Was Bill Gates better off as an entrepreneur and a drop-out? Yes, he's a highly gifted individual -- for him the freedom to focus on what he does best allowed him to shine and get from life huge returns when compared to what the 'system' would have reserved for him. But for a significant part of the more average folks, we could have trouble stating similar things.
The question in the title is nothing more than a matter of risks and insurances against them: do you want to take the chance of dropping out of school and pursuing your raw intelligence/dreams or you want the overhead of an administrative process in order to get at the end some lose guarantees about your hire-ability and your skills... It's not an easy question and it depends too much of everyone's personal situation (parents support, wealth savings etc) to be addressed generally.
He had a cartoon on his door, at one point. A figure walking down the street in the city. All the signage around him displaying "Lies". I thought it was excessively cynical, at the time. Over the intervening some decades, I've come to understand his point of view.
It's better to understand the system. Then make your own, informed choices. If you like doing something, do it. If you're doing it because someone told you there's an eventual payoff, beware.
Better for you: smart. You will be happier, or at least know the reasons you are unhappy.
You can't be proactive to solve the unknown.
Also the opposite of reactive is not proactive.
Apart from being pedantic about the word proactive, I also totally disagree with the premise of the article, some of the most inventive problem solvers I've met are lazy as hell.
It's anticipatory action to deal with a known future event.
Being smart isn't an achievement and hard work won't get you there. It is merely potential and without execution, it eventually becomes "wasted potential."
So long as you get a 3.5 GPA or above, you can, in the words of a fellow alum's mom, "pretty much do what you want." But what you want to do may not even involve that kind of GPA signaling.
If you really are smart, then you can figure out how to generate the right sort of signal for your purposes. You'll also figure out that you're not infallible and that there are others out there who are smarter than yourself. From this, it follows that durable signals need to be based on real underlying value.
OTOH, a personal story:
In school, I got excellent grades up until lots of effort was required. At that point my grades went down drastically. This is what comes from being praised as smart, separate from results.
It took me a good while after I was out of school to really come to grips with things, and it's still a bit of a struggle. However, I have managed to make a career of programming. I try to play to my strengths, solving tricky problems that don't yield easily to hard work alone. This makes me fairly valuable, though I have to work hard to find employment where management realizes that there are roles for people like me. Currently I develop software in support of the science team on an active NASA space mission. If I can pat myself on the back a bit, that's not bad for someone who took an extra semester to graduate high school and never went to college.
So someone smart can learn to work harder and be results oriented, but without help from parents and school I think it's a lot harder and brings delays. What could I have done if I'd been praised for results rather than "being smart?" I don't obsess about that, but it comes to mind these days as I raise my child.
I know what I might say will be unpopular, but what I've seen most of my life is subpar mediocre students will argue that grades mean nothing. They argue they could get straight A's if they cared to, but it's too boring, or whatever. And not surprisingly none of the ones that I grew up with are now what one would call a "professional success". None have started companies or done anything that would published in even a trade magazine/journal. In fact, of all the people I knew in high school who have been chronically unemployed, they all fit in this bucket.
With that said, they may have all figured out that things like jobs and startups are a fool's racket. And being able to dedicate more time to just having fun, whether it is sleeping around, XBox, being in a band, or playing basketball.
Grades are a sign of effort. Effort wins most of the time.
What really surprises me about the wildly successful people I meet is that most of them aren't brilliant. But all of them work their asses off. Non-stop. I haven't met one who was brilliant and had a good work/life balance. Unsurprisingly, these habits often (but not always!) start early... Most of these successful people went to great schools and got great grades.
There's gobs of people out there. Differentiate yourself, so that people actually care when you talk to them.
[Edit] A friend tells me it's pass or distinction. Oh well.
