The title of this doctoral dissertation is A Life History of a Gifted Underachiever: Maximum Efficiency with Minimum Effort to the Point of Diminishing Returns. The purpose of this study was to explore a journey from adolescent gifted underachiever to self-actualizing adult. This subjective research is a heuristic life history from a constructivist theoretical perspective including one participant, Frank. Twenty-one total hours of one hour in-depth interviews were conducted where open-ended, emerging questions were asked to complete the life history. A reflexive journal was kept by the researcher after each interview to help create a double description using both an emic and etic perspective for the narrative (Chapter 4) and identify bias. The interviews and journals were coded to find emerging themes and patterns. There were three findings and one subfinding for this research (Chapter 5). (1) The extremes of Frank's primary discourses and the conflicts that existed between them as a result of living an equal amount of time with each parent in a situation of divorce may have both led to underachievement. (2) The combination of living an adult oriented life in early childhood (free of child discourses) and being a gifted individual led to social isolation and difficulty in creating relationships with peers. When long-term peer relationships were broken, underachievement increased. (3) Motivation is a learned behavior. One becomes motivated to fail in the wrong environment, one free of goals. Situations and people can both increase and decrease motivation, in turn increasing and decreasing underachievement. Subfinding---Motivation is only evident to the point of diminishing returns, where repetition is seen in the task and only a small amount of improvement is seen. Working harder is without purpose. Implications of the phenomenon, participant, researcher and research are also mentioned (Chapter 6).
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