
Obsession - SecretofMana
http://pastebin.com/3RSUzfDk
======
habosa
If the OP wrote the pastebin content and is reading this, don't be so hard on
yourself. The self-awareness on display here alone is a sign of high ability,
and it's something many people lack. I go to a top-10 school and it's clear to
me that intelligence ≠ grades in a lot of cases.

Also, you can't be "a fool" for believing in yourself. Confidence, false or
earned, is incredibly useful in motivating yourself to push limits and achieve
great things. I have found that as long as I tell myself my goals are
achievable and do my work in that mindset, I can do many things I thought were
out of my reach. It sounds like "The Secret"-esque bullshit, but it can help.

There is no reason to push yourself to the point of "breaking as you describe.
When you get there, take a step back and think about why you're at school and
why you're chasing x or y career goal. The point of work is to purchase
leisure, but if you're letting work consume everything then you'll have a hard
time being happy. I think many people forget that work is, in many cases, a
means to an end. Slow down until you're at a point where you can enjoy your
time, and don't worry about the pace of everyone around you. Again this might
sound like cliché nonsense but I take a lot of comfort in thinking about the
big picture when pressure builds.

If you weren't looking for advice, forget everything I said. Also I
congratulate you for "letting it all out", it's not easy to compose one's
thoughts into such a rational assessment of a bad situation.

~~~
kubrickslair
I too went to a top 5 school and took some of the hardest classes in a school
which is famous for its hard classes. And yes, it becomes pretty obvious
quickly that grades are not a reflection of intelligence. And when the
threshold intelligence is high in the sample size, say at a good school,
grades and intelligence may be very weakly correlated, if at all.

Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But
I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world. My
cofounder is borderline ADHD and there are things he can accomplish that I
just cannot.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours.
> But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world_.

As a person who recently discovered that he doesn't have this ability and
can't focus for more than 10 minutes unless it's a hobby project or one is in
a really good mood, I can tell you that this ability _does_ count a lot.

~~~
philsnow
Happily, you can train the ability to hold your attention on whatever you
desire, just like you might train your biceps to be stronger.

If you're interested, look into "mindfulness meditation". If you're
immediately repelled (as I was) by the idea, know that there are several
serious engineers who now swear by this technique. There is a guy at Google
who teaches mindfulness meditation in a series of classes to other Googlers,
and he can't keep up with demand. Look at siyli.org for some introductory
videos (especially the ones showing a physiological effects of having done N
hours of meditation).

~~~
TeMPOraL
Thanks for your advice and reassuring references. I actually stumbled upon
mindfulness meditation several times on HN, and after first being repelled, I
ended up up reading "Mindfulness In Plain English" recently, and now I'm about
to start practicing it.

Basically, I got fed up with this state and decided to solve it once and for
all. I've managed to make some progress on it and I feel better/more
productive at work now, so I have high hopes it'll get even better.
Mindfulness is what I'm trying now, and the next book to read is "Feeling
Good" (similarly, heavily recommended on HN), a basic Cognitive-Behavioral
Therapy book.

------
orangethirty
One thing I've learned to love is being average. I'm not some rockstar ninja
coder. Nor do I want to be. Average is fine. Do you know what average people
accomplish? A lot! Average people build cars, houses, farm food, they even
manage to program these magical things called computers. Not everybody is a
genius, or even bright. Nor everybody needs to be one. You can do amazing
things without having been an straight A student. How do I know? I graduated
with a GPA of 2.16. Yep. 2.16. Guess what? I am a programmer who enjoys his
work, make a very, very good living, and have managed to build a coupe of
profitable businesses. All while being an average guy.

I used to think that being smart was the thing to be. Not anymore. What you
need to be is resilient. While a smart person pauses to analyze, I keep trying
and trying until I get it. No pause needed.

Go on. Live your life. Love the gifts you have and put them to good use. Don't
measure yourself by how you compare to others. But how you compare to your own
past. Keep moving. Be resilient.

------
simonsarris
I have some similar issues, though I still breezed through college
(prestigious school in 3.5 years, deans list, didn't "study"). I probably
related that story here (and definitely did on reddit in one of those kids-
called-gifted-where-are-you-now thread), so I'll spare us that story again.

But where this _really_ hit me was just two years after college, trying to
write a large technical book (on HTML). I'm _just now_ completing the task
after 9 long months.

It seemed like my mind broke, not because it was hard, but because of some
other invisible wall. I still don't have the words for it. Writing about other
things and reading other writing seemed to be the only thing that helped. It
was easy to write about the topics of my expertise, but so much of the book
was material that I had only heard of, and had to immerse myself in completely
before I could even begin the task of writing. The project was therefore a set
of many tasks within tasks.

OP writes:

> Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break
> the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small
> problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that
> they are ready.

There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic
ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame). The snippet that runs through my mind
constantly:

    
    
        We have not wings, we cannot soar;
        But we have feet to scale and climb
        By slow degrees, by more and more,
        The cloudy summits of our time.
        
        The mighty pyramids of stone
        That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
        When nearer seen, and better known,
        Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
        
        The distant mountains, that uprear
        Their solid bastions to the skies,
        Are crossed by pathways, that appear
        As we to higher levels rise.
        
        The heights by great men reached and kept
        Were not attained by sudden flight,
        But they, while their companions slept,
        Were toiling upward in the night.
    

Some days its hard to open a text editor. I don't know why. But sometimes
looking down at the stepping stones is more useful for moving forward than
looking up at your goals or (sometimes worse) everyone else. I think of poetry
and start the program.

[1] <http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_St._Augustine>

~~~
jinfiesto
There's a similar passage from Pope's "An Essay on Criticism that I'm
particularly fond of and I think illustrates the kind of hubris the OP was
suffering from:

    
    
      A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;
      Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:
      There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,
      And drinking largely sobers us again.
    
      Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,
      In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,
      While from the bounded Level of our Mind,
      Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,
    
      But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize
      New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!
      So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,
      Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;
    
      Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,
      And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:
      But those attain'd, we tremble to survey
      The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,
    
      Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,
      Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
    

Also, _"Before the gates of excellence, the high gods have placed sweat"
-Hesiod_

I've had similar issues as the OP, though at university I accepted lower marks
than I could have gotten because I simply didn't want to go to class. I could
learn the material on my own and use the time-savings to learn other things I
was interested in. I almost always made top marks on exams, so it wasn't an
issue (unless attendance was mandatory...)

I met a few people that had screwed off in High School, but for some reason
had decided to take College extraordinarily seriously. I realized that for
other people, material that would take me an hour or two to learn would take a
solid 8 locked in the library.

As it turns out, after talking to some of these people, the problem wasn't
that they weren't smart. It's that they didn't know how to learn, or had some
misconceptions about what learning entailed. I've watched people slog through
upper-level math classes by trying to _memorize_ the relevant material, when
they could have _understood_ it in half the time, if they'd approached the
material with the right mindset.

For a while, I was the OP. At least until I realized that if your goal is to
beat your peers, or measure up to some arbitrary external standard, you
probably won't. Even if you succeed, you'll make yourself miserable trying. On
the other hand, if your goal is to learn, you'll do it. You might even stand a
chance of beating out your peers. Unfortunately, something a lot of people
don't understand about learning is that after a certain amount of effort, it
just takes the amount of time it's gonna take. You can't really sit down and
say "I'm going to learn x in y hours" and not be disappointed much of the
time. Sadly, the education system all the way through College makes it seem
like this is so.

~~~
chipsy
It totally is about the mindset. And it's a combination of being properly
motivated(intrinsic interest), and also seeing different ways in which to
navigate the subject, and also knowing which ones are suited to your abilities
at that moment.

With all of those traits, it's easy. If you miss one, you might be able to
slog through. And if you miss two, it will be extremely difficult.

And our educational systems really don't encourage anything but memorization,
despite ample PR otherwise, so there's a selection bias by the time you hit
college level courses.

------
neilk
> I spend the day bedridden and panic-stricken by my own insecurities.

To the author of the piece: you are depressed. You are shutting down all
reasons to like yourself or even to have fun. I strongly advise counseling,
_immediately_. Even though you're in the middle of exams, this is very
important. Your school will have free or inexpensive resources available.

I know you wrote your piece as a cautionary tale, but there's a subtext of
giving up on yourself, and it seems that acknowledging and showing
imperfection is very difficult for you - or very difficult for your family.
(Let me guess, Asian parents?)

There is a way out. However, the way out does not involve barricading yourself
in your room or deciding that you are inherently broken.

The thing that successful people have in common is not being superhuman, it's
that they seek out -- and get -- help from other people _all the time_.

~~~
CatMtKing
I agree. Get help! It's not something to be ashamed of. Failure isn't
something to be ashamed of. College isn't a race; maybe consider taking a year
off and doing some exploring. Here's a quick Google for advice for taking a
year off from college: [http://ask.metafilter.com/25004/Taking-a-year-off-
from-colle...](http://ask.metafilter.com/25004/Taking-a-year-off-from-college)

Otherwise, I can recommend to you a book that opened my eyes to the process of
learning. The Art of Learning -- Josh Waitzkin.

