I find that an interesting take-away from the article. There are two underlying assumptions in the original author's piece; first that you find value in workin

I find that an interesting take-away from the article. There are two underlying assumptions in the original author's piece; first that you find value in working and second that you need to work to support yourself. It also equates "less effort" with "easier to do" which implies more success at doing. But the questions posted are useful ones, to wit: Why should my life be centered on the 'thing I'm good at'? I'm going to stipulate here that most people split their life into three parts, the part where they work (someone else tells them what to do), the part where they sleep, and the part where they do what they want to do. And that the ratio of those three parts to one week can be called their "work life balance." If you can agree to that stipulation, then I'm going to add the observation that the balance ratio is a significant, and perhaps dominant, contributor to a person's over all feeling of happiness, restfulness, and well being. If you agree with that observation, then I'm going to add that the dominant force acting on the balance is the amount of wealth your work generates per unit time. Basically, if you're paid more you can work fewer hours while still meeting all of your financial obligations. Further, you can reduce the portion of your life dedicated to work and distribute those hours over things you want to do or sleep. This allows you to adjust the life balance such that you can maximize your own feelings of happiness and well being. The final piece is the assumption that "work" is a competitive marketplace. There are more people able to work than there are opportunities too work, so selection pressure will reduce wages on opportunities that anyone can do, and raise wages on opportunities that fewer people can do. I believe this is the context in which the article is written. If that is correct, then to "win" (defined by maximizing your happiness and well being for the longest possible time), one needs to find the opportunities that pay the highest wages per unit time and out compete other candidates for those opportunities. So what I took away from the article is that if you start with the skillss that come easily to you, and focus on those, you can quickly become very competitive for opportunities requiring that skill. That will maximize the available wages to you at any given point of time. Personally, I always suggest to people they continue to explore other skills. That way you can discover still more things that come easily to you and open up still more opportunities. More choices here are always preferable to fewer choices. And to this last point, (e.g. you're the best mainframe programmer, but the PC revolution has come)? I believe the skill here is "programming", not the platform (PC or Mainframe). If programming comes easily to you then switching platforms will also be easy. Contrast that with "struggling to learn programming" where once you have mastered exactly one system you don't have any idea how to generalize those skills to another system. This article suggests, and I concur, that you're time would be better off on finding a skill that comes easily rather than trying to develop one that doesn't.