What makes someone good at building a baseball team? Is it scouting? Is it relationship-building? Is it financial muscle-flexing? Or it something unquantifiable, spiritual, rendering our General Managers nothing less than God-Kings of Sports Modernity?
Lulz aside, I probably thought, to some degree, some combination of the four specializations above pretty much covered it for most of my life. Then Chaim Bloom came along and screwed my whole world up in a dozen ways but made me appreciate a fifth column in this debate: Competence! You can have dreams of doing things well but if you are not good at them, are not even basic at them, they don’t much matter, no matter what the circumstances.