------
SurfScore
A lot of people don't mention this, but being smart (and more importantly
_knowing_ that you're smart) at an early age can have a HUGE negative effect
on your development.

This obviously doesn't happen always, but when you're a kid that knows you
have some superior intellect, you make immature kid-like decisions because of
it. You fall in love with your own head. You believe that you just "get it."
You ignore opportunities to develop skills because you have this irrational
(and often misplaced) confidence in you abilities.

This sounds like exactly what happened to the OP. They never truly developed
ther ability to focus because they could always skate by. Then when they
finally couldn't skate by anymore, _BAM_ , they realize "oh shit, I'm nowhere
near as good at this as I thought I was."

The good news is that once you have the awareness you can fix it, which is
what it sounds like the OP started to do. Just don't focus so much on grades
:)

~~~
3minus1
I read an article a while back that how you praise your children makes a huge
difference. Basically instead of telling them "you're so smart" it's much
better to say "wow you tried really hard and it payed off."

------
SecretofMana
Hey everyone, OP here.

I'm sincerely very grateful for all the advice. I wrote this out of
frustration less so with my grades, despite the tone of the piece, and more so
with the way I had been treating my friends as of late, in particular my
girlfriend, because of my grades versus theirs. I have been a jerk to the ones
that I love without reason, and that irritates me. I will definitely keep in
mind what's been said here, though.

For what it is worth, I also do not believe that I suffer from depression.
Although I am harsh on myself, and always have been harsh on myself, I have
always managed to work through and overcome my fears, usually by venting like
this, although until now I did it privately.

I also don't think that I have ADD, since there are stretches of time where I
can focus intensely, such as at hackathons or when I'm more relaxed over
school.

Returning to my computer after posting this was really a shock, I didn't
expect this much of a response to what I had initially perceived as an
immature outburst. Thank you all so much.

~~~
yojo
Your experience resonated with my first year of college (~12 years ago). I
came from a relatively small pond, and found myself similarly outclassed when
I got to college.

What I read in your story is that you are attributing the success of others
and your failure to intrinsic qualities in them and yourself. This is a bad
mindset; from this point of view at best your successes are realizations of a
predetermined destiny, and at worst every failure is a personal reflection on
you. In this worldview, it is emotionally safer to not try at all, and to pin
your failures on a lack of interest or lack of effort. In the long run this is
an incredibly destructive way to think, as you never accumulate the experience
necessary to ultimately succeed.

You wrote:

"The students who obtain top grades in classes have an ability to focus like
no other... It was an insult for me to think that I was ever anything like
them"

It is possible that some rare people possess this ability from birth. Most of
us have had to learn it. There is a way to gain this skill, and that way is by
trying, failing, then trying again.

By your own account, you have not been trying until very recently. You should
not expect to succeed on your first attempt or perform at the level of
individuals that have been working at it for years. The good news is that your
failure is not a reflection of anything intrinsic to your being, it is a
reflection on the way people learn good study skills and work habits.

It sounds like you are arriving at this conclusion on your own, and I strongly
encourage you to adopt a learning mindset where intelligence and achievement
are things gained through practice and gradual improvement rather than
characteristics engrained from birth.

There are good studies on the value of this mindset from the field of
developmental psychology. A quick scan of the literature turns up a few. I
didn't look very hard here, but you may find them worth a quick scan and a
starting point for further investigation:

[http://academic.reed.edu/motivation/docs/DangerousMindsetsPu...](http://academic.reed.edu/motivation/docs/DangerousMindsetsPublished.pdf)
<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17328703>
[http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23087453?uid=3739560&#...</a><p>Some of
those are not available in their entirety on the public internet, though it
sounds like you're at university and may have access to them through the
campus network.<p>My closing advice is to stay focused on incremental
achievement and do your best to learn from your failures. You are starting at
a disadvantage, but you can close the gap with time and effort.

------
baby
> I should have put the effort in first and should have only allowed myself to
> gain confidence through the results that followed.

This is a very powerful ending. I've struggled a lot to change parts of me in
the past, but this is my big fight. I, like everyone else, care too much about
other's opinion. I base almost my whole confidence on other's people opinion.
Others rise me up or take me down. And I've tried to change that to something
else. I've tried the "I don't give a fuck", I've tried to be mean... But I
think trying to get confident through work is the best way.

------
SoftwareMaven
There is so very correlation between grades and creativity[1], which I
consider to be far more important than raw intelligence (as measured by an IQ
test).

The problem with the OP is not that he got so worried about grades, it's that
he/she let is obsession with grades impact his relationships with others. He
saw them as a zero-sum game, and that's not the way life is (generally)
played. Even within university, where grades may be distributed in a zero-sum
fashion, the entire experience is most assuredly _not_ zero-sum.

More importantly than all of that, though, is the OP gained a large level of
self-awareness. That self-awareness (as long as he doesn't let him completely
cripple his confidence) will be far more valuable than full marks here and
there.

1\. [http://www.jofamericanscience.org/journals/am-
sci/0505/13_09...](http://www.jofamericanscience.org/journals/am-
sci/0505/13_0927_American_Science_am0505.pdf)

~~~
codygman
I can vouch for the fact that self-awareness is a VERY sharp double edged
sword.

------
bguthrie
I had much the same high school experience as the OP, but unlike him, I didn't
get into a decent college or university and took two years off to work at a
small startup. I couldn't have been luckier. I was a much stronger student
later as a result, and a much harder worker.

My dad did the same thing, and spent a couple of years in the naval reserve.

My advice to other students would be: don't rush into higher education if it's
not the right time for you. Time "off" for other life experiences, including
work, makes a huge difference.

------
Joeri
All through high school, I was this guy. So sure of my own abilities, so sure
that all I lacked to achieve was intent. When i went to university, failing my
first compsci year badly, this served as a wake up call. Strangely however it
was not the one I needed. It showed me that I knew less than I thought I did,
but I remained convinced that with good solid cramming I could force into my
brain what I needed to excel and that fundamentally those students that did
get good grades were no better. It didn't help that I got good grades on the
actual programming parts, it was mostly the theoretical subjects that I
failed. But my intentions to cram what I lacked in theoretical knowledge never
panned out. I could never motivate myself enough to cram as long and as hard
as it seemed I needed to, and I continued to get bad grades. I made excuses,
how a long period of illness prevented me from studying, how getting great
scores didn't matter as long as I passed. But in the end, the results stayed
the same.

Eventually I was forced by my parents to a decision: get serious or drop out.
I dropped out and got a programming job.

And then something strange happened. I felt a sort of obligation to my
employer to not slack off. Where i could never spend 8 hours a day in
motivated effort for myself, i could do it for someone else. Not with ease
mind you, i was physically exhausted those first weeks, and I suffered from
many stress-induced health problems the first year. But gradually i got into a
rhythm of continuous sustainable dedicated work. And then i figured out some
things.

A. Cramming doesn't work. The only healthy pace to truly learn is one that you
keep up indefinitely. I noticed that high achievers almost invariably are
always in study mode, but don't overexert themselves. Slow and steady wins the
race.

B. Knowledge compounds. The longer you continually apply yourself, the more
return on additional knowledge you get. Again i noticed that high achievers
had always been studying, while i was slacking off. The foundation they had
cannot be bypassed. It's the whole 10.000 hours thing. The reason i did well
on the programming subjects at university was because i had always been
programming throughout high school, even while i slacked off on everything
else.

C. Humility and self-doubt are they key to self-improvement. If you are sure
that you're already great, you will block yourself from the path of self-
improvement.

By changing my habits I changed my results. I'm now a tech lead for a dozen
other developers, and enjoy a reputation as a top achiever. I still feel
awkward with that reputation though, because i can easily recall those times
where i felt better than i actually was, so I try to remain humble.

~~~
eliasmacpherson
Had the same experience with working after graduating on what I feel was a
'charity pass'.

Once one's ability to support oneself is at stake, rather than some nebulous
concept of 'education' i.e. learning something because someone thinks its
important - it becomes surprisingly easy to work. I realised I would not be
showing anybody up around the same timeframe as the original poster.

In case it's not obvious, there's a corollary? from C: If you've no faith
confidence at all, you will block yourself from the path of self-improvement.

------
dade_
This is the danger of building self confidence for the sake of self esteem. It
can set people up for an epic fail. In a world of helicopter parents and
misguided, but well intentioned, efforts to give everyone a star, it will
eventually become apparent that self awareness is far more important. Well
written and succinct, this could be used as inspiration for a fable.

------
trustfundbaby
Sometimes, its just a case of being in the wrong field of study.

I was a straight A student out of high school, with little effort to boot.
Then I picked a major that I didn't really care for, because I didn't know any
better ...

I breezed through the first few years of college taking general classes and
the introductory classes to my major, but even then the cracks were beginning
to show in my choice of major, I'd score B's where I thought I'd get A's and
ever so often I'd come really close to getting C's.

When I hit the senior level courses, those B's turned to C's and ever so often
I'd almost get a D.

Why the decline in performance? Nothing had changed, except what I was
studying. I didn't care for it, and it didn't play to any of my academic
strengths (lots of math which I simply don't have the patience for), so I
couldn't just cruise through them.

