Gifted, Grinding, and Missing the Moment

Grind culture doesn’t just live in tech startups or TikTok hustle videos—it’s alive and well in the halls of our specialized schools, magnet programs, and gifted education at large. It’s the quiet expectation that success demands constant motion. That sleep is negotiable. That free time is indulgent. That if you're not maximizing every minute, you're falling behind.

If you work with gifted students—or you are one—you’ve probably felt it. And if we’re not careful, that mindset doesn’t just push students to work harder. It pushes them to the edge. Now, to be clear, most students in these environments aren’t explicitly told to behave this way. No one says, “Hey, go ahead and burn yourself out.” But the culture speaks louder than any one person. And that culture has a message: the busier you are, the more valuable you are.

I want to break this down into three ideas: how this culture warps a student’s sense of self-worth; how it robs them of the present moment; and what it means to truly experience school rather than just survive it.

Let’s start with that first idea—how grind culture warps self-worth. I’ve seen so many gifted students who’ve come up through their school systems with a string of A’s, glowing praise, and the identity of being the “smart one.” They’re used to being at the top. They thrive on it. But then they get into a more challenging environment—maybe a residential STEM school or an advanced gifted program—and they make their first B. For some, it’s fine. For others, it feels like a collapse. Like the floor drops out.

Because if your entire self-concept is built on never making a mistake, never stumbling, never being anything less than perfect—then the first B feels like failure. Not academic failure, but personal failure.

And that’s the danger. That’s the distortion. In grind culture, your worth becomes tied to how much you achieve, how much you produce, and how well you perform. Not who you are, or how you think, or what you care about.

Even students who aren’t struggling academically are still caught in it. They’ll stretch a 30-minute assignment into two hours just so they can stay busy. They’ll take six classes instead of five, not because they need to, but because someone else is doing it. And they feel like they have to keep up.

And when they’re not working, they feel guilty. As if rest is a sign of weakness. As if joy, or boredom, or just being still for a moment, is indulgent.

Which brings us to the second idea: grind culture makes it nearly impossible to live in the present. One of the most revealing things I’ve sometimes heard from students is how they think of high school as already being in the past. Like, they’re living their lives based on what’s coming next. College. Scholarships. Prestige. The future.

Every assignment, every decision, every extracurricular activity is filtered through that lens. How will this look on my application? Will this help me stand out?

And that hyper-focus on the future means they’re rarely connected to the now. They don’t see their high school experience as something to savor, or to enjoy, or to be curious about. They see it as a transaction. A toll you pay to get where you want to go.

But if you spend every moment of your youth preparing for the next stage, you’ll never feel like you’ve arrived. There will always be another benchmark, another prize, another bar to clear. And one day you’ll look back and realize you missed the very thing you were trying to build.

And it’s not just the students—educators, we can get caught up in this, too. We see these gifted kids and we push them. We want them to be successful. But sometimes we forget that they’re still teenagers. They still need sleep. They need friends. They need to eat. They need to be bored sometimes. They need space to discover who they are when no one is watching.

And that brings us to the third idea: when school becomes a grind, it stops being an experience. We like to say things like “this school will change your life” or “you’ll remember these years forever.” But how can that be true if students are too tired, too anxious, or too overwhelmed to remember anything but the pressure?

When everything becomes about output, the input suffers. Relationships fade. Passions narrow. Curiosity dims. And even the joy of learning—that spark that probably brought these students here in the first place—can flicker out.

That’s why I’ve become more convinced than ever that we need to think less about rigor and more about vigor. Less about grind and more about growth. Less about getting through and more about what you get out of it.

There’s a reason some of the most balanced, joyful, wise students I’ve met are the ones who’ve had a little more time to figure it out—maybe they came in as sophomores and had three years to grow, instead of just two. Maybe they had a hard year and came back stronger. Maybe they dropped a class to focus on their health and learned more in that space than they would have in another lecture. The point is: they learned to live the experience, not just push through it.

So yes, the grind is real. But it doesn’t have to be inevitable. It doesn’t have to be the price you pay for excellence. What if the real mark of success isn’t how much you suffered to get there, but how fully you were able to show up in your own life along the way?

If you’re a student, especially one in a high-achieving environment, you’ve probably already figured out how to push yourself. You’ve learned how to hit deadlines, juggle responsibilities, and carry the weight of high expectations. But learning how to pause, how to rest, how to say no, how to reclaim your time — that’s just as much a part of becoming who you are. 

It’s not weakness. It’s wisdom.

And if you’re an educator, I know the tension you feel. We want to prepare students for the real world, for competitive colleges, for whatever comes next. But we also have a responsibility to protect their capacity to wonder, to connect, to enjoy the now. Otherwise, we’re not cultivating learners — we’re manufacturing exhaustion.

There’s no one solution, no policy or schedule tweak that magically fixes all this. But we can start by shifting the question from “How can students do more?” to “What do they need to be whole?” And we can keep naming the things we see, even if they’re uncomfortable. Especially when they’re uncomfortable.

Because in the end, school should be more than a stepping stone. It should be part of a life worth living — not something to just survive and move on from. And for gifted students, especially, we owe them more than just opportunity. We owe them space. We owe them breath. We owe them the chance to be present, not just prepared.

That’s how transformation happens — not in the grind, but in the moments they actually get to live.