Micheal Simmons in his article on Medium writes about one discovery that changed his life. He once read a study that said that most US presidents, members of Congress, senators and even university presidents graduated college with low GPAs. He also discovered that most of his entrepreneurial role models had not even graduated from college, or even if they did, they definitely did not consider college an important part of their success. This information made him think: why are we told that having a high GPAs in a good (expensive) college is a road to success, while case studies of those who are in fact successful show that these people did the opposite?
If you think about it, most successful people are non-conformists. It’s logical. To be truly outstanding, you need to take personal responsibility for your education and your development, and not rely on someone else to compile a syllabus for you to follow. We all had these people in school or college who were doing every homework and studying for every subject, they had straight As and took good grades seriously. If you follow up on their careers, some of them got decent jobs, but really few of these people created something unique or new. Because innovation and creativity require a different mindset. Non-compliant, not dependent on the external motivation of a grade or teacher’s praise. It requires risk-taking and original thinking. It requires knowing yourself, understanding what you like and what makes you tick, and following your natural inclinations. Such an approach will require prioritization. You cannot put equal attention to all subjects to have good grades, and you need to take it easy on topics that are not interesting for you to invest your full attention into domains that you find fascinating.
We may think that people who did well on all the subjects in school and university are better learners than the rest of us. In fact, that wide-spread assumption can be incorrect. Studying for the test or solely for a good grade strengthens extrinsic motivation that can actually weaken our intrinsic motivation. That means that people get used to studying for the sake of some external reward, be it a good grade or a prestigious college. With this mindset, people forget about the pure pleasure of learning itself, the deep internal satisfaction from discovery, thinking and solving puzzles. Intrinsic motivation is increased by your experiences of learning when many pieces of disconnected information finally come into one unified picture, by that special state of flow when your brain is working to the maximum, and the attention is pin-sharp, wholly immersed in the process of thinking.
Putting equal time to all subjects in a school or college for the sake of grades means you might be good at them, but on the global scale, you might be closer to mediocre.
And when you are fascinated with some subject, you want to dedicate your full attention to digging it deep. This is the only way to elevate yourself above mediocrity and move towards expertise.
Some people, like Micheal Simmons, stop caring about their GPAs and ignore assignments on subjects that they do not consider necessary for their future careers. Some other people delegate the work on the non-important topics to academic ghostwriters like the ones in Personal-Writer so that they could focus on things that matter to them without the risk of being expelled from the college.
If you think about it, this is a good strategy: you have decent grades on all your subjects and keep your parents happy, while you use the college time in the way that is truly meaningful to you. Delegating writing tasks on filler subjects allows you to dive deep into areas that you want to explore in your life, building the knowledge in your own way and not just consuming a pre-digested curriculum that someone else has designed for thousands of students. If you want to be really good in your field of expertise, you need to know something different from thousands of students that attend the same college, right? You can get intrinsic motivation from learning and you can access all the resources in the world that will bring you new knowledge and ideas.
OK, summing it up: studying for the test or solely for a good grade strengthens extrinsic motivation that can actually weaken our intrinsic motivation that makes us enjoy life and studies. Therefore it's a much better way to delegate unimportant academic assignments to writing experts while putting your best energies into the subjects you truly care for.
