Even though I've done things that many people consider harder than school (taught myself programming, worked at Google, quit to start my own company), I felt li

Even though I've done things that many people consider harder than school (taught myself programming, worked at Google, quit to start my own company), I felt like succeeding in school was much more difficult. (1) The main reason is that ~90% of the things you do in school make zero sense. They happen just because that's the way things have always been done. In this kind of environment, it is really hard to find the motivation and will to succeed. (2) Very few people actually give a fuck in school, which adds to the dreariness. Many of the best students are just the best at gaming the system. Most professors don't care and are focused on research. The result is that the people at the top of the system are often the people you respect the least. (3) Grading on a curve can be brutal. You can have an easy class where everyone gets the material, but because the professor wants to have a certain distribution on the test, the standard deviation is tiny. That means the line between success and failure is actually incredibly thin. This means that beating your peers is a lot more important than actually knowing the material well enough. In practice, this forces students to overstudy boring material just because everyone else is too.