“Life is what you make of it. You are dealt a pack of cards, your DNA is fixed by your mother and your father; you maybe siblings but you may get different parts and parcels of the DNA. Your job is to make the best of the cards that had been handed out to you – what can you do well; what you cannot do well and what you are worst at.” — Lee Kuan Yew
I understand where you’re coming from. I was a high-achiever early in my life and suffered when school became more about learning skills than just raw giftedness. I also went to RI and flunked out of JC. In my situation I hadn’t yet failed but I could smell that failure was coming. I decided to drop out in September of J1. My dad was a realtor and I decided to enter the industry. After NS I continued working as a realtor until I was 26 (by which point I already saved up a substantial amount of money because I live an extremely frugal lifestyle). I don’t want to live the rest of my life as a PA. I knew I had to go back to school. I signed up for 4 A-level subjects and I took a year off to study. I got AABC my first try and then I decided to take it again the next year. I then achieved 4As. With those results I applied to medical school in the UK. I’m now a man in his early 30s reading a medical degree at Imperial College London. My father is paying even though I could afford it myself if I wanted to, but he insisted.
I’m not naturally conscientious. I daydream in classes because I learn quickly. The effort to really sit down after a class to revise material is the hard part because in your mind you probably think that you already understand it. Understanding and being able to reproduce it on a test are completely different skills. So I set aside a couple hours of each down and I make it a habit to physically sit down for x amount of hours regardless of how much I think I know. It was torture at the beginning but now I’m so used to it that I don’t think about it anymore. Took me a while to understand this. Nobody in my life has ever told me that I need to work for my grades.
School isn’t only about raw intelligence. It’s a bit like having perfect pitch doesn’t make you a better musician automatically. I understand what you’re going through completely and I hope you know that you’re not alone. I’m not saying that I’m highly intelligent, but many highly intelligent people I know also suffer from this issue of drifting off in class because they often get too bored with how easy the material is. The difference between knowing down to the force of how to hit a tennis ball and actually hitting it like Federer is in the hours. A student with good studying techniques will trump a highly intelligent person who doesn’t study every single time. If instead of learning how to add, you learnt by heart every single permutation by which two numbers can be added and their answers; you’d test better. You want to know how those competitive speed cubers solve their cubes so quickly? They don’t just learn the algorithms, they actually memorize.