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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

  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!

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.

It honestly sounds like you do not have similar issues at all.

Everybody has an experience or story about where they hit a wall with something in their life. This post was specifically about hitting a wall in college.

Writing a book is quite a different task from taking college classes. It's also not something where you can easily compare yourself against others, which was a huge component of this post.

Wonderful! I'd love to hear about them. I also have a few go-to poems for those days I feel unbalanced. The two I've probably digested the most would be "If--" by Rudyard Kipling, and "Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann. They're not exactly hidden gems, and I've even seen them floated around HN from time to time, but man do they work.

http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gongsu/desiderata_textonly.html

http://www.kipling.org.uk/poems_if.htm

Out of curiosity, if it isn't too personal, which are the other ones?

Sorry but reading this makes me want to wretch -- the Bard character from Asterix comes to mind ;-)

>The original outside of pyramid consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece.

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://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17328703 http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/23087453?uid=3739560&#...

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.

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.

There is a certain anxiety that comes when you know you have to do something you really don't want to do. For example, a class holds no interest, you know what needs to be done but you have no inclination to do it, so you don't. Besides you can always do it later and later sounds great. The deadline draws near and you must complete tasks (final projects, prepare for the exam, etc) or risk taking the class over again. You know you need to perform but you just can't bring yourself to do it. The anxiety of missing the deadline sets in and the thought of doing something over again that you detested doing in the first place begins to eat away at you. The tasks really aren't all that difficult or time-consuming. The real barrier to success is just you and your own stubborn will. Now there's anguish from the self-inflicted pain. Then you get depressed because you realize that you did this to yourself.

Thank you for posting this. It was an eye-opening read, and hit pretty close to home.

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.

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.