When I graduated college, I had a very decent general GPA (in the low 3's),
but it was only so because of my strong early performance in college, my major
GPA was in the 2's. I was so ashamed that I didn't attend my own graduation
and wouldn't let my family come either. I withdrew a little bit from friends
and life, because I felt I had let down a lot of people and was a bit of a
failure.

3 years later I discovered something I truly loved (programming and building
things) and after many years of excelling at it ... I finally realized what
I'd done wrong.

Hopefully you come to this realization much earlier than I did.

------
unclebucknasty
There is a danger in measuring ourselves (and our worth) too literally through
traditional measuring sticks like grades. May sound a little fluffy or cliche,
but bear with me.

My high school had a different grading scale than the 10-point scale used by
most high schools and colleges. So:

95-100 was an A; 88-94 was a B; 82-87 was a C; 76-81 was a D; 75 or below and
you failed

Brutal. But, I didn't even realize this until I got to college. What was once
failing was now a C. And what was once a D could now be a B. It was a
liberating feeling, but it underscored two things:

1\. I could have had a much higher GPA in high-school 2\. These measurements
are artificial and arbitrary as a means for determining our "value" or even
our proficiency in a subject

I get that these measurements can have real impact on our lives, because
others use them. The key is not to believe they tell us anything about
ourselves beyond our performance in a specific context, wherein an arbitrary
measurement is applied.

Find what you love and learn it. If you struggle to do so in the environment,
then work with professors, other students, and whatever resources are
available to help you learn to learn. Once you've done that, you will find
that the actual education and knowledge gained is more important, valuable,
and self-improving than its measurement.

Ironically, you will also see a lift in your grades. But most importantly, you
will likely be happy with yourself, no matter what letters appear on your
report.

------
niggler
No amount of words on my part can capture the essence of the message better
than this: [http://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/famous-
fa...](http://bitsandpieces.us/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/famous-failures.jpg)

The words would be something along the lines of "good grades are indicative of
discipline and work ethic moreso than intellectual capacity" and that many
people that we consider extremely intelligent or gifted had really poor
grades.

------
strictfp
I believe that this type of crisis ultimately hits everyone with an analytical
mind, given the current school system. That is at least the conclusion that
I've drawn from my similar experiences. The urge to understand is not catered
for in school. Questions and discussions are not encouraged. Instead, you are
supposed to succumb and absorb enourmous amounts of information as fact. First
after doing this, you are allowed to form your own opinions. A clear bottom-up
approach.

This does not work well for an analytical mind, and as I see it there are very
few choices for us who prefer top-down. I feel that the hacker community is
one place which caters for us, given the unrestricted access to information on
all levels. But in school there is usually very little you can do except be
quiet and take notes, like a robot.

The consequence is that top-down analytical minds have a tendency to skip
studies and ultimately hit this crisis. And because bottom-up people
eventually will start to draw conclusions from their fact bases and gain the
ability to reason, you will be outsmarted.

The real fix for this in my mind is to start catering for the top-downs, with
more focus on how disciplines interrelate, their background and history, and
less focus on direct facts and methods.

------
throwaway78954
I wonder if I wrote this post. I didn't but it sounds eerily similar to my
condition right now.

I was admitted into one of the most reputed universities in my country. I've
failed, year after year 2 times in my junior year & on track for a 3rd year of
failure this time.

I was a bright student in school - the top 10 in my grade. But that's where
the problem stems from. I thought I was a genius to excel high school without
studying whereas everyone around me was pretty mediocre. After all they
studied so hard and didn't do as good as I did.

In university everyone told me how brilliant I was and that my marks didn't
reflect my potential. Now they're all working, getting promotions, traveling,
enjoying their lives and I am no better than I was 3 years ago living with my
parents and hardly contributing anything to this world.

PS: Throwaway for obvious reasons.

------
graycat
My wife was at the top of the class in nearly every course she took in school,
K-Ph.D. I was at or near the top of the class in material I liked, essentially
just math, physics, and chemistry. From those two examples, here are some
lessons on how to make good grades and/or do well.

I will start with what my wife did: First, care about making good grades; care
a LOT. Second, actually do at least most of the reading and homework. Take
good notes in class and study them. Work with other good students in the class
to share notes and thoughts on the content of the course. It helps to have a
terrific memory, and for that it helps to really care a LOT. It helps to cut
out nearly everything except course work and to have the ability to do well
with relatively little sleep.

Then, with the basic learning done, work with other good students in the class
to get a good view of what the teacher likes to see on tests, term papers,
etc. I.e., figure out how to please the teacher, i.e., 'read' the teacher. So,
before tests, work with those other good students to write out likely test
questions and together work out good answers. Then on a test with, say, four
questions, may have written out good answers to two or three of the questions
the night before. Tough to compete against that.

For the other good students she worked with, she had a room in the girls dorm
on the 'academic unit' with other astoundingly bright girls, and they shared
draft test questions, etc.

Lucky was not in a class with any of those girls because would have come in at
best second. For making As in college, those girls were fantastic.

Of course they were beyond belief in the humanities courses, e.g., could
actually make some sense out of the mush. But for a while my wife was in pre-
med so also made As in the 'filter' courses in organic chemistry and
comparative anatomy.

It also helps to have some just fantastic academic talent: My wife wanted to
take a course in European history but did not want to have to work to make a
good grade so just audited the course. The prof asked audits also to take the
tests, so my wife did. At the end of the course, a lecture course with 300
students, the prof told my wife that she should have taken the course for
credit because she made the highest score in the class. And she didn't even
seriously try. Tough to compete against that!

For a term paper, she organized all the information on index cards, arranged
them, then typed the paper.

She made high school Valedictorian, in college was 'Summa Cum Laude', Woodrow
Wilson, PBK, and won two years of NSF graduate fellowship in one award.

Then what I did: In K-8, the girls were much better students than I was in
penmanship, spelling, writing, memorizing poetry, artistic drawing, working in
groups, clerical accuracy, etc., all as should be expected. Also all the
teachers were women and clearly liked the girls much better than the boys. So,
I gave up on trying to get good grades from the teachers and just pursued what
interested me.

I was so often treated with such contempt by the teachers that for all the
rest of my time in school I was unconsciously terrified of criticism from the
teachers. So, if something didn't go just right in a course, then I was
terrified that the situation was hopeless so gave up. So, really, I could be
comfortable in a course only if the material was pure math with a level of
precision about like that of Bourbaki so that I could be iron clad sure that
my knowledge could not be questioned. It was also good if I had carefully read
an excellent text before the course and, thus, really already knew the
material. K-12 teachers: Quit hurting good students.

Things made a big change in the ninth grade in math: I liked the math and
really cared. I had no study skills but began to develop some. The teacher
sent me to the state math tournament; I was likely at the top of the class. He
realized that mostly I was learning just from the book and told me that for
the tournament I should learn the last two chapters on trigonometry he was not
going to be able to cover in class, so the weekend before the tournament I
did.

That pattern went on: I really liked math and learned mostly from the book. I
really made no attempt to get good grades from the teacher, but I understood
the material so well I got A or B from the teacher but led the class or nearly
so on state standardized tests.

That pattern continued in college:

It worked out that I never took freshman calculus! The college I went to for
my freshman year didn't want me to start with calculus but put me in some
course beneath what I'd already covered in my high school (that had a
relatively good math sequence). So, I showed up only for the tests and
otherwise got a good calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year I went to
a much better school, with a quite good math department, and just started with
their sophomore calculus. Did fine.

In freshman physics, I really liked the material and led the class,
effortlessly.

It was nice: Often I studied the physics in the gorgeous reading room of the
library. There some of the really pretty girls were wearing some short,
slightly full, plaid, heavy wool 'wrap around' skirts, each held together with
a huge, chrome diaper safety pin! Still I got some physics done! Got to really
like physics to learn under such circumstances!

Some of the more advanced physics was badly taught or from a poor book, and
then my grade fell to a B; I had no patience with poor quality material. But
in math the books were much better, and I did very well on both learning the
material and grades. I got Honors in math and 800 on the GRE test of math
knowledge and got sent to an NSF summer program in axiomatic set theory,
modern analysis, and differential geometry. The differential geometry was
lectures by a Harvard graduate and student of A. Gleason. He said that I
needed only the inverse and implicit function theorems, but so far I'd not
seen either of those (I later got them from Fleming's book). I was too
intimidated to realize that I could have hit the library for an afternoon and
evening and walked out with good knowledge of both theorems. The theorems are
just local non-linear versions of the standard and fairly obvious general
solution of a system of linear equations. There is a nice proof using
contractive mapping. Alas, due to those two theorems, I walked out of the
class -- bummer, it was material I would have liked to have learned,
especially for relativity theory.

In my career I continued a lot of independent learning from some of the best
math texts, e.g., I took a second pass through Rudin's 'Principles', went
carefully through Halmos's 'Finite Dimensional Vector Spaces', Fleming's
'Functions of Several Variables', the math parts of von Neumann's 'Quantum
Mechanics', and much more, a big stack more.

