It took several years of jail for Malcolm X to realize the power of religion and of politics, and to discover that he had gifts for both. Few of us know in advance what domains we may have an affinity for. Prodigies are children who from an early age show a definite gift in some direction, but most of us are not prodigies and it takes us decades of trial and error to find out what we are best cut out for. Even in our sample, some individuals did not realize what their vocations were until they were middle-aged. And often the realization was forced on them by outside factors, such as a war or
...more
