The Child Prodigy's Guide to Aging Gracefully

  1. Shut the fuck up. Nobody cares.

    Nobody cares how old you were when you started college. Nobody cares what your SAT score was. Nobody wants to know how amusingly young you are. Nobody has the time, the energy, or the inclination to be in awe of you anymore. Sorry.

  2. There are some things that can only be learned through experience.

    More than some, actually, many. Possibly even most. All the theory in the world isn't worth jack shit without a good deal of practice, and practice takes time. And many of the most important things don't even have any theory behind them. So, you may be better at some things than the folks who are twice your age, but I promise you they have you over a barrel in terms of major life skills. Learn from them.

  3. Just because you can think like an adult doesn't mean you can love like one.

    This one is probably the most depressing. Your pool of available romantic partners is going to be almost equally split between mindless fuckups your own age, and well-rounded adults who are your intellectual equal who think you're an immature twit. You may, rarely, find another aging prodigy whose life path and brain power are roughly equal to your own, but the chance that this person won't be a raving psycho is vanishingly small. You can either live a lonely and celibate life, or you can have sex with your friends and develop deep friendships to meet your emotional needs. I recommend the latter, as it will likely keep you sane until you grow up enough to form a really meaningful attachment.

  4. The past is vanishingly unimportant compared to the future.

    Another depressing item, this. What you have done before is important, but only because it indicates what you might be able to do. People don't care what you have done, they care what you will do. For them. It is a frighteningly mean world out there. You will get FAR more respect if you keep your illustrious past under wraps and only bring it up when absolutely necessary (if, for example, your boss asks you if you have experience with a particular OS, and you interned on the dev team in high school, that would be an appropriate time to mention it). Then rumors will spread and everyone will think you're brilliant yet modest.

  5. Dependability is more highly valued than genius.

    If given the choice between a brilliant-but-late solution and a sufficiently good solution which is on time, nearly everyone will choose the latter. This is true many places, but is particularly true in the working world. You can be the smartest person on the team, but if your boss can't count on you to show up and get your work done, you're going to be pretty disposable. Imagine a class where half the grade was attendance -- that's pretty much like real life.