When I went for my Ph.D., what I had learned before I entered was nearly
enough for the course work. For the research, I brought my own problem with me
to graduate school, had an intuitive solution I'd worked out on an airplane
flight, got enough math in my first year to turn my intuitive solution into
some solid applied math, later wrote some corresponding illustrative software,
and that was my Ph.D. research. For a Master's, there was a question in a
course without an answer. I thought for two weeks in the evenings and saw a
first solution and asked for a 'reading course' to attack the problem. When
the course was approved, I gave my first solution right away. Two weeks later
I had a much nicer solution, wrote it up, and that was the end of the 'reading
course' and the last I needed for a Master's. Later I published the paper.
When I published I did some more library work and discovered that I'd invented
a theorem comparable with the classic Whitney extension theorem, that is, H.
Whitney long at Harvard. I also discovered that I'd solved a problem stated in
the famous Arrow, Hurwicz, Uzawa paper in mathematical economics. So, that
work I did in that 'reading course' was publishable.

Eventually I concluded that working the more challenging exercises in the best
pure math texts -- Rudin, Halmos, Royden, Neveu, etc., is good training for
doing original research. Eventually I discovered that if not afraid of being
whacked in the neck with a bad grade by a prof in a course, then usually can
get what need for a given research problem from stacks of books and papers
much more quickly than the rate of coverage in a course.

Eventually discovered a 'way' to do research: Do a lot of intuitive guessing;
then test the intuitive guesses with some intuitive filters or checking on
special cases.

For a simple outline, "Is A true? Okay, likely if A is true, then B is true.
Is it believable that B is true or would that be asking too much? Naw, likely
B is false. So likely A is false. So, check A on some simple special cases.
Okay, still A seems false. So, try C. Is C true? If C is true, then likely D
is true. Okay, maybe D is true. Check out C on some simple special cases. C
might be true! So, maybe try to prove C is true. Now to prove C is true,
likely the proof has to make essential use of all the hypotheses we have for
C, so in looking for a proof, be sure can make good use of all the hypotheses.
Else are trying to prove something stronger than C which is likely not true.
Now, if C is true, just what, intuitively, is going on?"

Can do a lot of this while writing little or nothing. When the intuitive work
seems good, then try to write out some actual math with careful derivations,
any new definitions and then theorems and proofs. If the intuitive guessing
goes well, then have a good shot of seeing how to do the proofs right away.

Mostly don't write longer than trivial algebraic derivations without having a
fairly good idea what is going on intuitively. That is, mostly don't expect to
get much just from pushing symbols around.

In nearly all of K-12 and college, what my wife did worked much better than
what I did. For graduate work, a Ph.D., publishable original research, and
applications in a career, what I did worked much better.

~~~
Tycho
In high school, I kind of looked down upon the culture of 'caring a lot' about
getting top grades. Partly because I saw much of it as suckers jumping through
arbitrary hoops, and partly because I reckoned that my memory was easily
capable of holding all the necessary information, if I just put in a meagre
number of hours studying (which I hated, so usually didn't bother). I focussed
on trying to impress the teachers by answering the difficult questions in
class which (seemingly) stumped the 'straight A' students, and also I loved
English class because that was the one where disciplined study yielded little
advantage. If someone got top grades but didn't outwardly show any flare in
any of these areas, I considered them 'not that intelligent.'

Not saying this was justified, but it's definitely how I felt. What I probably
should have realized is that in the long run, self-discipline is an extremely
important trait no matter what your natural aptitude is. But I also think
schools should make more effort to make subjects appealing on an intuitive
level, not just a stack of exercises to slog through - I would have done much
better in say maths if that was the case. I have to admit though, even though
my attitude is different these days, what your wife did in college to get top
grades still seems... kind of lame.

~~~
graycat
Once I understood what she did to get top grades, it did surprise me, was
maybe "kind of lame".

But there was a 'reason' she did what she did: There were some strong
influences from her family that anything less than an A would be 'shameful'.

So, yes, might notice that in K-college she didn't "outwardly show any flare".
Right. She wanted the As. They meant a LOT to her. She knew that she didn't
really get any extra points for "flare".

But eventually I learned that away from a course with a prof, credits, and
grades, really, out of the view of anyone powerful, influential, and
potentially critical, she had plenty of 'flare', really was just brilliant.
E.g., computing wasn't her field at all. But at one point she wanted to do
some computing, in of all things artificial intelligence. Well, I was on a
team of three that had designed and developed an AI language. So I gave her a
one hour lecture covering everything from how to use the computer, file
system, text editor, and scripting language to our AI language.

Two weeks later she had a good, first program running. I looked at it,
explained some of the 'theme' of how that AI approach was intended to work,
and let her try again. In two more weeks she had one of the nicest AI programs
our group ever saw. Just brilliant. We had some really bright computer science
grad students in our group; in computer science, she was brighter. Astounding.

There is much more to human performance in school, research, and a job than
meets the eye: In front of powerful, influential, potentially critical people,
she was just terrified to appear less than Little Miss Perfect in the sense
she got from her family. In our home, in front of just herself and me, she was
free to show 'flair' and be brilliant.

If you sense that the "lame" part might not be so good in some respects, you
are correct. I spent a lot of time around high end academics and saw a lot of
people with spectacular grade point averages, some of whom maybe never failed
to dot an 'i' since before kindergarten. Commonly these people were from very
bright up to brilliant, but it seemed that their grade point averages were
from various reasons and not just brilliance. Some of those various reasons
were, in the end, not so good.

But if want to make the As my wife made, then what she did worked, and not
much else does.

There was a time in high school plane geometry where apparently I did
something like you did: I was totally in love with the subject, ate the
exercises in the book like popcorn, by the hand full. The teacher was the most
offensive person I've ever met in a classroom, so I refused to appear to do
her assigned homework and mostly slept in class. Each day she assigned three
not very difficult exercises. What I did was all the non-trivial exercises
then turn to the back of the book for the more difficult supplementary
exercises and do all of those. I never once failed to do a non-trivial
exercise during the whole course. To save time, I didn't write out all the
proofs but usually did small versions just in my head, in the margin of the
book, on scraps of paper, etc. For the few exercises that actually took some
effort, say, two hours, I'd write out a proof carefully.

For one of the supplementary exercises, I started on Friday afternoon and just
kept going and finally got it late Sunday evening. Nice exercise! On Monday in
class, there was one of her assigned exercises, easy, with the same figure.
So, after she discussed the solution to that exercise, for the first and last
time I 'participated' in the class and mentioned the exercise in the back of
the book with the same figure. She was thrilled and had the class turn to that
exercise. Time passed .... After about 20 minutes she was getting frustrated
and nasty, was exhorting the class to "think", etc. Since I didn't want to be
accused of ruining the class, I raised my hand and said, "Why don't we ..." at
which time she angrily interrupted me nearly shouting "You knew how to do it
all the time". Yes, I was 'guilty' as charged! Of course I knew how to do it.
I knew how to do every non-trivial exercise in the book. If I didn't know how
to do it, no way would I ask her.

She never let me finish the solution!

I didn't know that the exercise would be difficult for the teacher. I wasn't
even sure I was one of the best students in the class. I guess she wasn't
working all the exercises!

Uh, apparently on the state test in plane geometry I did well! Another guy and
I were 1-2 in the class. We were also 1-2 in the school on the Math SAT. The
teacher who read me my SAT scores had known me since the sixth grade, looked
at my Verbal SAT, 538 (654 the second time I took it) and said "Good". It
wasn't good, and I knew that. Then she looked at my Math SAT, stopped, looked
afraid, and said, "There must be some mistake". Yes, sweetheart, there was,
and had been for 12, long, painful years, you ditzy bimbo. I was a good
candidate for the best math student in the school, and the school never knew
it (actually apparently the principal did know; apparently he looked at some
of my standardized test results -- but the teachers did too much gossiping
among themselves).

So, yes, for that plane geometry teacher, there was a strong sense of
'competition' even with the students. So, she didn't want me to show any
'flair'. But I demonstrated that my knowledge of the subject was from my
efforts in learning and not from her efforts in teaching. Of course this was
in part my reaction to all those K-8 teachers who treated me with contempt.

Contempt? Of course, my Ph.D. and research were in mathematics: Well my eighth
grade arithmetic teacher strongly advised me never to take anymore math in
school! Why? I didn't do well on her tests. Why? I understood the material
quickly but for the exercises, say, multiplying two four digit numbers, had
poor accuracy. Why? Not from lack of understanding. But at the time, common
for boys, my 'clerical accuracy' was not good; my handwriting was awful which
meant that commonly I misread my intermediate results; and no one explained to
me that I needed to be sure to work carefully to write clearly, keep the
vertical columns lined up, and get correct results. Finally a college physics
prof told me bluntly that I had to work carefully enough to get correct
numerical results since a mistake could ruin a physics career. From then on my
accuracy was from okay up to good enough.

Even now I do not trust my clerical accuracy. So for anything important, I do
it, let the results 'age' hopefully for a few days, do it again independently,
and compare the results. Also I no longer want to do anything like 'manual'
arithmetic or use a calculator where I have to copy between the calculator
and, say, paper. Instead I essentially just program all arithmetic. Otherwise
I'm too prone to simple mistakes.

