[hilbert42]

"Lots of smart kids who didn't have to work very hard in high school learned early that they were going to have to work harder in college."

Some don't learn early either. I was smart enough to coast along for quite a while doing little and then I suddenly had to apply myself (it was a bit of a shock). I had to relearn how to apply myself and it was harder than I anticipated.

Of course, this never applied to truly brilliant kids (they're the ones I envy). It also doesn't help when one's parents kept pointing to a couple of brothers who lived several blocks away from my home and saying to the effect 'why can't you stop mucking around and just apply yourself like them'. (They were in different classes to me and a year's difference separated them. Trouble was my mother and theirs used to associate with each other (mother's club and all that stuff), so such comparisons were easy.)

It turned out later that it wasn't that they just had normal brains but with lost of application to study—but more. Some years later (perhaps a decade or so) I opened the pages of Scientific American and started reading a fascinating and informative article, it was then that I turned to the author's name only to realize that I knew that 'bastard'. Also a check of the references showed that he had a string of publications about the subject in other advanced publications.

As they say, that's life.