Semester Post-Mortem, Wherefore Academic Excellence?

My resolution to blog weekly, as you may have noticed, was fiendishly foiled by events beyond my control, and a steady accumulation of work over the last weeks of the semester further eroded my resolve. That first shameful week I had been apprised of a Macarthur Foundation call for abstracts in a subject very close to my field of study. Although I only had a few days of notice before the due date, the potential $10,000 honorarium was motivation enough for me to spend my entire Friday in a windowless computer lab writing the outline for an ambitious but probably over-vague chapter about digital media. What became of my efforts I do not know. They promised to get back to all applicants by mid-May, but I have yet to hear anything. I'm not terribly optimistic.

After that it was one paper and presentation after another. It all turned out OK, really. Once you accept the fact that you're going to spend nearly every waking hour working on stuff, it becomes bearable in the short term. I've also wisened to my own limitations--I have about 3 hours during the day when I can do really good work, with diminishing returns after that, and I need plenty of sleep. So I don't feel guilty going to bed early, or winding down with an episode or two of The O.C. after my productive hours. It's all for the best. Just have to make sure I give myself plenty of lead time for any assignment, and I don't take on too much.

But I am far from representative of most MIT students. Some MIT folks seem to have reached their level of academic excellence due, in part, to chronic insomnia. They are able to use those sleepless hours to get stuff done. Others are almost completely socially non-functional, and not in a hip geek-chic kind of way. That's a pretty high price to pay for an advanced degree. But once you get this far out on the academic bell curve, the qualities that make a good student are necessarily abnormal. Is there a big difference between extreme academic excellence and mental pathology?

Of course, in my case, I got here out of sheer luck, which trumps all other virtues.

What do you think? Does "genius" exist, or is that an entirely bogus concept? Have incidental or even detrimental personal qualities helped you get ahead?