My co-blogger Boatfloating makes the point that excellence in one field does not necessarily mean that excellence in other fields, and this is a good thing! Who among us is world-class at everything? Certainly not I. I don’t have an NFL physique or Pavarotti’s pipes.
This reminds me of the miracle of comparative advantage and trade. It makes me profoundly grateful to be alive in this era when I think about how we are really no better, in terms of raw human potential, than the ancient men and women that first planted fields in the Fertile Crescent, or crossed the land bridge from Siberia into the North America, and yet we are so much wealthier and live lives of such greater ease than they. Isn’t it amazing that from such crooked timber a society as ours has been fashioned? It’s a miracle is what it is, and we should all be thankful that there are opportunities for us to live better than the Kings of old even with the limits we all have.