But the contempt from those K-8 teachers did damage. One graduate course
started off with some axiomatic set theory. The prof gave a pop quiz. One of
his questions was tricky, and I saw how to do it only at the end of the time.
So I wrote quickly and used a symbol without defining it but used it with the
meaning I'd seen in an earlier NSF course in set theory. So, later the prof
called me for a 'conference'. He was convinced that I was a poor student. I
explained the symbol and said that I thought that its meaning was standard in
axiomatic set theory, and he then saw that my solution was one step shorter
than his and good. Then he relented. But that contempt from him was too close
to what I'd gotten in K-8; I concluded that there would be no way to please
him; gave up; and never went back to that class. He wasn't teaching the course
very well anyway, and later I got a just brilliant presentation of that
material, best course of any kind I ever took in school.

These examples can show students some of the challenges in school: Not all the
challenges are obvious on the surface. Your remark about 'discipline' is
correct: Even if a teacher dumps on a student unfairly sometimes, the student
needs to continue on and not just walk away. The course is not all just about
competition for 'flair' but also has some material should get through, flair
or not.

But, for a Ph.D., one way for a grad student to 'polish their halo' is to do
some publishable, original research, independently or nearly so, early on,
i.e., show some 'flair' for research. Why? The main difficulty for a Ph.D. is
just the research, and showing that can do research, especially independently,
can do wonders at getting the faculty on the side of the student.

We've now solved all the problems in higher education!

------
killermonkeys
OP: I remember being in precisely your position when my last year's exams came
around many years ago. I remember going from effortlessly succeeding in school
to busting my ass to be mediocre in uni, too.

The fact is that over the long run, effort counts for more than exam
performance, so if you are trying, keep doing it. That's what counts.
ADD/ADHD-type inability to concentrate and focus are hard, but you do learn to
cope, and more importantly you learn to position yourself in situations where
you exploit its advantages.

What I wouldn't do is not push yourself when you believe you can get away with
it, a mistake you and I both have made. Keep yourself on the boundary of
uncomfortable, otherwise you will not be prepared when it gets tough.

Keep it up for a few more weeks and it'll be done, and just keep getting up.

------
gaussianblur
This resonated well with myself, another student two weeks from graduating,
with similar issues. It helps to remind myself that Rome wasn't built in a
day, and trying to do work that usually takes peers weeks in just a single
night is just my immaturity coming through.

------
adammil
You're trying to replicate on demand, at the last minute, the discipline,
focus, and maturity that the others have gained and heavily practiced over the
same years that you apparently spent fooling around. It has nothing to do with
intelligence, really. Self comparisons and value judgements are pretty useless
when all you really need to do is put in the time required to achieve your
goals. You may have to accept that it's just going to take longer to get where
you want to be because you lost some time. Ultimately, I'd rather be the new
you, getting wiser about life, instead of the old you patting yourself on the
back about how smart you are but getting nowhere.

------
guylhem
To err is human. Persistance is evil.

By your post, you clearly show a will to amend your past actions, and to work
seriously now, to get grades you deserve - not just because you're "good at
anything you touch", but because you are good and apply effort.

Trust me on this one, these deserved success will taste like ambrosia.

At the moment, do not overtly blame yourself. Many people can't see through
themselves like you did. Yet since we're all human, we all fail time to time.

The _real_ danger, as you so clearly phrased, is self delusion, ie refusing to
see or understand how or why we fail.

The TV philosopher of my childhood said it best - "knowing is half the battle"
(†)

†: Gi Joe, famous tv philosopher, giving quotes and wisdom to children,
worldwide :-)

------
trippy_biscuits
College revealed that several tools were missing from my collection. I did not
know how to study, manage/budget time, or work hard on something I did not
like. I had always been able to understand something just by looking at it. I
could see, hear, or read something and be able to recall it, verbatim, without
really trying. I never had to think very hard or study. Everything was just
easy. I never understood why my peers couldn't grasp a concept, recall
details, or understand things.

Then I got to college and stuff got real. I looked around and did not know why
everything was so easy to my peers. I just couldn't keep up with a full load.
Even a half load was impossible. My innate abilities didn't scale and I had to
learn new ways to do things. It was a bitter time with repeated failures.

Get a mentor and some decent coping tools - something that will track what you
need to do and remind you so you don't have to keep it all in your head. Learn
how to break tasks into smaller pieces so that it's easy to visualize their
completion. Know your own limitations and avoid situations that will make you
fail (video games all night means no HW done, no sleep, and a really crappy
tomorrow). The hardest part is self mastery: doing what you need to do when it
needs to be done instead of doing what you want to do whenever you feel like
it.

