[jkhdigital]

Having an economics education, I like to think of this in simple economic terms: Everything has a production process, and during that process the unfinished goods are generally useless, or at least far less useful than the finished product. Economic development is, in some sense, the steady expansion of the scope and scale of production processes that society can engage in. I think the complexity of the modern economy along with globalization have drawn out the “production process” for building highly useful human beings as well. In any case, I guess my main point is that you have no idea how valuable your unique mix of skills will be until it is “complete”, and that may take decades, but the payoff for building that skill set can be orders of magnitude larger than a “normal” path.