Phee-roo!

All my life there has almost always been two ways to get through anything. The way the majority of the world does it, and the way I do it. I’m smarter than the average person… it’s a fact. I’m not the smartest person alive, but put me with 100 other random people and test them, chances are I’ll do better than the average. About 7th grade is when I fully realized this, about age 13, as I romped through chess and math tournaments with ease.

Eventually, this resulted in me being able to simply hear or read something once and understand it. I did not need to perform a math function on 20 different problems to master it. I did not need to write down words and then write their definitions to learn what they meant. This work all became busy work to me and I could not justify to myself wasting my time doing it. The problem is that the world is not designed for someone like me. The world is designed for dumber people, and this has been my curse.

We live in an “‘A’ for Effort” society, where if your willing to do something 100 times, even 100 times wrong, you’ll get further than someone who does it 1 time right. High school is exactly like this, college is slightly better but with society allowing every smuck to go to college now, even professors are starting to have to give in and create busy work for their less than stellar students to make it through college.

As soon as I realized I could learn quickly, I decided not to do the busy work, the homework, or anything of the sort. I showed up for school, found out what we were working on, learned it, and then went to sleep. I woke up to take tests and made A’s on almost all of them without any effort. Spending time on homework seemed pointless. Tests wound up counting for only 30% of the grade you got in each class… it was designed this way, so that people that couldn’t pass the tests were able to breeze through the class by doing their homework which was graded primarily on effort and accounted for 70% of the grade. Between teachers being cool and realizing that I was learning and also furiously doing make up assignments to get my grades up at the end of each semester, I managed to make it through high school with a C average.

The smartest thing would have been to realize how to play the system… which is what I do now. Too bad I didn’t know then. Conform to get ahead, and strike out at the system when opportunity allows.