Self-Discipline Outdoes IQ in Predicting Academic Performance in Adolescents

And if you are here reading this after telling yourself you really would code your ass off today, you already lost.

I'm not surprised.

For me school has always been about discipline and dedication and not about skill. The school adapts itself to a lower difficulty so that more will pass and they compensate by making it more cumbersome so that the skilled, but not so disciplined, will get bored and not perform as well.

This was also my personal experience. I was pretty good at math but I never got any challanges so I just didn't do anything, but luckily I aced the tests and the only homeworks we got where to have complete the chapters. This translated to other courses where I was good, but I got bored and not motivated so I got a lot worse grades than I could've had if I was dedicated.

I managed to motivate myself later on to get good grades, other would call them great, but I know I could've had straight A grades if I just weren't so lazy and skipped a lot of hours.

Furthermore it doesn't help (doesn't show in grades) if you know a subject really well. Often the workaholics, or a bit nicer: those with more discipline than me, would just study like hell before a test and get a great score, where I wouldn't but I knew the subject well enough so I would get a great score too. I'm a bit upset with this because I doubt that they could remember anything from those tests but I felt I could remember them for months.

I wouldn't be surprised if this held true for particular subjects that are generally thought of as "hard" as well. My favorite is mathematics. I used to have a really tough time with maths and used to hate it. Then, the smartest friend I have (who coincidentally did his PhD in financial mathematics with Freddy Delbaen back then -- for those who don't know this area, that means he was really good) once made an offhand remark along the lines of "Most people think of mathematicians as 'geniuses' -- if only. You have no idea how much you simply have to learn by heart and how much work it can be." That sort of pushed me over the edge and I started to re-learn mathematics from the ground up, starting with, yes, high-school material, working my way up with MIT OCW courses (http://ocw.mit.edu) and eventually being able to take PhD classes in statistics in the space of about 2-3 years (incl. periods of part- and full-time work). Not bad for a guy who couldn't tell the difference between cos and sine functions when he started. And all because I shed the notion of "math is for talented people" and started to actually work my ass off. It was surprisingly "easy" once I put in the work and I also noticed how shortcuts taken in one part would hurt me down the road later so it really was all about remaining disciplined.

Why do you care about academic performance? Wouldn't your time be better spent on entrepreneurial endeavors?

BTW, it appears that fast thinkers are less likely to be creative people:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527535.500-a-slow-mi...

Duh. But you can get pretty far on pure IQ. Every male in my family is a useless lazy sack, but we all have science PhDs.