Average People, Rejoice! 'C' Students Most Likely To Succeed

Life success does not necessarily mean academic success.

By Nicole Weaver — Last updated on Aug 22, 2023

Photo: Ivan Samkov, Karolina Grabowska | Canva

Some parents stress over grades and push their kids to get an above-average GPA. But it all may be for nothing!

There is a time of year when students graduate and there seems to be a running theme in commencement speeches, according to Elite Daily. Students who skated by with an average GPA tend to be very successful in the real world.

This speech comes from a former President: "To those of you who are graduating this afternoon with high honors, awards, and distinctions, I say, 'Well done.' And as I like to tell the C students: You, too, can be president," George W. Bush says during his commencement speech for Southern Methodist University.

He's not the only president who didn't do the best in school, in fact, a number of other presidents did poorly in school. This list includes John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Bush's father, George H.W. Bush. President Joe Biden even struggled when he was a law student with his grades.

Are you not convinced enough that you don't need academic grades to succeed in life? Steve Jobs never finished college. The same is true for Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and Richard Branson suffered from dyslexia and dropped out of high school at the age of 15.

He isn't the only adult who told graduates that grades don't matter. Astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson also keeps it real.

"Your grades, whatever is your GPA, rapidly become irrelevant in your life," says the scientist during his speech at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. "The most dangerous people in a free society are those who don't know ... It's OK to not know. But if you don't know, but think you do know ... That is dangerous. Those are the signs of the end of an informed democracy."

So, why are GPA and academics, not a great way of determining someone's worth? It all has to do with how someone defines success. It's a person's character, experiences, connections, and who they are as a person, not their grades, that ultimately determine their direction and worth in life. Things that, essentially, cannot be graded.

So, what is success? Success requires things like passion, perseverance, drive, emotional intelligence, as well as the ability to completely accept failure.

The struggles someone has, and the way they choose to get past those struggles, are what really determine how far they can go.