There are a lot of things that one can be in the absolute top of, and overall academic achievement need not be one of them. Speaking personally, when these art

There are a lot of things that one can be in the absolute top of, and overall academic achievement need not be one of them. Speaking personally, when these articles come out, there are always a lot of comments about "I didn't really try super hard in high school, but college was a huge wakeup call for me and I had to learn to learn." That wasn't me at all. I somewhat lazily skated through high school, and got a mix of 4s and 5s on AP exams. I did the exact same thing in college, with no change to my work/learning ethic, and lazily skated my way to finishing my 4-year molecular bio degree in 3 years, with a GPA of like 3.5 or so. Then I went to grad school, did more of the same for two years, and won an award for having the 2nd best masters thesis produced by the university that year. Then I got a great job in my field doing cancer research, did that for 5 years, then jumped careers entirely and now work in robotics. But you know what? I feel like I'm constantly surrounded by people smarter than me. I'm not some brilliant person, I'm just some dude that when presented with some problem, things just seem to make sense for a path forwards, and maybe my special thing is that I just always go explore that path and learn that either I was right or why I was wrong and that just pays dividends. When I see people around me who work hard at things, who study and memorize and read papers, they impress the heck out of me, because I really struggle to do the same thing. And when I do, I really struggle to absorb any information; if something doesn't make sense to me, it's like it just passes out of my head. I have to do/build/try it to make it make sense a lot of the time, or at least have things framed in a way that just intuitively makes sense for me. Anyway, my point is that maybe I was the top 99.99% of something, because, clearly I was/am pretty good at some things that apparently most "gifted" people struggle with. But I never got a 4.0, I never aced all my classes, and I never really cared to as long as I felt I was getting what I needed to out of the classes. I did the work I needed to do to gain the information and skills I felt I was there for, and as long as the number assigned to me by the professor for doing so was at least an 80, I was happy.