TL;DR? College is a boss level. Learn how to defeat it so you aren't stuck
playing the same level forever. The abilities you (l)earn are required in the
levels that follow.

~~~
CamperBob2
_I did not know how to ... work hard on something I did not like_

I guess I'm the only one here who considers this the worst habit of all. How
do I know when to stop working on stuff I don't like?

------
trench0
OP, this exact thing happened to me in high school then into uni. Well, I
actually dropped out because I just could not make it work. I wasn't like the
top students either. Hell, I was hardly even average.

If there is any advice I can give, it would be to be _proud_ of every
accomplishment you achieve. People use pride to motivate them. The pride of
finishing a course, an assignment, a homework problem, getting a paycheck,
promotion, a diploma -- I could go on. I can't even count the number of times
I thought I was prepared for a test only to end up with a barely passing grade
(if I was lucky). Practice and preparation are empty, unfulfilling activities
without pride, and I think that's why I could never get anything out of them.

Pride is something that I struggle with even ten years after I packed all my
shit into my car and made the long and painful drive home from university. My
failures still hang heavy on my every movement, regardless of the good things
that I do today. It could have been different, I think to myself. I should
have done better. It seems like you are struggling with the same emotions.

In the end many functional, successful people struggle with regret of _some_
kind. You seem to be remarkably introspective about yours, and that is a good
thing. Let it guide you, motivate you. It took me ten years (and debt that I
am still paying off) to trust those instincts.

------
hexonexxon
I am a highschool dropout who got a GED while in prison for a hacking charge,
slacked through community college to bring up my pre-calculus to university
level, transferred to university and slacked through that as well.

I did not do the full time course load where you must be disciplined to handle
30+ credits per year therefore require extreme military like focus on your
studies. I was doing half that sometimes less, while working on days off or
getting wasted in the campus bar with the student radio society.

------
brandonhsiao
The biggest assumption in this paste is that grades = ability. Getting good
grades is a such a specific ability requiring so much dedication that getting
bad grades may not necessarily reflect a lack of ability.

It may not be so wrong to think that others do better than you in school
because you don't try, and that you are actually more able than them. The
counterargument is, "Well, try for a bit. Show me what you can do if you just
start trying." The problem with that is that your success at any moment isn't
just your effort applied to the lever that is your ability. You have to build
up to it. So even if you're smart, if you suddenly start trying to get good
grades during high school you'll still be behind people who aren't as smart as
you but tried the whole time you didn't. It's more accurate to say, you would
be better than others if you had tried as hard _and as long_ as they had.

A lot of smart people don't try at things that don't interest them but do an
extremely good job at things that do. So, I agree with the spirit of your
message that you should measure your abilities with your results rather than
your own guesswork about your own abilities. But I disagree that school is
necessarily the right metric to use.

------
adrianhoward
Random thoughts - just in case the OP is around:

* _"It was an insult for me to think that I was ever anything like them"_ \- No it wasn't. At the very, very worst it was a mistake. And everybody on the planet makes 'em. Mistakes, especially mistakes in your teens and twenties, are rarely fatal ones. Failing at something sucks, and can feel ghastly, but things usually get better again. I'm in my forties now. A bunch of my friends who are well off, successful and happy now had a shitty time in their twenties. They dropped out. They went insane. They failed their degree. And later on they found something they were passionate about. They found a balance that let them live with their mental illness. They figured out how to study and went back and got their degree. Bad things happen. They seldom last.

* You sound really, really stressed. If you have friends you can talk too outside of the university / finals environment go talk to them about this. Especially if they're a bit older and have been through this. They'll have a different perspective that you may find useful and reassuring. I'd also really consider going and having a chat with your tutor and/or the counselling service your university provides. Doing this isn't failure. Doing this is acknowledging that there is a problem and starting the process of fixing it.

 _"The students who obtain top grades in classes have an ability to focus like
no other" / "Under pressure, they excel where I break"_ \- Handling pressure
and being able to focus are habits and skills as much as they are innate
gifts. But they take time to acquire. Like becoming physically fit it's a task
that takes months and years - not days and weeks. They are things you can get
better at - no matter where you are now. Keep trying it will pay off in the
end.

------
onedev
Thank you for sharing your feelings OP. I can empathize with you, and wish you
the very best.

Sometimes it's great reading how other people feel in these kinds of private
situations that happen inside one's conscious.

You can't really discuss them with anyone else so when one person decides to
let it all out (as OP did), I think its beneficial to EVERYONE who may have
had or still have these kinds feelings/experiences.

------
6d0debc071
The odds that you'll be the best in something very competitive are low. Sorry
to say. If that's your selection criteria what are the odds that you got the
perfect genetics and a better upbringing than everyone else there? Sure,
effort and all that jazz - but everyone else who sits down and thinks
similarly is executing a similar strategy, effort isn't _that_ rare. You might
get a slightly better study algorithm, spaced repetition vs cramming or
something, but that's a thing here and there....

That said, I've rarely found being the absolute best at something to be worth
the effort even among a small pool of a few thousand people. Crippling over
specialisation I believe is the meme. If you can't be the absolute best, you
might want look for related areas you can get better quickly - most of the
time, in my experience, it can make the initial problem you were having
trouble with easier anyway.

It's also a lot harder for you to get fired if you've got your fingers in lots
of pies =p

------
sandycat3
OP should stop comparing himself to others and know that good grades isn't the
meaning of life, just appreciate what you already have. I also got a low score
in Theory of Computation, but the subject itself is actually extremely hard.
Also me and my friends study harder than most of our other classmates but we
still never get decent grades

------
throwaway1979
As someone who can count the number of B's I've gotten in one hand (K-PhD), I
have to relate a saying: "grades don't matter ... it's just how we keep
score". In the original version of the saying, money comes in the place of
grades :-p

But seriously speaking ... at some point, you will stop caring about grades. I
stopped grading after I starting grading undergrads as a lecturer. Heh .. I
stopped caring about my age after 31. As a former child prodigy, I sometimes
do feel I've wasted opportunities and my potential. But then I remember that
the battle isn't over yet ... I may yet do something I feel is consequential.
It is no longer an achievement in science. Rather, I hope I can create a
company that gives a livelihood to many people, treats them well, and does
right by the world. Given that I don't even zero entrepreneurial experience at
this point in my life, this dream might just wither away. But c'est la vie.

------
foolrush
You will do just fine.

The point of education is to set aside the hubris and learn.

You very clearly have.

------
brianmcdonough
There are a lot of people out there that didn't and don't fit into the
classroom learning model. Stanley Kubrick was a truant. Ansel Adams was pulled
out of school at an early age because he was "hyperactive." Steve Jobs dropped
out of college because of cost. Jimi Hendrix "played" a broom for more than a
year before his father bought him a cheap used guitar. Jane Austen, the author
of "Sense and Sensibilities," dropped out of school at age 11 because of cost.

The classroom model is not for everyone.

Dropouts can and are just as successful, more so, I think, the earlier they
realize they are not like everyone else.

Like you, I am not like OP.

Everything I learned that is valuable to me on a daily basis was not learned
in the classroom. Classrooms are really boring and who wants to listen to a
talking head?

I have achieved much so far in my life, but I wish I would have known earlier
that direct experience was a much better way for me.

School's out. Forever.

------
doki_pen
There is an important lesson that many "gifted" people don't learn until later
in life (myself included). Being gifted is like having a head start in a
marathon. It is minuscule compared to the results of hard work and nothing to
be proud of. Be proud of the things that you worked for, not the things you
are born with.

------
sidcool
That came deep from within the heart of the OP. Good luck to him.

------
ZirconCode
I know this very well. It is like watching your life drift by, and promising
to yourself that you will be fine because the winds favor you. I was able to
pass high-school easily, and in the last year, to prove to myself that I
could, I passed 9 AP's. I'm now in college, and I'm on the verge of dropping
out, for other reasons, nevertheless. I know now that one day I will hit my
wall, and that I want to get there as fast as possible, so that I can push it
further.

Concerning productivity, what helped me go from doing nothing to being fully
functional, were three things. I started meditating in the morning and evening
(read Mindfulness in Plain Engllish, free pdf), I started sticking to a good
sleep schedule, and I started using the Pomodoro technique. Hopefully they may
be able to help you.

------
amanvir_sangha
I can relate.

Around the age of 10 my family moved to UK. Few weeks after being enrolled in
the primary school, the teachers were extremely impressed by my
mathematical/studying ability and asked me to take a Mensa test, my parents
agreed and I somehow managed to get in. That was year (grade) 6. After that I
managed to a secondary grammar school solely on mental ability. I hated
memorizing content, in fact, to this day I still don't remember studying at
all after moving to the UK.

The secondary school was boring, I strolled through the first 5 years by
simply turning up to the lessons, I didn't have to do any work at home. In my
spare time I concentrated on programming and building things. I almost feel
fortunate that I had so much time to be creative because I got to build
websites reaching 40M pageviews per year, I got the chance to play national
level basketball and everything else in between.

But that all changed when I started my a-levels. I picked random subjects like
psychology, economics and computing along with mathematics with no thought and
oh boy was that a mistake. For the first time ever I got a D on a maths test,
it was horrible, I though I could just manage my a grades by simply turning up
to the lesson. What was I doing wrong? "I've _always_ been good at maths!!"

I was too late to realise that I couldn't just "turn up to the lesson" and get
the grades I wanted. I ended up messing up my entire year and decided to take
it again. Not having studied properly over the last 6 years probably also
brought my studying skills and time management down. It's kinda funny, last
year I was e-mailing the google security team about vulnerabilities but
somehow failing an a-level computing test! Maybe it had something to do with
the boring content?

This year I dropped psychology and picked up Physics instead and I've been
doing pretty well, getting A and B grades in all my subjects. I also realised
I prefer STEM subjects since there is less memorization involved and it's more
about understanding the content. In hindsight, I could I have saved some time
if I had just _tried_.

------
hkmurakami
I was probably fortunate that this kind of frustration came much earlier in my
life. In elementary school, I basically never studied for any exams other than
memorization-style spelling and vocab tests. I excelled at math but was
mediocre at best at everything else. I distinctly remember getting a 17/100 on
a 5th grade, take home, open book history test. (actually, the only reason I
was good at math was because I went to my normal "American" school 5 days a
week and a separate "Japanese expat" school on Saturdays and had double the
math hours as all my peers)

I also remember when things changed for me, and had OP's "I can do better"
moment. It was in 7th grade when I got my first B in math in my life (Algebra)
and narrowly escaped a C in Civics (I think I got a 79.6). While not
"disastrous" marks by any means, it was still incredibly jarring for a
generally studious kid who always turned in his homework on time, wrote his
papers, tried hard, etc.

Looking back, it's strange that the almost-C bothered me, since I think I had
some Cs during elementary school. Maybe I had instinctively known that in
Junior High, the stakes were somehow higher. But more importantly, my new
friends were getting straight A's, and I knew that there was no reason I
couldn't do just as well as them. Also, I knew that I was "good at math" and
that I should of course be able to get an A in the subject. Of course, I had
basically never studied in my life, so it was growing pains figuring out how I
can do well in history/literature/spanish exams.

I somehow managed to figure out a studying method that worked for me and it
was good enough to get me near straight A's throughout the rest of Junior
High. My High School was the same as my JH, so knowing "the system", I was
able to do similarly well in HS. The biggest difference that I can see between
OP and myself is that my "on" switch was flipped 6-7 years before OP's, which
allowed me to turn on the after burners while I still wasn't too far behind my
peers and still had enough time to catch up.

However, I was definitely not the most efficient or the smartest in my class,
and was probably putting in the most time out of anyone in my grade. Two guys
were definitely much much _smarter_ than me and I knew it, despite my having
higher grades than either of them. To this day they are two of my closest
friends.

Looking at the "traits" OP describes in the studious types is really
interesting to me. I procrastinated like crazy and played video games for an
obscene number of hours (I would frequently borrow a RPG + the console from a
friend on friday, finish the ~25 hour game over the weekend and return it to
him on monday). I remember playing FF7 before it was even out in the states
(since all my consoles were Japanese region) for over 300 hours and had
amassed so much "gil" (money) in the game that the number was overflowing out
the left side of the menu window. But it's true that I have always performed
well under pressure (I always did better on the actual standardized exams than
my practice exams) and put in pointlessly long hours studying the course
material until I knew (almost) everything (combined with the massive hours of
video gaming and extracurricular activities I had, I would often only get 3
hours of sleep/night which is just pure idiocy).

But what do I have to show at the end of it all? Honestly the result is a book
smart'ish and tool'ish person who can't build anything to save his life
anymore, a far cry from the kid who would tinker around and build stuff when
he was 8~10 years old. I do _extremely_ well within the defined framework of
an academic setting, but I highly doubt that I'd outperform this significantly
doing anything "in the real world" (I probably do outperform the "average" to
some extent, but definitely not to the degree I did as a student). Hindsight
is 20/20, but it would have served me much better to have focused on what I
enjoyed most: drawing, tinkering around with techy stuff, etc rather than
devote thousands of hours to cramming academic material into my brain.

So even if you "succeed" in the academic rat race, it's not really useful
unless you're going to use those supposed "accomplishments" in the future (ex:
go into consulting/ibanking where academic pedigree and GPA is heavily
considered).

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say anymore, but as a person who
managed a breakthrough from a position similar to the OP (and there are quite
a few people in the top colleges who didn't study hard at all to get their
perfect marks -- definitely not me), I can say that it's not necessarily
useful to succeed at this either. In fact getting a wake up call 4+ years
earlier might turn out to be a blessing.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
Seventh grade was an awakening for me, too. I had sailed through elementary
school with no effort, then hit seventh grade an nearly failed multiple
classes my first quarter. That changed things significantly.

Unfortunately, it didn't change things enough. My senior year of high school,
I was taking three AP classes and still only doing maybe an hour or so of
homework a day and still getting good grades.

Then I hit college. And that hour a day completely didn't cut it (and getting
hooked on MUDs didn't help :). I didn't get the grades I wanted, but I got the
grades I deserved (maybe even better), graduated, and never cared about them
again.

Far more important than the ability to get perfect grades is the ability to
learn on one's own. And I don't think the two are perfectly correlated in any
way.

