[SurfScore]

A lot of people don't mention this, but being smart (and more importantly knowing that you're smart) at an early age can have a HUGE negative effect on your development.

This obviously doesn't happen always, but when you're a kid that knows you have some superior intellect, you make immature kid-like decisions because of it. You fall in love with your own head. You believe that you just "get it." You ignore opportunities to develop skills because you have this irrational (and often misplaced) confidence in you abilities.

This sounds like exactly what happened to the OP. They never truly developed ther ability to focus because they could always skate by. Then when they finally couldn't skate by anymore, BAM, they realize "oh shit, I'm nowhere near as good at this as I thought I was."

The good news is that once you have the awareness you can fix it, which is what it sounds like the OP started to do. Just don't focus so much on grades :)

[3minus1]

I read an article a while back that how you praise your children makes a huge difference. Basically instead of telling them "you're so smart" it's much better to say "wow you tried really hard and it payed off."