> Perhaps it should be; everyone can be the best at something. You have to find your something.
This implies there are at least 8 billion “things to be good at” which I don’t think is necessarily true. I suspect most people are not the best at anything.
True. There are far, far more things to be good at. I can make up a completely new board game right now and I'll be the world champion at it immediately.
At a slightly less extreme level, it's always possible to find something niche enough that is just so obscure that you can become the best by persistence alone. Maybe you're the world expert on blue umbrellas manufactured in 1993.
People don't want to be best at something for the sake of it, but because it brings some perks with it - recognition, fame, money. Being the best in a game which literally nobody else knows is largely meaningless. I mean, try it, it doesn't take much time to make up a trivial game. Does it bring any kind of satisfaction to know you're the best in the world (because nobody else knows it)?
(to be fair, there is also inner satisfaction coming from deep understanding and mastering of some activity, but alone it's rarely enough without any external validation to motivate people)
> I can make up a completely new board game right now and I'll be the world champion at it immediately.
That sounds intuitively true, but it's not.
I thought the same thing, until I met an actual board game genius who beat me at every single game we played that I invented and practiced before playing against him.
That's why he makes a pretty good living creating and selling board games and I don't.
People with talents do exist, unless board games is your thing, it won't work.
Maybe there are with combinations. I might be the best programmer who can do woodworking, play flamenco guitar, and squat 475 lbs. I'm just waiting for that category to be added to the Olympics.
I think your real niche is going to be creating software for luthiers that enables you to design the flamenco guitar of your dreams. Critically, you discover the ideal guitar body for flamenco is incredibly heavy…
That seems like a leap to me. I bet there's plenty of people who could take over that life and rough set of preferences and do a better job of being happy.
If I say that some people would be happier in some kind of impossible to reach theoretical, that's not a good thing, is it?
And the person you were talking to didn't even say they were happy! They just said they're the best at some combination of things. Even assuming they are happy, they're probably not near the top of the happiness charts. "best at making yourself happy" looks to me like a completely unfounded guess/hope.
This implies there are at least 8 billion “things to be good at” which I don’t think is necessarily true. I suspect most people are not the best at anything.