[firebones]

There is a lot of wisdom in this post. I think there are some people who have a knack for recognizing talent, value, whatever you want to call it, and protect and/or share their own social capital to encourage (boost?) what they see and remove impediments to it flourishing. It's not a guarantee, but it might be a signal. If the baseline is a 1 in 5000 shot at the NBA, there still may be 10 of those deep boosters among the 5000 who do the same things, but come up short. Yet 10 kids reduced their odds from 1 in 5000 to 1 in 10.