You and your parents can stop worrying -- Edison, Darwin and lots more were far from being geniuses in their teens.

History books seldom mention it, but the truth is that many of our greatest figures were practically "beatniks" when they were teenagers. They were given to daydreaming, indecision, hebetude (plain dullness), and they showed no promise of being a doctor, lawyer or teacher.

So, young men and women, if you suffer from the same symptoms, don't despair. The world was built by men and women whose parents worried that they would "never amount to a hill of beans". You don't hear too much about their early failures because parents prefer to cite more inspiring examples.

A MAN THEY DON'T TELL YOU ABOUT

If you take piano lessons and your attitude towards practicing is marked by laziness, your parents might justly complain and flaunt before you the famous picture of little Mozart in his ruffled night-shirt, playing the piano at midnight in the attic. But the point is, your parents would not show you a picture of a certain part who never showed a whit of interest in music during his formative years. In fact he never showed talent in any direction whatever. Finally put to studying law, he barely passed his final exams. It was not until he was 22 that he suddenly became fired with a great passion for music and his name was Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Charles Darwin's early life was a mess. He hated school, and his father once shouted, "You care for nothing but shooting dogs and rat catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family!" He was sent to Glasgow to study medicine, but he couldn't stand the sight of blood. He was sent to divinity school and barely managed to graduate. Whereupon he chucked the whole business and shipped out to the South Seas on the famous exploring ship Beagle. On that voyage, one of history's greatest scientists was born. It was here that he collected the material for the book that would revolutionize biological science -- The Origin of the Species.

EDISON WAS "ADDLED"

DARW IN HATED SCHOOL

In the sciences, there have been hundreds of geniuses who aimed straight at the goal from their earliest years, and hundreds who showed no aptitude at all. So it goes. You have the Wright Brothers, who were brilliant in engineering in their early teens, and you have Thomas Alva Edison, whose teacher tried to get him out of the class because his brain was "addled". You have the Nobel Prize physicist Enrico Fermi, who at 17 had read enough mathematics to qualify for a doctor's degree. And you have the great Albert Schweitzer, who wavered between music and the church until he was 30. Then he started his medical studies.

Politics offers a familiar example of contrast. Herbert Hoover must have learned administration in the cradle. When he was at school he was drafted as football manager, though he didn't know the game, and the glee club manager, though he couldn't sing a note. Whatever he touched went smoothly, glee club or food for a starving Europe.

But one of his successors in the White House had about as checkered a youth as can be imagined. Turned down by West Point because of poor vision, Harry Truman tried a dozen jobs, including in a drugstore, a bank, a bottling works, and a railroad yard. But he got there just the same.

FAULKNER FAILED IN ENGLISH

Great writers are supposed to be born, not made, but here again there are many fascinating exceptions. William Faulkner quit school in the fifth grade and rattled around the country as a house painter and a dishwasher.

Once he tried attending college, but failed in freshman English and quit. He wangled a postmaster's job in a small Mississippi town, and infuriated the populace by getting the mail all mixed up and closing the office whenever he felt like it. Faulkner was 25 before he started the writing career that won him a Nobel Prize.

HOW ABOUT THOSE PRODIGIES

And added to all the aforementioned paradoxes you have a small army of child prodigies who were graduated from college when they were 15, and are now obscure clerks in accounting departments. And you have a small army of men who were too stupid or indolent to get into or finish college and who are today presidents of the firms that hire the prodigies.

So who's to say what about youth? Any young boy or girl who knows what he wants to do in life is probably the better off for it. But no teenager needs despair of the future. He has that one special advantage over the greatest man alive -- time! If you don't think time counts, look at Grandma Moses, she never sold a painting till she was 80.