I’m comfortably above average but comfortably below genius, not entirely sure whether that fits your personal definition of high so it felt worth clarifying.
In school, it meant that learning was something I could do with no actual effort. Without studying and without doing homework aside from what I did at my desk to pass the time before class started, I had as strong a grasp on the subject as the students who did and comfortable grades. Then when I started college, that passivity suddenly didn’t work anymore and I had no idea how to cope with it. I never actually learned how to learn, formally speaking.
Emotionally speaking, that whole thing was awful. It sucked when it was easy because I was so bored, it sucked when it was hard because I was so frustrated. I actually failed out of high school due to low attendance at the very end, then tested into the local college without a diploma because I still knew the material even with the problematic attendance, then got suspended from college due to now-for-the-opposite-reason low attendance and never went back. There was also unrelated shit going on, to be clear, but this that I’m describing was not a small part of my overall psychological state.
As an adult, it doesn’t mean much of anything. While it’s a bit easier for me to learn things than it is for the average person, the ease with which I learn things doesn’t matter anymore because it’s largely happening without other people’s direct involvement or on any kind of schedule. On the occasion there needs to be an actual work training lesson I attend, it’s something that only happens for a day and enduring a single day of tedious education is so very achievable compared to it being my entire life.
The biggest impact these days is that it makes me hate Aaron Sorkin.
There are a bunch of adorable space critters that you’ll think are that when you’re watching the movie, and they certainly were marketed and merchandised like crazy, but they’re actually there due to the unwanted presence of adorable Earth critters during filming. They couldn’t shoot the scenes without including these birds that lived where they were shooting so the solution they came up with was CGI-ing weird faces on them and including some close-ups to make them look deliberate.