By this standard, the man on the plane I wrote about in the introduction should have been the happiest guy in the world. He was rich, famous, and respected for what he had done long ago. He had won the race! The same goes for Darwin and Pauling. But they weren’t happy, because that model is all wrong. It is based on a completely misbegotten model of human striving. In fact, had the man on the plane had an “ordinary” life—had he never accomplished something extraordinary—he might not have felt so miserably irrelevant today.
