Freedom, inefficiency, and prosperity are not infrequently found together. - Samuel Eliot Morison.

It’s not about finding what you can do better than others, but about finding what you can do exceptionally well relative to other ways you could expend yourself.

Throughout his career, Pei could never get rid of the tax. He accepted it as part of the price he had to pay to do the work he loved. Even in the core work itself, the creative process, Pei could never rid himself of the tax. “I get into a great inner turmoil when I have to find the right design for a building,” Pei lamented. “It absorbs me completely and I can't think of anything else. This may be a matter of hours or it may take as long as a month of sleeping badly, being irritable, sketching ideas and rejecting them. I am useless to everyone else. It is traumatic for my wife.

By its very nature, this study relies on people with highly visible accomplishments. I worry that some readers might misinterpret this as an implicit worthiness hierarchy that valorizes achieving fame over taking more unseen paths. I also worry that some of the people in the study can feel so unapproachable in what they made of their lives that readers might discount the relevance of learning from them, or be left wondering, “Well, their lives are interesting, but could I ever do what they did?” I share that feeling. Studying Charles Colson made me feel somewhat intimidated by the standard he lived to after prison.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.