[ska]

Ok, "half assed four years..." was making some assumptions I shouldn't have. You could well have been doing other useful things at the time. At ~2hrs a week, you didn't actually find out what you could have done there, so that's a waste, but I understand being afraid to follow that conviction and drop college in favor of whatever you were finding interesting. I'm the last one to support the everyone-must-go-to-college message, but I understand it feeling risky.

Even in your circle though, I'm sure the (unfortunate) message was clear that the piece of paper was table stakes, not success. And every university has some variation of this message, repeatedly.

Table stakes get you a seat at the table, that's all. It's the things that aren't shown on that paper that decide what sort of a player you are. And success, in the end, is most of the time dependent on getting good at doing many of the sort of things you describe as struggling with, not because it's what you want to do, but because it's what is necessary to achieve what you are trying to do.