I see quite a lot of parallels to what Brian says and myself. But, for myself I see it as pure lameness on my part.
Let's see:
My high school principle was sentenced to death for mass murder (true).
I failed basketball my senior year of high school in gym so got a "D" in gym that year.That was even though I was on the varisty ice hockey team and junior varsity tennis team.
I was totally not interested in high school my senior year and did no home work, all year. For my physics class, I did the best in the class for the first standardized class but later failed them. I failed physics. I may have failed math: I don't even know (I failed geometry in 10th grade. I stopped going to school a couple of days before graduation so never got a high school diploma. I actually don't know if I would have received one.

After a few years of Woolworths stockroom, working in the office and yard of a shipyard, unloading fish...all for minimum wage or very close to it, I snuck into a unselective state University (the one with the keg parties).

One of my classes was Journalism. The professor was a fraud. I mean, he made up all his credentials. He was also crazy. He would come to class and tear up a book and then leave, when he came to class at all.

When they fired him late in the quarter or semester, the chair of the journalism department asked what grade I thought I deserved. I was honest, and still try to be, so I asked for a "C", because I had not done the paper (in part because it was a little hard to take the class seriously. I got the "C". This may have contributed to going on academic probation. But, that was better than the 8 people who lived in the suite I was living in the year before: their combined cumulative average was 0.2 because one of them got a D.

Later, my last 2 years I worked hard and did well, and got a job with just a B.A. with an oil company where I picked up a lot of the expertise that I still use. Later, in grad school, I took about 6 more math classes to add tot he couple (1 remedial) that I took as an ungrad. These math classes, for me, were a complete waste of time, even the ones I got As in. I just learned to do the problems and not how to understand what I was doing. I would have been better off working on writing during that time.

I had a lot of problems in grad school, that were probably related to undiagnosed (yet) migraines and anxiety. A couple of times I had to hand in blank tests and drop courses.

I still ended up with a Ph.D. I actually respect most the people who do the most with the least educations: broadcaster Peter Jennings (dropped out of school at 16), Tom Dibblee (Bachelors), Nano Seeber (Bachelors, some grad classes).

I'm good at what I do despite all of that. Writing is the biggest problems, although I am vastly better than 20 years ago. I also need to say "no" more often and write more papers ("no" to working with students, "no" to projects with no salary like Haiti, and not sink excessive amounts of time into a single project (Turkey). It is the last that will cause me to have zero salary in a couple of months (haning in with 50% now).

Chris