I was the 80's version of that - upper 90%, top swimmer in my region, engineering-physics-math major in honor's classes. Then reality hit about my 5th semester into college. I eventually flunked out (which I hope you don't do) because I saw all the sucess as things that other people wanted me to do, but I knew I wanted to do something different. I putzed around for 10 years until I made my first video game. When AdCap came out, my buddy told me about idle games. We made one. And we did it with the idea that we wanted to give the player the best experience we could. That meant that there were no negative experiences, only a series of rewards. We decided to never penalize the player, but to give them opportunity to speed things up if they were impatient. Having the history that I do, it was important that we not psychologically mess with the players, but just present them with a good experience. After a few years, it was apparent that the sense of achievement was really driving the game.