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> To me, the question that springs to mind then is: does that kind of attitude work as well for “lesser” mathematicians/people?

My grades shot upwards when I stopped caring about them and decided to focus on what interested me (i.e. I like subject X and want to learn it well and will not use the grade as a metric of how well I learned it).

What does 'work' mean?

If work means to live a happy and meaningful life- absolutely.

If work means to gain the prestige of a man like Conway- probably not. But I can rest assured that I likely wouldnt achieve that with other attitudes either

They may not become famous in their fields, but they're not going to be worrying about that stuff anyway, so will probably be happier. Which, it turned out for me, was a better goal all along.

It's not necessarily about becoming famous. If you're good enough, you can just work on what you enjoy doing, and it will probably yield something research worthy anyway, and your bosses will be happy, etc. Otherwise, you might end up simply having fun on dead-end stuff, which are harder to sell, academically.

But that's just my impression… mind sharing your story?