I had a coworker once who was a college drop-out and had exactly all of the flaws that the VP warned about in your story. He was highly intelligent, and could have made a great software engineer, but his focus and work ethic were terrible, and his work suffered for it terribly. He was exactly the kind of person for whom everything was easy their whole life, then they finally reached a level where blind intelligence alone was not sufficient, and has no persevering skills to fall back on.

I hit that same crisis my sophomore-junior years of college, but powered through it and finally learned the skill of hard work (which most other students had already mastered by high school).