Hm... I guess we come from different places on this topic... I remember when I was a Freshmen or Sophomore in High School I would feel bad for people that put sooooo much work into projects when I would do it in a few hours one night when I was bored from what was on TV... or I just got home from Baseball practice and I had to get it done real quick so I could go to my girlfriends house... then I realized... It's their own fault they want to be overachievers. My AP Physics teacher told me that I had an acute ability to BS about anything and act like I knew what I was talking about... (Maybe I've been BS'ing all of you? I really don't even know what a guitar is...). From that point on I prided myself in doing less work than everyone else. Because I knew I could get the same, if not better results than anyone in my class. People have different abilities... mine just so happens to be that I'm efficient with what knowledge I do have and my brain works in a deductive reasoning manner.... I never really knew how good I was until a Technical Communications class at Tri-State University... The class is designed to prepare engineers for presenting proposals and other things to corporate administrators... as well as some other things. My professor made each of us give a 5 minute speech on a topic that we were assumed to know little to nothing about... We simply would have to get up in front of the class and our professor would give us a topic that he was very familiar with. This was to test our ability to think on the fly and keep the speech flowing. He was less concerned with the content since we weren't suppose to know what we were talking about. My topic was to present the facts of how to measure the Modulus of Elasticity in metals (at this point in school we weren't expected to know this). So I went on and presented my case... and recieved high praises... That's when I realized that I can always do less work and get more out of it. It's a good ability to have, so embrace it. but don't slack too much or it will bite you in the ass. Don't be so hard on yourself. Sounds like you're a little too critical of yourself.