I wonder how you would have fared in the normal system. We can't know which is why we need large numbers. I went trought the normal school system and I also fe

I wonder how you would have fared in the normal system. We can't know which is why we need large numbers. I went trought the normal school system and I also feel like I am pathologically unable to do anything I don't consider to be fun. I get away with it because I just barely made all the tests. But it caused me some stress, my bachelors, masters and PhD theses were finished over the weekend by skipping a lot of sleep. I do things in the end because the thought: "if others can do it, I surely should also be able to do it", motivates me to kick my own ass into action apparently. My brother is just as smart but never motivates himself in the end (near a deadline). In stead he drop the ball. He ended up an alcoholic and is now recovering, trying to find a way of life without stress. I feel I just escaped that by a small margin. Next to school I did play a lot with computers but despite this fact I went into biology. It was fun and I'm good at memorizing books by stuffing them into my brain 1 night before a test so I did well. Now, at 38 I managed to go from biology to data science to bioinformatics to software development. And I finally feel like I want to get to work, not because of deadlines but because I feel like I'm building something really cool. I wonder how I would have done in your system. I don't care much for my titles, I saw many people blindly do what their professor told them and got PhDs without creativity. Sure you have to be baseline smart, but motivation trumps IQ imo (at least when IQ is above a certain minimum, which I recon is really not as high as you would think). I almost hope my son makes it through school with minimal effort so that he has time to focus on fun things. Things that interest him naturally. I feel we lost trust in self motivation and build a pretty shitty system as an insurance against not being able to motivate oneself. But this system, at least for some, is very demotivating (my son included).