What I Like Is Not Always What Matters.
I have struggled with priorities all my life —
and the people I love paid the price too.

I have struggled with priorities my whole life. Not because I could not work hard — I built companies, and I could teach myself almost anything I set my mind to. But when many things sat in front of me, I could never tell which one truly mattered most. I would quietly pick the one I liked the most. And for years, I did not even know I was doing it.

And here is the hardest truth: the people I love paid the price for it too.

I Chased What I Loved, Not What Mattered

This is the quiet trap. A gifted mind is pulled hardest towards whatever it finds most interesting — not towards whatever is most important. The two are not the same thing. But to a gifted person, they feel exactly the same.

So you pour your hours into the problem that excites you, while the thing that truly needed doing sits and waits. You are not being lazy. You are not being careless. Your mind simply runs after what lights it up, and quietly walks past what does not — even when the dull, ordinary task was the one that mattered most.

It Was Never About Ability

Let me give you a real example from my own life. When I was running Su-Kam, my true priority should have been to personally watch over the finances. I did not. It did not interest me the way the products and the building did, so my mind simply walked past it — for years. Then, when things went badly out of hand, I finally turned my full attention to it, dug in, and set it right.

And that is the proof of everything I am saying. The ability was always there. The moment finance became the thing I focused on, I handled it. The problem was never that I could not do it. The problem was that I did not make it a priority until a crisis forced me to.

The same thing happens at home. I catch myself doing things that are not important, spending my time and energy where I should not, while the things that truly matter quietly wait. Not because I cannot see them — but because my mind keeps reaching for what it prefers, instead of what it should.

When Everything Feels Important

Part of the problem is that gifted people are good at — and curious about — so many things. Experts call it multipotentiality: too many interests, too many open doors, and a deep difficulty in closing any of them.

When every option feels exciting and every task feels important, something strange happens — you freeze. You cannot choose, because choosing one feels like losing all the others. There is a line that captures it perfectly: when everything is important, nothing is.

A Mind That Runs Ahead of Itself

There is a real reason behind this, not just willpower. In a gifted brain, the thinking races far ahead — but the quieter skills, like planning and deciding what comes first, often lag behind. Specialists call this asynchronous development: a powerful mind that can still feel stuck on something as simple as "what should I do first?"

So you can be brilliant and still feel scattered. You can solve the hardest problem in the room and still not know which of your ten ideas to begin with tomorrow morning.

The People Around You Suffer the Most

This is the part I have lived, and the part that hurts the most to write. When you cannot set priorities, you are not the only one who suffers. The people closest to you do too — your wife, your children, your brothers and sisters, your parents. They wait on decisions that never come. They watch you pour yourself into one thing while something they truly needed quietly slips away. They end up carrying the weight of the choices you could not make.

I have seen this in my own home. My family has felt it. That is not an easy thing to admit. But it is true — and pretending otherwise helps no one.

Why Parents and Teachers Matter So Much

Here is the question I keep returning to: how does a gifted child ever learn this? Because left on their own, they will always follow their own choices. They pick whatever they like the most — and they genuinely cannot see whether it is important or not. That blindness does not quietly fix itself with age. I am living proof of that.

And this is the hard part: this can really only be learned in childhood. Once you are an adult, it is extremely difficult to change the way you think and behave — the patterns are set so deep that you spend years just trying to soften them. I know, because I am still trying, at 63.

That is exactly why parents and teachers matter so much. A gifted child needs to be gently taught — again and again — the difference between "what I want to do" and "what needs to be done first." Not by force, because force only makes a gifted child push back harder. But by helping them see it, name it, and practise it while they are still young and their habits are still forming. If no one teaches them early, they spend their whole lives learning it the hardest possible way, as I did.

What Helps

None of this means a gifted person should crush their curiosity. The curiosity is the gift. The goal is only to add the one skill the gift did not arrive with.

Teach the difference. Help the child name what they like and what is important — and gently point out when the two are not the same.

Choose a few things that truly matter. You cannot do everything. Pick the small handful that matter most, and let the rest wait.

Get the ideas out of your head. Write them down, draw them, record them. A mind holding fifty things at once cannot rank them. On paper, you finally can.

Do the important thing first, the liked thing after. Make it a simple daily habit, not a battle.

Protect rest. A tired, overloaded mind cannot set priorities at all.

I am still learning these, even now. Every small step has made my life — and the lives of the people around me — a little lighter.

This has been one of the hardest battles of my life, and one of the quietest. I am building GiftedKids.in so that gifted children can learn to set their priorities early — while it is still possible — and so the people who love them never have to carry the cost of a lesson no one taught.

— Kunwer Sachdev, Founder, GiftedKids.in | June 2026