Anyone who has any understanding of American history and our national character can see why we're attracted to nonconformists who achieve great success.
Anyone who has any understanding of American history and our national character can see why we're attracted to nonconformists who achieve great success.
> This silent consensus had informed me, both at the lyé and at the university, that one shouldn't bother worrying about what was really meant when using a term like "volume", which was "obviously self-evident", "generally known", "unproblematic", etc. I'd gone over their heads, almost as a matter of course, even as Lesbesgue himself had, several decades before, gone over their heads. It is in this gesture of "going beyond", to be something in oneself rather than the pawn of a consensus, the refusal to stay within a rigid circle that others have drawn around one - it is in this solitary act that one finds true creativity. All others things follow as a matter of course.
-- Alexandre Grothendieck, "The Life of a Mathematician - Reflections and Bearing Witness" (1986)
> Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
-- C. S. Lewis
I don't see skills related to getting good grades vs skills related to innovation as being at odds with each other.
I think the big answer here is that there is something that causes both not caring about school and succeeding in "innovation" and business. It's called "wealth" and is the most effective predictor of any kind of success.
Americans are always looking for get rich quick schemes. We love to hear the story, "working hard is for suckers, just have a good idea one time and you'll be a billionaire" -- it lets us blame the poor for being poor (the cornerstone of American economic culture) because they obviously just aren't smart enough to come up with a good idea. We like to say "getting As is for suckers, you don't need it" because we want to feel better than those nerds in school who wasted their energy and time trying hard.
Then we get to college...
Saying wealth is a predictor of success is like saying success is a predictor of success. You're not wrong, but it's not a very interesting statement.
And I don't know about you, but the nerds at my school didn't waste their time on pointless crap like learning to pretend to do physics while not using calculus (preferring to do the bare minimum to get adequate grades) and instead poured their passion into things like sports, playing chess and magic, and teaching themselves how to program.