One of the great errors in life is to imagine it as a zero-sum game. You’re born with X amount of talent, or wealth, or luck, or willpower, and that’s that. If you make such an assumption about yourself, you’re hobbling yourself before you even leave the gate; because the fact of the matter is you can increase your skills and abilities, your perseverance and your patience; and working on those qualities will benefit you at no cost to anyone else.
That’s pretty strange,
when you think about it. You can make
something out of nothing … sort of. You
can, using the (perhaps fairly limited) set of gifts you were handed
genetically, make yourself more.
Where did that more come from?
Was it anywhere before you possessed it?
It certainly wasn’t floating around in the ether; and you didn’t take it
from anyone else. Aristotle would say it
was in you in potency, but that just means you had some more basic abilities or
qualities in your nature that allowed you to develop this super(your)nature—which,
again, did not exist before.
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