The Unspent Gift

Every person arrives carrying something only they carry, a particular way of seeing, of making, of caring, arranged in a combination the world has never held before and will never hold again. Much of it is never spent. Not because it lacked worth, but because it never found the place that needed it.

The scarcity that costs us most is not oil, or gold, or even time. It is the meeting of a gift and the need that would complete it. We have built vast machinery for counting what we can extract from people, and almost none for discovering what is inside them. And so an enormous reserve of value sits unspent, distributed among billions, breathing, quietly waiting to be asked.

TO GO DEEPER Volume V: "The Human Capacity We Fail to See"

IV