Former executive and author reveals trauma of being an 8-year-old prodigy

Yu Dan Shi started high school at eight, university at 14 and was a high-flying boss while still in her teens — until it nearly killed her.

Yu Dan Shi started school early, and it didn’t take long before she started to get noticed.

The youngster was both hardworking and gifted, meaning she “sailed through” most of her subjects and topped her classes in her native China.

In fact, she was considered to be something of a child prodigy, which meant she ended up skipping several grades, starting high school at just eight years of age and graduating university with a computer science degree at 17.

“My family didn’t have a lot of resources and we were quite poor, so my mum wanted my brother and I to really grow up quickly and study as quickly as we could so we could work and be more independent,” she told news.com.au.

“She really drove that desire into us — and once I went to school, my mother, who was a teacher herself, noticed I was quite clever and that there was a lot of information that could be accelerated.”

Ms Shi has no pictures of her childhood, as her family “didn’t really have money to take photos”. Picture: Supplied

Then, when she was in Year 4, Ms Shi’s mother told her to teach herself fifth and sixth grade maths, English and Chinese in a few months, so she could go straight to high school.

“Before that, I was a very happy child, even though I was a bit younger (than her classmates) but I was not very happy in Grade 4,” she said.

She succeeded, and the eight-year-old soon began life as a high-schooler.

“It was very uncommon — I believe at time I was the only child ever to go to high school at such a young age in my hometown, and because it was in China, it was home to two million people,” she said.

“I went to high school as a very confident child, even though I was a lot younger, because I had a love of studying and learning, but then things changed.”

While Ms Shi passed most subjects with flying colours, physics was her weakness — and despite her incredible academic achievements, she began to think of herself as a failure because of that one difficult area.

She worked hard at school all day and spent hours studying at home, but still struggled to pass.

“I felt defeated and dumb — like I was a fraud and that I didn’t deserve to be in high school,” she said.

“I never once thought I had actually achieved a lot or that I was genuinely clever and gifted, because I spent all my time and energy focusing on what I was lacking, not what I was good at.”

Nevertheless, Ms Shi went on to graduate both high school and uni at incredibly young ages, before landing a high-powered corporate job in her teens.

“I was promoted fairly quickly and at 18 or 19 I was already a leader of people much older than me, travelling around China and going to big events — I was a child talking adult language,” she said.

Ms Shi said many people had an unhealthy relationship with stress and success. Picture: Supplied

Ms Shi worked seven days a week, often until midnight — and at 18, was making more money in one month than her father, a university maths professor, made in an entire year.

But the first clue that something wasn’t right came when she woke up one morning at age 20 to find half her hair had turned white from stress overnight.

She decided to move to Australia in pursuit of a more relaxed life, earning a master of business administration and scoring an executive role at a Fortune 100 tech company in Sydney.

She went on to have two daughters — and finally, in her early 30s, the pressure of non-stop work from age eight, coupled with the stresses of raising a young family while working in a “very demanding” job took its toll.

One day, she collapsed in the back of a taxi, and just 36 hours later was being operated on after doctors discovered a life threatening infection in her gall bladder, which she had had for months on end.

She described it as a “wake up call”, and while Ms Shi did not quit her job immediately, she began reducing her workload, working “smarter” instead of harder, volunteering and studying subjects that interested her in her spare time.

Today she has given up her corporate life and is a full time coach and mentor, after earning a masters degree in coaching psychology from the University of Sydney.

The 42-year-old has founded an executive coaching workshop program, Inner Genius, and has also recently published a new book, Come Alive.

It traces her own journey from child prodigy to burnt-out executive, and provides advice on how to make real, sustainable changes to your own life.

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