Jay Mathews is a Harvard graduate, an education writer for the Washington Post, and a vocal opponent of the prestige obsession in college admissions (I believe he also coined the term “Namebranditis,” which I’ve since borrowed liberally.) In 2009, he penned the column, Elite Colleges Don’t Make Elite People, which posed the question, “Where did your heroes go to college?” The resulting list, which included successful people in fields ranging from business to politics to athletics, showed that the majority did not attend prestigious colleges.

I also suspected, and a decent but not exhaustive Google search confirmed, that few if any were known to have been great at everything they touched back in high school.

Yes, many of them showed teenage flashes of what would eventually be greatness (nobody wakes up at age 30 and decides to become one of the best tennis players in the world). Some even had perfect GPAs, and a few others had perfect or near-perfect test scores.

But in a list of some of history’s most famously successful people, none of their online biographies included any reference to excelling at everything they tried in grades 9-12. I couldn’t find one example of someone who’d excelled in academics, athletics, arts, leadership, music, philanthropy, student government, and testing simultaneously.

Surprising? Not really. Do you know any adults who could make the claim to high school perfection?

Today’s heroes were never perfect. Let’s cut tomorrow’s heroes a little slack.