It's interesting how much we (specifically Americans, but it may be a wider phenomenon than that) really love success stories that follow from academic mediocrity or failure. This is a perfect example: we really want Fred Smith to have built his business on an idea that got a bad grade in school. A really common example is the misconception that Albert Einstein did badly in school.
I don't know how widespread this was, but when I was a youngster, people started noticing that high achieving people tend to both do well in the workplace and in school. Many took that visible correlation to mean that school is what causes one to become a high achiever, and from there started pushing the idea that you will be forever stuck working for minimum wage at McDoanlds if you do not graduate from top academic programs.
While, from an adult perspective, it is logically silly and a violation of all standard economic models, when impressionable children are hearing this from respected adults on a frequent basis it is something that sticks in the mind.
Now the people I grew up with are adults, doing just fine for themselves, and most are certainly not stuck forever working at McDonalds for minimum wage, no matter how less than stellar their academic track record ended up being. I feel these success stories are appealing to these people because it is a sort of "I told you so" moment towards those who pushed the wrong message on them.
We also exaggerate the addictive potential of drugs. For the most part, only a fraction of individuals, those particularly genetically prone to serious drug addiction, will suffer. Moreover, environment is often a strong causative factor in almost all forms of addiction.
Yet there are good reasons for exaggerating addiction potential to young children. Taboos are a coarse but effective social mechanism, and maintaining them often requires lying. Moreover, it's far easier and cheaper (especially given paucity of our scientific knowledge) than attempting to identify those particular children and adults most likely to become addicted.
Likewise, exaggerating the necessity for going to college is a cheap and easy way to guide expectations and channel effort. It's no surprise that upper-middle class children both graduate from college at higher rates _and_ generally have much better economic prospects--it's because of this very sort of unquestioned enculturation. Same phenomenon for Asian groups and other highly successful subgroups within society.
Reality will intrude soon enough. You don't need to tell a kid that Santa Claus doesn't exist; he'll figure it out. The only difference between that and other cultural lies is that when a kid figures out there's no Santa Claus he doesn't have a life-long chip on his shoulder or believe that he uniquely outsmarted the man. But when it comes to drugs, college, and now apparently homeownership, people seem to think they've attained some sort of unique, hard-won insight. And that cynicism is the only reasonable reaction.
I grew up super poor. Nobody ever told me to go to college. In fact, adults ridiculed "book learning" and school counselors exaggerated the unavoidable costs of college. But I did go to college--a private one with a generally elite upper-middle-class and upper-class student body. Both cultures lied to their children, but as an adult I can tell you which lie I'd have much preferred. And I can't say I'd have preferred the cold, hard truth, either. The truth is usually far more difficult, if not impossible, to articulate, especially to young people. Indeed, the truth usually requires context that just doesn't exist when you're talking about the distant future.
Drugs are another good example. When we hear stores about people like Steve Jobs and other success stories having used drugs, and even sometimes crediting their success to drug use, we get a similar feelings toward those who told us the wrong stories. I suppose there is something satisfying about showing them that they were wrong.
I think it's the "Office Space" phenomena. Everyone is a Peter Gibbons and to paraphrase, 'the truth is that I don't really give a shit, Bob.'
People like the underdog success stories because hey, if they did REALLY start to try over the next few years, it could be them too. But I think that besides luck, the secret sauce is probably perseverance more than any sort of inherent genius. I think the common thread behind a lot of people who achieve remarkable things is just that they didn't mind spending a ton of time banging their heads against walls and being wrong.
Or...whatever, just the 'temporarily embarrassed millionaire' quote for the hundredth time.
Americans love an underdog. Bonus points for an underdog pitted against an authority figure. Extra bonus points when that authority figure is in academia.
The attraction of this tale isn't that Smith got a bad grade on the paper or even that he was a mediocre student, but rather that a scrappy undergrad had a great idea but his prof couldn't see the genius of it.
It's that "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" cultural attitude.
Everyone loves the stories about how Zuckerberg and Bill Gates dropped out of college, but conveniently forget that they dropped out of Harvard, not some random community college.