~~~
ruswick
I agree entirely. In fact, I've always been of the opinion that the
institutionalization of learning works to the detriment of education and
discourages most students from learning on their own, while doing an
incompetent job of equipping them with knowledge of value. Schools ought to
place greater emphasis on technical skills, applied math, nonfiction writing
and modern government/geopolitics; and less on lab science, academic math,
literature and classical history. It's not that the classical academic
subjects lack intelectual value, but that public schools ought to serve a
purely pragmatic purpose. The current system is, in my opinion, exceedingly
ineffective and even detrimental to students who are deterred by what they
perceive as pedantic material. They determine that they don't like school
(particularly math), adopt defeatist attitudes and, by the end of high school,
are entirely unequipped to enter the workforce or to matriculate into post-
secondary programs.

Also, I'm curious as to when you attended school and which APs you took. I'm
currently taking four, and I consider myself fortunate on nights when I have
less than four hours of work.

------
zoba
Your story is exactly my story - surprisingly so. I'm out of college now and
have better focus, but it is still getting better (I plan out my day in on
paper with a 15 minute granularity and don't allow myself to deviate from that
plan - exceptions occur.)

The advice I'd have given myself is: ok, so now you've realized it. You didn't
/really/ know before, so don't fault yourself. The only logical thing you can
do now is work towards fixing the problem. When I get upset about things like
this, I just repeat this mantra until I realize the truth of it: It is what it
is, not what it should be, not what it could be, it is what it is.

My email is in my profile URL if you want to chat more.

------
seivan
I did this as well. ADHD explains some of this.

------
cinquemb
"Cause when I die buddy You know whats gonna keep me warm? Thats right. Those
degrees."

\- Kanye West

[http://rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-school-spirit-
skit-1-2-lyric...](http://rapgenius.com/Kanye-west-school-spirit-
skit-1-2-lyrics)

------
hardwaresofton
Don't want to ruin the pity party, but learning is more important than grades.
And grades don't actually matter. You need them to meet an end, but not much
more. The question is, are you going to do something with all you claimed to
have learned? And even worse still, are you going to do something that is
going to mean anything to anyone?

Grade A students who graduate and just get a job somewhere, doing something,
for someone for the rest of their lives, then retire cozily and die do not
impress me, and they shouldn't impress you either.

Do something amazing.

(I'm not there yet, but I think I've got a point.)

~~~
j-kidd
I am sure there are many Grade A students who never went on to do amazing
things, simply because there are many aspects in life that cannot be
controlled. Many things one does in life end up being meaningless, and that's
life. Your grudge against Grade A students is unjustifiable.

You may want to check out this movie: <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2036416/>

It is a story about Giddens Ko, who grew up despising Grade A students, then
became somewhat of a Grade A student himself. He went on to become the most
successful Chinese author / director.

~~~
hardwaresofton
So I think you're assuming that I'm not a grade A student. I've done plenty
well in school, maintaining a 4.0 until that dreaded A- came along and ruined
me.

My point is simple, whether you like Grade A students or not, if you don't do
anything important, you won't be important. People are what they do. Maaaaaybe
I was a little harsh, but the point doesn't change.

------
aniro
"There is nothing more damaging to a young man's character than for him to
discover that he is clever."

I stumbled upon this once long ago and have not been able to (re)discover the
source since. In my memory, it was attributed to Leo Tolstoy (or may have been
a comment made by one character in reference to another in one of Tolstoy's
novels). Or maybe I made the whole thing up and was simply chastising myself
while trying to learn Russian by being clever instead of diligent.

It near perfectly distills so much.

I would prefer diligence over cleverness every single time, most especially
within myself.

------
FallDead
Grades as a metric for intelligence or understanding seems to be broken. I
remember in high school and university there were students whom would do
vastly better then my self in many cs courses. It bothered myself until
learned that they had access to a Drop box that contained many solutions
collected through out the years as well as past midterms. If stopped bothering
me when they were not getting Co-op placements and had to apply their
knowledge. My point is don't count on a metric to define who you are and how
intelligent you are.

------
dzent
As I went through college (and I think everyone more or less goes through
this) I learned to care less about marks as a whole and more about what I
learned in that class/if there the knowledge is easily obtainable elsewhere.
However, I'm fortunate enough to be in a field that doesn't explicitly require
grad school (compared to say, those aspiring to be doctors) and that
internship experience/generally more concrete interviews generally lessen the
requirement for having really high marks.

------
danbmil99
In college, whenever I bragged about doing something interesting or achieving
some milestone in my studies, my roomie Paul would draw hard on his big doobie
(they hardly got you stoned back then even if you smoked all night) and say
something like "Miller, I could do that if I just gave a shit. I'd kick your
ass and everyone's ass, if I could just get off my ass".

Not sure whatever happened to Paul.

OP: find out what you are good at. Grades and academia are not the be-all and
end-all of existence or success.

------
skierscott
I heard someone say one, "I not getting mediocre grades because I'm dumb; I'm
just as smart as the smartest kids, but because I don't work hard enough ...
Y'know, if I was _really_ smart, I would work hard enough."

I've found this to be true in my college classes. For example, I took a class
recently that was heavily related to previous research I did. The class was
easy for me because I did previous work in that area.

------
buremba
I have focusing problem and I figured out that working multiple projects at
the same time is better for me than focusing only a project. Although, it's
hard to finish one of them completely, it's good to know there's a different
project I can work when am bored one of them. Just find an area that you like,
you don't have to be good every class you take. It's enough be good at one
area to be successful.

------
kombinatorics
I too share this grand delusion. I know it's a delusion, yet I can't formulate
a solution. I'm a first year right now, I share the same story from high
school, to rejection from the university I wanted to go to, and finally to the
low grades in university. Thanks for sharing the story, it gives me insight on
where my behaviour will lead. Thank you.

------
sn0v
So much wisdom in this thread for a guy like me who's just wrapping up his
Bachelor's and headed for his Masters! Thanks guys! :')

------
xijuan
I am one of the try-hards OP has described. I came to Canada at the age of 12
knowing very little English. In my first two years in Canada, my self-esteem
and confidence dropped to a very low point because I couldn't keep up with my
peers due to my poor English skills. Basically, I was not even allowed to take
regular classes because my English was not good enough. I am not naturally
good at learning language so I had to study very hard. My parents were not
good at English and we didn't really have money for tutoring. I don't even
think my parents really believe that tutoring would work; they always believe
in self-learning. I eventually got better and got the chance to take regular
classes. But my English still caused a lot of difficulty in understanding the
course materials. Other students could easily understand the lecture and the
textbook. However, to me, I could not understand anything the teacher said in
class; so I had to read the textbook myself. The textbook was pretty hard for
me; so I had to read two or three times. To my surprise, due to hard work, I
was able to get the top marks in most of my classes. And the learning
strategies I have developed along the way have helped me succeed in university
as well.

I think OP definitely has "idealized" the people who could achieve top grades.
I procrastinate a lot of times, wasting my time watching dramas and constantly
interrupting myself with online chatting. I am not sure if I perform poorly
under stress or not. But I am very very very prone to stress and anxiety. I
think because that I recognize my limit (my predisposition to stress and
anxiety), I always start things early so I don't have to stress out in the
end.

It is not that good to get high marks all the time. Some people think I am
simply a nerd who doesn't know how to socialize. They would also say that I
only know how to get good marks but not know other things. Some people would
think that I am an introvert who stays at home studying all the time... In
fact, I love being around people, love hanging out with friends.. I love
teaching, tutoring and giving out presentations.. There are a lot of
stereotypical beliefs about nerds.. And these things made me very sad at
times. But I feel that I had to work hard because I wanted to go to grad
school and GPA is a big consideration when it comes to applying for grad
school..

Anyways...all these rambling probably won't help OP gets good marks..I will
provide some of the study strategies that have helped me succeed in school: 1)
Prepare before you go to the lecture. Read the textbook before you go to the
lecture. There are times when I preview the whole course material during the
summer before taking the course... I think that is simply too extreme for
other people..But I did that and it worked for me. When everyone was
struggling to understand the materials, I already know most of it...

2) I record my lectures and listen to them like "music"? If the prof is good
at lecturing, it is actually not that boring to listen to the lectures again.
At times, the prof would give some possible hints about questions on the
exams; those hints can be helpful at times.

3) Start on your hw early so that you can leave some time to ask questions. If
hw counts a significant portion of the mark, you should definitely start early
and ask the TA questions if you don't get any of the questions. Keep asking
them until you figure out the answers. KEEP ASKING! It is funny that I
eventually become a very friend with one of my TAs because I always go hang
out with her during her office hour.

