[Chris is me]

The average A student in high school is probably not a hard working genius. They're probably just a student smart enough to get away with doing well in all their classes without real effort. They have "tons" of "fun" in college.

Occasionally you'll stumble on someone dedicated to their schoolwork more than anything, but more often than not people I know in this position do that at the expense of extracurriculars, a social life, and whatnot.

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Now with that off my chest, it seems like this thread is less about "What do those A students have that I don't?" and more about how people like you (and me, too) can become those A students wherever we need to be.

The only way to do better in school than you are now is to own up and work hard. No matter how many times you tell yourself that you're brilliant, you're going to have to apply yourself and do the work you don't necessarily want to do. It's not some aspect of your personality that you don't care about some of your classes; it's that you're not trying and it's awfully hard to connect the dots in your head that what you're doing dictates your future.

You do know how to study. You have a textbook for each class, you can read the chapters, do the practice problems if any, it's not exactly a mysterious process. You just haven't before, for whatever reason. Some people fear failure so much that they don't even try so that they can chalk it up to laziness and still feel smart at the end of the day since their abilities were never actually tested. It's silly, but it affects the best of us, apparently. Other people are unmotivated for other reasons, or they just plain don't care. Either way, the only way to really turn that around is to muscle through your work.

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If that advice actually helped you, lemme know. We're a lot less different than you might think, and my 3.1 GPA isn't going to stay that way for long at this rate...