Also, goals can grow and change, as you experience and learn more about various fields of study. Pursuing an academic physics career, as appealing as it currently appears, may lead you into areas that you find even more fascinating and rewarding.
I agree with this completely.
I've never taken an IQ test, but my profile seems to be similar to yours, and I had similar goals to you at your age. I did the first two years of a physics major and did decently well, but decided to drop it because other interests called to me more. I don't consider the time in physics class wasted.
I think I do have a genuine spatial weakness compared to the average person, not just a relative weakness (learning to drive was extremely painful for me, for instance), and that did make a lot of physics work challenging - I had a hard time picturing some of the situations in physics problems, and had a dreadful time with things like vector cross products. I still got As and Bs in physics classes, and I had the ability to finish the major; it just didn't seem like enough reward for the effort when the intensive course in electromagnetism came up, and so I switched to computer science. Someone with my abilities who was more motivated to do physics could probably have gone on to graduate school in it.
You're not stuck with what you decide on in high school for the rest of your life - you're not even stuck with something if you get an undergraduate or graduate degree in it. Not to mention, with the economy the way it is,
no one is guaranteed a career track that they'll get to stick with forever; this is even more true now than it was when I was in college (undergrad class of 2007).
Even if you later decide physics is not for you, what you learned studying it can enrich your knowledge of anything else you decide to pursue. No learning is wasted.
