Everybody is a pure genius learning machine when they are born. But by the time we finish school, we've lost almost all of our natural gifts. Why is this? Because that's the way the system was designed.
Contrary to popular belief, school doesn't exist to teach people anything. It exists for several reasons, and serves several groups, but it does NOT serve students.
To begin with, the whole "teach a room full of kids" method was created not as a teaching system, but as a sorting system. This was first created in Prussia, and they wanted a quick and painless way to determine who should be the aristocrats, who would be the soldiers, and who would be the workers.
School was perfect for this. By the time kids had gone through the system, they knew who belonged to which group.
Then during the industrial revolution, school changed into an assembly line to create assembly line workers. The basic concepts of math, science, and language were enough to teach kids anything they needed to become workers in those new, smoke-belching, factories that were popping up everywhere.
If you were bored in school, if you didn't reach your potential, if you tried but kept hearing that you should just listen and not speak, it's not your fault. School wasn't designed for you.
How about modern times? Who benefits from the school system?
One group is labor union leadership. Teachers don't have a choice but to pay union dues. And guess who collects part of this? Labor management. They don't have to do anything except collect their money.
What do they do? Increase teachers salaries, so (union leaders) get more money. They increase the number of teachers, so they (union leaders) get more money. How do they do that? By paying off politicians. Do they care about kids? No.
Who else benefits? Big corporations. A million kids go through the system, and maybe a few thousand are chosen to work for the big corporations. Do the big corporations pay for any of this? Nope.
They benefit from the filtration system with having to support it. Do they care about the kids who don't make it to the top 1%? Nope.
Bottom line is that school wasn't created to benefit you. That means only you can rediscover your genius. It won't come from books. It will come from your experience, your life, and everything you learn along the way.