5) I know every well about my limit. So most of the times, I don't take too
many courses to overwhelm myself. I also tried to balance my semester with
some easy courses and some hard ones. Whether the course is easy or not
depends on what you are good at. An English course can be easy for an Arts
student to get an A but extremely hard to a science student.

6) Know about the teacher's testing strategies. Some profs like to ask
questions from the textbook; some like to focus on the lectures more.. Some
have really tricky MC questions.Some teachers like to test the conceptual
stuff more. Every prof is different. Knowing what the teacher's testing style
is very important.

7) I don't know how relevant it is to other people but TAs have marked my exam
wrong multiple times.... It happened to my friend also. There was once when
the TA gave me 76 when I got 95.. There was also another time when I got 95 on
an exam after crazy scaling. I thought this time, they probably marked
everything right and I didn't need to check my exam with the TA; but I
eventually went to check it before my final just in case there were some
similar questions on the final. And they marked a written question wrong
again. Maybe I am just bad luck.. Always check your exams carefully to see if
the TA has made any mistakes.

8) I am generally a very curious person who doesn't mind studying anything.
But after studying something for a long time, I would also get bored and
frustrated.. At those times, I would keep telling myself "STUDYING SHOULD BE
ENJOYABLE. IT IS REALLY INTERESTING!" OK.. Maybe I was just a bit too crazy..I
don't know. My point is that at times, it is important to motivate yourself
and to keep remind yourself how interesting the topic is.

These are all I can think about it so far..If I remember more, I may add
later.

------
vellum
His inability to focus sounds like ADD. I thought all the college kids were
doing Adderall these days. I'd recommend getting some counseling for that,
plus the depression and anxiety. I wouldn't be too worried. Grades != work. If
he's a CS major and can program his way out of a paper bag, he should be able
to find work easily.

------
stevewillows
The later you can discover that you're smarter than someone else, the better.
You're not alone in being at a disadvantage for discovering this at a young
age. The humility that results from the awakening is jarring, but with some
work you'll turn out just fine despite the initial discouragement.

------
krisroadruck
I don't mean to be a dick, but its called the 99TH percentile for a reason.
Those guys getting top marks are smarter than 99 percent of the general
population. I've often been a bit mystified by peoples inability to recognize
where they sit on the intellectual bell curve.

------
16s
He/she is a great writer. Good advice too.

Break big tasks down into small ones, practice and train for each small task
and then when the big tests (or the challenges of life) come you'll be
prepared.

Learning how to study will help you learn how to live and deal with life in
general.

------
melling
Here's JFK's Harvard application.

<http://www.scribd.com/mobile/doc/46922945>

I get the feeling he didn't work as hard as most of the people posting here.
I'm sure the same can be said for a lot of famous people.

------
abecedarius
Good thing here: facing the feedback and updating.

Not so good: taking the narrow criteria of school grading as a crucial measure
of worth. High or low, it may matter, but not so intensely as this writer
seems to feel it.

------
dools
I'll throw my little story in here in case the OP is reading - always helps to
have multiple points of view.

I did alright in primary school[1] but mentally checked out in the first year
of high school (year 7). I actually told my mum not to waste her breath
chastising me for poor marks: I was more interested in friends and socialising
so I wouldn't be doing much on the school front. She should expect Ds. not Fs
necessarily, but D average. She was kind of taken aback but gave me the
benefit of the doubt.

In year 11 I changed schools (common in Canberra where I went to high school,
and Tasmania where I went to college which is what they refer to year 11 and
12 as, it's the last 2 years of high school when you're 17 and 18).

The school I went to in Tasmania was incredible (word up Friends' School!) and
I had amazing teachers. I caught up and got good grades in (almost) all areas
except for one crucial one: Maths.

See all the other classes like English, Psychology, Sociology, Japanese, to a
lesser extent Chemistry and Physics, weren't cumulative. Maths, on the other
hand, builds each year on what you learned the year before, so the fact that I
had been actively ignoring maths for the past 4 years meant I had no hope of
catching up. So I got a pass. I didn't fail, but I got a 7 out of 20 so pretty
close to failing.

The fact that I passed and the fact that I went to school in Tasmania meant
that I could use the Maths course I did as a pre-requisite when applying for a
Mechatronics degree when I was 21 (the final year in which I was able to use
my tertiary entrance score!).

Why I chose to do an engineering degree I have no idea. I didn't really think
too much about how Maths heavy it would be. I just thought that Mechatronics
sounded really cool. I didn't even really understand what it would entail.

The 1st year, I failed (yes, actual fail, like 32 out of 100) all my Maths
courses. Didn't even come close to passing a single one.

I then took 2 years off and deferred while I went to the UK and worked for 1.5
years in London as a programmer. I had taken 6 months of C first year, and
really loved it - it was the only class I did well in that year.

So I worked and a funny thing happened: I got a job I wasn't even remotely
qualified for, and through a trial by fire realised that I could learn things,
and then use them, completely independently. I did this professionally before
I ever did it in an academic setting.

The first year of university, and these 1.5 years following it, taught me,
basically, to RTFM.

So when it came time to go back to University for 2nd year (by now I was 23) I
took 6 months to study my high school Maths text books at my own pace. I did
all the exercises, asked some people I knew for help when I couldn't figure
something out, basically, learned Maths the same way I had realised that I
could learn how to program on the job.

I then went back and passed (with low credits) all the subjects I had failed
in 1st year, and then passed all my 2nd year Maths (and Maths related) courses
(some of them I even almost got distinctions - like 72 out of 100!)

I was so pleased with myself. I was so pleased with that fact that I'd learned
how to learn, that nothing could ever have hurt my sense of pride in those
marks, even though all the kids around me were depressed because they got a 90
instead of a 95.

The moral from this for my purposes (may or may not apply to you) was:

If you start from behind, you might never catch up in terms of the absolute
value of your outcome (ie. I think there is virtually zero chance that, unless
I was some sort of crazy genius, that I could have truly aced my Maths exams
2nd year of uni). BUT ...

Your sense of achievement at learning how to learn can, if you let it,
overshadow that shortfall AND ...

That is the most valuable thing you can learn anyway: the most valuable skill
(and the one I look for most when hiring people) is the ability to read and
parse a complex set of instructions without freaking out. This is the essence
of all learning, and regardless of what mark you come out with, you can count
yourself lucky if you figure out how to do this. It's incredibly valuable.

The secret of life: RTFM.

[1] I'll be using Australian school terminology.

~~~
ricw
That's what happens if you slack off in school. School (< age 18) is
essentially the best place to learn how to learn, and many (including myself)
defer this because they think its somehow too easy. School often seems so
irrelevant, and lets not kid ourselves, much of it is. The one thing that
isn't irrelevant however is learning how to learn. Glad you learnt it late, as
did I..

~~~
dools
Yeah I actually dropped out of Uni after 3 years but I'm so glad I went.
People kind of say to me "oh aren't you upset you didn't finish?" but in
actuality I finished like 13 courses, I just didn't do my thesis :)

But above all it just gave me the experience of figuring shit out. Totally
invaluable.

------
Iuz
I had almost all of those issues except when I, filled with hate and
competitiveness, decided to drop everything off and focus it paid off.

Maybe even with the good result I should know I'm making a mistake.

------
womenintech
This was a really heart felt piece. Wishing you all the best.

------
Surio
Hmmm.. pastebin.com is not available from my geo location. I've had this
couple of times before also.

Is there an alternative link to the original post?

The rest of the comments have been a good read anyway.

thanks.

~~~
zalzane
<https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/6789520/paste.txt>

~~~
Surio
Thank you.

------
otikik
Dude. Chill. Grades are just numbers on a paper. Imagine how they will look
when you are old and have children. You will probably not even remember them.

------
dvirsky
I would consider getting tested for ADD. I am not a professional or anything
but some of what OP has described sounds to me like the symptoms of ADD.

------
lefinita
To think that I'm are ready for a challenge, but mostly I fail without
preparation, that mindset makes me weak and always fail

------
rmg7344
I've been experiencing the same feelings as well, OP. All we can do is to try
to get better.

~~~
tunetosuraj
but we won't get better. Isolating ourselves and force-focus is not the key. I
don't know a lot about the subject OP's referring to but to get good score all
you need to do is understand things. Self study may not help at this time,
have a friend over who is more or less like you but try and study together.

I'm just like OP. Recently I gave exams and if I hadn't had my friend over for
studies then I would have failed. Now I'm getting a decent score.

I have learned something today, "To lose false confidence in me". You have
opened my eyes.

I was fiddling with scripts and browsing all day long just before my physics
exam. Can you believe it?

All the best ;)

------
readme
Focus is the key to success in everything.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Focus is a byproduct of giving a damn. Find what you give a damn about and
you'll learn focus through practice.

~~~
swampthing
You would be surprised - there are actually a lot of people who, for whatever
reason, are unable to focus even on something they care greatly about.

~~~
ZenoArrow
Perhaps you and I have a different definition of focus. Can you give me an
example?

------
zallarak
This is hilarious, this dude needs to get outside and enjoy the sun more.

