From as far as I could remember, I was always a terrible student. Taking instructions has never been my forte. Three words into anyone telling me about something, I would drift away into other worlds, even if the instructions were of a very important nature. But I have always loved learning things so that I could solve a problem.
A problem provides a finite outcome from which I can retrace my way back to a knowledge/ability/skill that helps me get there.
This, predictably, created significant challenges in my academic life. I could never really find much meaning in studying so much of theory, while, at the end of studying it all, you could still do not a lot or solve many real-life problems with it.
Understandably, people could not understand the stubbornness with which I would not make an effort, often marking it off as laziness or lack of interest. For me, it was just a case of I could not see the point in doing it if I could not solve a problem with it.
It was a means without a fitting end.
Of course, having grown up into an adult, I do see the point to it. Outliers cannot be the norm in any system because that would result in chaos the system cannot handle.
That said, I do sometimes wonder, how it would have been to be in an educational system that had outcome-driven the norm.