Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

When I was an undergraduate at university, one of my dear friends and someone who was very

bright ended up being Vella Victoria at my university.

She too was a psychology major and during one of our summer holidays

she spent an internship in inner city Chicago working with kids that were on the street and had very difficult lives.

When I saw her that fall, she shared a very interesting story with me.

She said during the summer she was working with a boy who was about 15 years old and he was incredibly bright. One day he asked her if he could borrow one of the books she was reading.

It was a very advanced book by Alfred Ather, one of his original writings, a psychologist

who is well known for specific aspects of psychology theory. He only borrowed it for one night and when he came back the next day he told her he read the entire book.

She was rather surprised but after talking with him she clearly could see that he understood and had read the entire book.

But his response to her was also very surprising.

He said, so what?

What difference does it make? So my friend who was Vala Victorian at our university

met a young man who was an inner city boy living on the streets

who was clearly in her mind brighter than she was and yet so much of his life was being wasted or she felt he had so much potential which just wasn't ever going to be actualized unless his life situation

clearly and drastically changed.

So next I want to share one of my belief systems, one of my theories about human behavior that I believe affects all of us, and I call it the Bell Curve.

You probably have heard of it. It's just a statistical curve that describes human behavior.

Let me use an example to explain what I mean by the bell curve. Think about height.

If we randomly picked a thousand people, some of the people would be

exceptionally short, but only a few of them. Some of the people would be exceptionally tall,

again, but only a few of them.

...