I find it amazing how narrow the gap is between brilliant and average, particularly for intelligent people. A couple of hours of reading a textbook can sometime

I find it amazing how narrow the gap is between brilliant and average, particularly for intelligent people. A couple of hours of reading a textbook can sometimes be equivalent with about a year of public school education. Case in point: Took AP Computer Science my sophomore year of high school. I got C's on most of the tests (mostly code tracing) for the first two months or so. After getting a particularly bad grade on a test (near failing, and I got all A's in everything else), I went home and thought "fuck this" and pulled out some Java book and read it for about 5 hours. After this, I moved from being about 40th percentile to best student in my class. I got high A's the rest of the year without trying particularly hard, and I actually enjoyed the class, and this lead to me starting to program on my own for fun, and eventually becoming a pretty good programmer.