Obsession

I would consider getting tested for ADD. I am not a professional or anything but some of what OP has described sounds to me like the symptoms of ADD.

Sometimes, its just a case of being in the wrong field of study.

I was a straight A student out of high school, with little effort to boot. Then I picked a major that I didn't really care for, because I didn't know any better ...

I breezed through the first few years of college taking general classes and the introductory classes to my major, but even then the cracks were beginning to show in my choice of major, I'd score B's where I thought I'd get A's and ever so often I'd come really close to getting C's.

When I hit the senior level courses, those B's turned to C's and ever so often I'd almost get a D.

Why the decline in performance? Nothing had changed, except what I was studying. I didn't care for it, and it didn't play to any of my academic strengths (lots of math which I simply don't have the patience for), so I couldn't just cruise through them.

When I graduated college, I had a very decent general GPA (in the low 3's), but it was only so because of my strong early performance in college, my major GPA was in the 2's. I was so ashamed that I didn't attend my own graduation and wouldn't let my family come either. I withdrew a little bit from friends and life, because I felt I had let down a lot of people and was a bit of a failure.

3 years later I discovered something I truly loved (programming and building things) and after many years of excelling at it ... I finally realized what I'd done wrong.

Hopefully you come to this realization much earlier than I did.

I too went to a top 5 school and took some of the hardest classes in a school which is famous for its hard classes. And yes, it becomes pretty obvious quickly that grades are not a reflection of intelligence. And when the threshold intelligence is high in the sample size, say at a good school, grades and intelligence may be very weakly correlated, if at all.

Personally, I do have the ability to be extremely focused for long hours. But I don't think that having that ability counts for a lot in real world. My cofounder is borderline ADHD and there are things he can accomplish that I just cannot.

I have some similar issues, though I still breezed through college (prestigious school in 3.5 years, deans list, didn't "study"). I probably related that story here (and definitely did on reddit in one of those kids-called-gifted-where-are-you-now thread), so I'll spare us that story again.

But where this really hit me was just two years after college, trying to write a large technical book (on HTML). I'm just now completing the task after 9 long months.

It seemed like my mind broke, not because it was hard, but because of some other invisible wall. I still don't have the words for it. Writing about other things and reading other writing seemed to be the only thing that helped. It was easy to write about the topics of my expertise, but so much of the book was material that I had only heard of, and had to immerse myself in completely before I could even begin the task of writing. The project was therefore a set of many tasks within tasks.

OP writes:

> Regardless of whether or not they like or dislike the material, they break the challenge of studying for a test or completing an assignment into small problems, working away until they know, not think, but absolutely know that they are ready.

There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame). The snippet that runs through my mind constantly:

    We have not wings, we cannot soar;
    But we have feet to scale and climb
    By slow degrees, by more and more,
    The cloudy summits of our time.
    
    The mighty pyramids of stone
    That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
    When nearer seen, and better known,
    Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
    
    The distant mountains, that uprear
    Their solid bastions to the skies,
    Are crossed by pathways, that appear
    As we to higher levels rise.
    
    The heights by great men reached and kept
    Were not attained by sudden flight,
    But they, while their companions slept,
    Were toiling upward in the night.

Some days its hard to open a text editor. I don't know why. But sometimes looking down at the stepping stones is more useful for moving forward than looking up at your goals or (sometimes worse) everyone else. I think of poetry and start the program.

[1] http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Ladder_of_St._Augustine

> There are four or five poems I read almost every day as a sort of cathartic ritual, and one of them is The Ladder of St. Augustine, by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (of Paul Revere fame).

Out of curiosity, if it isn't too personal, which are the other ones?