Others had respectable successes, making significant improvements in learning medicine, statistics, comic book drawing, military history, and yoga, even if they didn’t reach de Montebello’s degree of success.
You listed 5 things there. Even being kind and presuming there were a couple more who experienced minimal benefit rather than dropping out, that's still a failure rate approaching 50%. If I proposed a theory based on those stats even as an undergrad, my professors would've laughed me out of their offices