Potential

In Grade 3, I made the mistake of doing well on a school-sponsored IQ test, a rather stupid mistake considering how smart the test said I was, because from then on every one of my teachers would look more closely at the work I produced and invariably inform my parents that their son wasn’t “living up to his potential,” and of course I was just dumb enough to believe them, up until high school and all the way through university, to the point where I wonder now if I haven’t spent the last forty years trying to prove them right.