Everything in life is a trade-off. Some of us are born with high aptitudes for academic learning. Others are born with great physical skills. Others are athletic. Others are artistic. Others can f.u.c.k like rabbits and never break a sweat. In terms of skills and talents, humans are a wildly diverse group of smelly creatures. Sure, what we end up accomplishing in life ultimately depends on our practice and effort, but we are all born with different aptitudes and potential

A bell curve. Any of you who have taken a statistics class and survived will recognize it.

A bell curve is quite simple. Take a population of people, like, let's say people who play golf at least once a year. The horizontal axis represents how good they are at golf. Further to the right means they're really good, further to the left means they're really bad.

Now, notice that it gets really thin at the far ends of the curve. That means there are a few people who are really, really good at golf. And a few people who are really, really bad. The majority fall into the mediocre middle.

We can apply a "curve" in this way to tons of things in a population. Height. Weight. Emotional maturity. Wages. How often people like to f.u.c.k. And so on.1

For example, this is Michael Jordan dunking a basketball.

It's well-known that he's one of the best to ever do it. Therefore, he's way on the right side of the bell curve, better than 99.99% of anyone else who has ever dunked a basketball. Few can compare

Then you have this guy:

This Guy Not Dunking

Obviously, he's no Michael Jordan. In fact, chances are many people reading this right now could do much better than this guy. That means he's probably towards the bottom end of the bell curve, an extreme on the other side.

Dunk Comparison Bell Curve

We stand in awe of MJ because he's more athletic than all of us. We laugh at the trampoline guy because he's less athletic than most of us. Both are at different extremes of the bell curve. And most of us are the majority in the middle.