Why not do both? Learn your amazing life lessons outside of school and couple them with learning everything you can inside school. Why limit yourself? Why go out of your way to diminish your own value? It doesn’t make sense.

That’s how people end up in lives of mediocrity and servitude- they make self-destructive life choices that they rationalize by wrapping them up in some sort of bogus heroic narrative that they literally only came with to make them feel less bad about themselves. There’s nothing wrong with failure, right up until someone decides to not learn from their failures, and enshrines them instead because it’s a lot less work and it feels better. I’ve been there and it sucks. There is no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow.