"Drive" by Dan Pink sort of talks about that. Your purpose should be something that you provide, not external factors, like grades and fears from what comes from them.
It's entirely possible to be internally driven and to still not function well in a school. (Unless you think the only purpose students should pursue is "succeeding in school".)
I think my story is a decent anecdote to support your statement. I spent half of college on academic probation with the main contribution to my terrible GPA being default failing status from skipping too much class.
I dropped out of school, got a job that was supposed to teach me something. It turned into answering the phone, but I used that time and title to land a Jr. software dev position and within just a few months I was being assigned solo projects and completing them ahead of schedule because I actually enjoyed learning the material outside of a structured environment.
I'm not a genius. I'd bet I'm not even that special. I think many people are just too conditioned to follow the wide beaten path, that even when they see a more appealing path they are scared to take it, and no one is actually encouraging them to take that path.
I'm in the same boat. I struggled through college because I had to in order to keep my parents' health insurance (!), but my heart wasn't in it. Eventually I learned to do the minimum and coast through, but I had other things going on in my life that were so much more interesting and I just couldn't muster the motivation to "study".
Enter the real world, and guess what? Critical thinking skills and a tenacity to solve real problems are in tremendously short supply. You've got high-GPA graduates galore who can't tie their own bloody shoes. Motivation is everything.