[ksdale]

I think this is quite insightful. There was a post on here a while ago about William Faulkner being an absolutely atrocious postmaster when he was in college. Of course, a lot of artists tend to have a more meandering paths than a lot of CEOs, but his habits as a postmaster were probably just as important to his writing career as his later habits.

This may be more applicable to artists, but my own take is that a lot of people would be surprised at how much a lot of really successful people looked like "losers" for a significant part of their early lives, due to them living in their own world and not working hard enough on anything they didn't care about because they spent all their time thinking about the one thing they really cared about.