The World Doesn't Pay for What You're Best At
We pick the career that pays, not the one we're built for. I'm only now asking what that cost me.
When I taught test prep for the psychometric exam - Israel’s version of the American SAT - I heard the same sentence dozens of times, in different versions:
“I thought about studying agriculture. Or marine biology. But it’d be a waste of the high score I got - so I’ll do software engineering instead.”
Every time, I watched a smart, capable kid quietly trade the thing they were drawn to for the thing that paid better. And I never said much, because I’d done exactly the same thing.
Here’s the idea I keep coming back to. Everyone is born with a real aptitude for something. About almost anyone, you can say: “even as a kid, you could see they had a gift for X.” But here’s the catch - the world doesn’t reward all gifts equally, and which gift it rewards changes from era to era.
In the 21st century, the best-paid work is in senior management, tech entrepreneurship, medicine, and finance. So the prized talents are mathematical ability, leadership, building things, financial fluency. If your gift happens to be one of those, lucky you - the era you were born into pays for exactly what you’re good at.
But rewind to the Renaissance. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the money and the status went to artists, scholars, merchants, teachers. Michelangelo, da Vinci, Raphael - and the dealers who sold their work - got rich. Clergy and educators were honored. A brilliant financial mind in 1500 had far less to monetize than a brilliant painter. Same gift, different century, completely different payoff.
So generation after generation, smart and gifted people end up living lives that don’t fit them - not because they failed, but because they optimized for what the era rewards instead of what they’re actually built for. They pick the field with the higher salary, the better odds, the family’s approval. Not the one that actually speaks to them.
And not everyone has a passion for numbers or a knack for inventing technology. Some people could move the world through teaching, or art, or history - fields the 21st century mostly shrugs at. They get the message early that their gift isn’t the valuable kind, and they quietly set it down.
I’m not going to tell you to “follow your passion” - that’s cheap advice, and chasing something like studying jellyfish migration patterns is genuinely scary when it pays nothing and no one understands it. I’ve spent my own career in the lane the world rewards, and I won’t pretend I’d trade the freedom that bought.
But I’ve started to wonder about the quieter cost. Not whether I succeeded - I did fine by the era’s scoreboard. Whether the scoreboard was ever mine to begin with. That’s the question I didn’t ask at twenty, when I was busy not wasting my high score. I’m asking it now.