The hungry genius who thought that the sea isn’t real

The hungry genius who thought that the sea isn’t real

John was a guest on TV Prva’s Život priča, and on the show he talked about his unusual talent and hard life throughout which this talent has been providing him with great support. He doesn’t remember his father, and he lives with his mother in a very difficult financial situation.

“I started to speak at a later age – I was almost three – and I learned to count first. This talent wasn’t really obvious in the lower grades, and in the third grade, it already started to show a bit through adding larger numbers with five or four digits. I thought that everyone can do that, even today I don’t think that I’m so special, every one of the seven billion of us has a unique talent,” says Jovan Stević.

Instead of the Economy High School, where he is a student now, he wanted to go to military school – partly so that his mother wouldn’t have to worry about money, food, or clothing.

“I wanted to have security in life, I didn’t want my mother to have to think about those things all the time. I wanted her to have fewer things to worry about. It didn’t really work out. Before our life wasn’t really a straight line; at times we were hungry, other times we were full... We were around 70 percent hungry, and 30 percent full. When you’re hungry, your body can’t function at its 100 percent. That’s why I liked playing games, finding shortcuts for formulas, preparing for competitions,” says Jovan.

They lived from alimony to alimony, often on bread and pate, which he is sick of eating. He says that thinking about math helped him to forget about the hunger, and now – when the situation is indeed somewhat better – the boy who has no trouble taking the root of 616,225 (785) without pen and paper still keeps running numbers in his head.

This also helped him to overcome problems with his peers. In elementary school, where in one grade he didn’t have a single book, he didn’t go on two field trips because his classmates didn’t want him to. Because of his unusual opinions, he believed that the sea isn’t a real thing until he was 15.

“We had problems with hygiene, we didn’t even have water for years where we lived, we used to take drinking water from a well, we couldn’t wash our clothes, I didn’t even have personal hygiene products. I did have some flaws of my own, which also contributed to the rejection, but the main reason was that of the physical nature. So out of 25 kids, 18-19 of them decided that I shouldn’t go,” says Jovan.

When asked if the children bullied him, he says “just a bit.” On the show, Jovan also said that he didn’t think about the distant future and that the recipe for happiness can not be either a minus nor a plus – there should be enough of everything.