscientiousness as a character trait measured in children who are not necessarily gifted correlates with long-term outcomes. It's not known by me and I don't have time to look it up right now, though!
