You wanna know how the proverbial Bill Gates-who-dropped-out-of-school-yet-became-a-millionaire thing happens? I'll tell you.

I work with a computer science major. He's good, he knows his stuff, but we've been stumped a few times in the program we're developing for our research project.

One time we were stumped, but he saw a friend of his and asked him if he had any ideas. This friend thought a little bit, went to the web, and soon pulled up a piece of code that demonstrated the concept of what we needed to do. He explained it, Brent implemented it, and away we went. This guy was a whiz! He knows so much about programming. We were telling him a little bit about our project and program and he was telling us about this other language that would've made it way easier... He was one of the proverbial computer geeks that seems to know everything.

Later, I asked Brent about him, and Brent said he didn't even make it into pro-school in computer science, so he had to switch over to Mathematics. And that was even though he knows way more than Brent.

Now, it's not that hard to get into pro-school (which qualifies you for junior and senior level classes in the College of Engineering) if you're a responsible, Math-oriented person. But the reason this guy didn't make it was because he'd take assignments and make them way harder than they had to be, do all this wild stuff, and then wouldn't get them in on time.

Brent--and I'm the same way--would just make sure he knew what exactly the teacher wanted and do it.

Here's the thing. This guy could drop out of college because of grades, but still get a job somewhere coding, channel his creativity, and all of the sudden be a star codepounder. He's a dictionary programming-wise. If he can channel it to doing something strategic and productive.