I can relate. Around the age of 10 my family moved to UK. Few weeks after being enrolled in the primary school, the teachers were extremely impressed by my mat

I can relate. Around the age of 10 my family moved to UK. Few weeks after being enrolled in the primary school, the teachers were extremely impressed by my mathematical/studying ability and asked me to take a Mensa test, my parents agreed and I somehow managed to get in. That was year (grade) 6. After that I managed to a secondary grammar school solely on mental ability. I hated memorizing content, in fact, to this day I still don't remember studying at all after moving to the UK. The secondary school was boring, I strolled through the first 5 years by simply turning up to the lessons, I didn't have to do any work at home. In my spare time I concentrated on programming and building things. I almost feel fortunate that I had so much time to be creative because I got to build websites reaching 40M pageviews per year, I got the chance to play national level basketball and everything else in between. But that all changed when I started my a-levels. I picked random subjects like psychology, economics and computing along with mathematics with no thought and oh boy was that a mistake. For the first time ever I got a D on a maths test, it was horrible, I though I could just manage my a grades by simply turning up to the lesson. What was I doing wrong? "I've always been good at maths!!" I was too late to realise that I couldn't just "turn up to the lesson" and get the grades I wanted. I ended up messing up my entire year and decided to take it again. Not having studied properly over the last 6 years probably also brought my studying skills and time management down. It's kinda funny, last year I was e-mailing the google security team about vulnerabilities but somehow failing an a-level computing test! Maybe it had something to do with the boring content? This year I dropped psychology and picked up Physics instead and I've been doing pretty well, getting A and B grades in all my subjects. I also realised I prefer STEM subjects since there is less memorization involved and it's more about understanding the content. In hindsight, I could I have saved some time if I had just tried.