I was probably fortunate that this kind of frustration came much earlier in my life. In elementary school, I basically never studied for any exams other than memorization-style spelling and vocab tests. I excelled at math but was mediocre at best at everything else. I distinctly remember getting a 17/100 on a 5th grade, take home, open book history test. (actually, the only reason I was good at math was because I went to my normal "American" school 5 days a week and a separate "Japanese expat" school on Saturdays and had double the math hours as all my peers)

I also remember when things changed for me, and had OP's "I can do better" moment. It was in 7th grade when I got my first B in math in my life (Algebra) and narrowly escaped a C in Civics (I think I got a 79.6). While not "disastrous" marks by any means, it was still incredibly jarring for a generally studious kid who always turned in his homework on time, wrote his papers, tried hard, etc.

Looking back, it's strange that the almost-C bothered me, since I think I had some Cs during elementary school. Maybe I had instinctively known that in Junior High, the stakes were somehow higher. But more importantly, my new friends were getting straight A's, and I knew that there was no reason I couldn't do just as well as them. Also, I knew that I was "good at math" and that I should of course be able to get an A in the subject. Of course, I had basically never studied in my life, so it was growing pains figuring out how I can do well in history/literature/spanish exams.

I somehow managed to figure out a studying method that worked for me and it was good enough to get me near straight A's throughout the rest of Junior High. My High School was the same as my JH, so knowing "the system", I was able to do similarly well in HS. The biggest difference that I can see between OP and myself is that my "on" switch was flipped 6-7 years before OP's, which allowed me to turn on the after burners while I still wasn't too far behind my peers and still had enough time to catch up.

However, I was definitely not the most efficient or the smartest in my class, and was probably putting in the most time out of anyone in my grade. Two guys were definitely much much smarter than me and I knew it, despite my having higher grades than either of them. To this day they are two of my closest friends.

Looking at the "traits" OP describes in the studious types is really interesting to me. I procrastinated like crazy and played video games for an obscene number of hours (I would frequently borrow a RPG + the console from a friend on friday, finish the ~25 hour game over the weekend and return it to him on monday). I remember playing FF7 before it was even out in the states (since all my consoles were Japanese region) for over 300 hours and had amassed so much "gil" (money) in the game that the number was overflowing out the left side of the menu window. But it's true that I have always performed well under pressure (I always did better on the actual standardized exams than my practice exams) and put in pointlessly long hours studying the course material until I knew (almost) everything (combined with the massive hours of video gaming and extracurricular activities I had, I would often only get 3 hours of sleep/night which is just pure idiocy).

But what do I have to show at the end of it all? Honestly the result is a book smart'ish and tool'ish person who can't build anything to save his life anymore, a far cry from the kid who would tinker around and build stuff when he was 8~10 years old. I do extremely well within the defined framework of an academic setting, but I highly doubt that I'd outperform this significantly doing anything "in the real world" (I probably do outperform the "average" to some extent, but definitely not to the degree I did as a student). Hindsight is 20/20, but it would have served me much better to have focused on what I enjoyed most: drawing, tinkering around with techy stuff, etc rather than devote thousands of hours to cramming academic material into my brain.

So even if you "succeed" in the academic rat race, it's not really useful unless you're going to use those supposed "accomplishments" in the future (ex: go into consulting/ibanking where academic pedigree and GPA is heavily considered).

I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say anymore, but as a person who managed a breakthrough from a position similar to the OP (and there are quite a few people in the top colleges who didn't study hard at all to get their perfect marks -- definitely not me), I can say that it's not necessarily useful to succeed at this either. In fact getting a wake up call 4+ years earlier might turn out to be a blessing.