I think it's also a similar effect to Australia and New Zealand's Tall Poppy Syndrome, or Scandinavia's Law of Jante, where people try and take down those better than them. People who didn't go to college want to tell people who did "it doesn't matter anyway, the richest man in the world is a dropout".
That's because the skills and traits that get you straight As in school are not the skills and traits that produce innovation and greatness. The former relies on conforming to set expectations and the latter involves either ignoring those expectations altogether, or exceeding them to such a degree that they can barely be said to apply at all and in the process setting an entirely new baseline.
Anyone who has any understanding of American history and our national character can see why we're attracted to nonconformists who achieve great success.
Not gonna fly on HN, where any "serious" programming by definition takes place in teams, where people welcome stuff like Go enforcing a brace style just so they don't have to argue with others, but alas, it's true:
> 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.
The skills that get you straight As in school are trying, being organized, dedicated to seeing things through, and being willing to work hard. That's it. It's just a question of priorities.
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.
Poverty and wealth are both primarily consequences rather than causes. It's very easy to confuse the direction of the arrow of causation though. And of course I say primarily because there are feedback loops that muddy the picture a bit.
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.
In high school, lots of people get straight As without any of that drudgery. Just 1.5σ gets one so far out of range of teachers that one need only glance at the books at which one chooses to glance.
I think that it's because most people (like myself) don't have As, and wish to imagine themselves probably becoming the next Einstein even it they've showed no real sign of genius yet.
Dramatic contrast also makes for a better, more memorable story. That's what gets written, that's what gets spread around by word of mouth. Survival of the fittest maximises contrast in the story.
BTW a variant I've heard is that people who get 2nd class honours do better in their (non-academic) careers than those who get a 1st.
BTW2 Einstein actually did do badly in one subject at school - practical physics. src: Isaacson's bio
I've read elsewhere that the professor had a rule that you should not write a paper about anything illegal. That was because during the 1960s at least one idiot wrote a paper like "I'm gonna start a marijuana farm and make millions!!!!!!" So the professor had a rule, no papers about starting marijuana farms, or any other illegal idea.
The FedEx that became successful in the 1970s was borderline illegal a few years earlier. Regulations were reduced during the 1970s and then finally phased out when President Jimmy Carter deregulated the transportation industry in 1980. So Fred Smith's idea was in the same category as starting a marijuana farm. Both ideas faced hostile governmental overview. This is indirectly acknowledged in the quote from Esquire:
"His skeptical professor didn’t think such a business had a ghost of a chance, considering the airline industry’s intense competition and heavy regulation."
Right, in the 1960s the idea would have been very difficult, but regulations changed a during the 1970s and largely ended in 1980. FedEx's big success in the 1970s and 1980s was made possible thanks to the change in regulations.
Seems to me that if someone is used to getting Cs, and they don't remember what great they made on a term paper, it's a pretty good bet that they got a C.
Frankly, though, I think it's not that great. Sure, it has a lot of emotional resonance, but that's because the Vietnam War has lots of emotional resonance. Seen solely as a memorial, it's cold & impersonal. That kinda works, given Vietnam's role as the first U.S. victory[0] the country felt badly about.
[0] Yes, the U.S. won: North & South Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, in which North Vietnam agreed that the South Vietnamese people would be allowed to determine their own political future. It was only in 1974 & 1975, after Nixon's resignation, that North Vietnam again invaded South Vietnam, breaking the treaty.
I have to wonder if at some point an Esquire fact checker called up his professor and asked if he kept individual grades in ancient student records. My guess is that it has been too many years now and all records are lost.
He graduated in 1966, so it's been at least 51 years now. There's a pretty good chance the professor is dead, and a near-certainty he's retired. So I would say close to no chance at this point. Back when Esquire did the story in 1978, however, it had only been 12-15 years. It's within the realm of possibility the grade book would have been findable at that time.
I suspect you're right. I think most universities only store things like evidence of semester final exams/papers. And those are probably not stored beyond ten years for undergrad.
I expected this article to be at least tangential to C programming. Glad to C otherwise, I'm almost grateful. I know C pretty well, though, and would miss or reinvent it if it wouldn't exist.
