Chapter 2: A Theory of Gifts
Eight principles of a human universal
The Beacon Project is a multi-year initiative at More in Common seeking to advance a new civic vision for America’s Exhausted Majority. In October 2025, we published an essay introducing a prototype for that vision, called “potentialism.” The question we’re asking is: What would it take for potentialism to offer a legitimate alternative to the prevailing political philosophies of our time? Over the past several months, we’ve shared this vision with everyone from community organizers in Alabama to leading policymakers in Washington, D.C. The response has been positive enough that it’s encouraged us to continue working out the theory. What follows is the second installment in this series.
Want some more context before diving in? Check out these posts:
Potentialism is based on a simple idea, called the “potentialist maxim”: Everyone has a gift, and a right and responsibility to develop and share that gift.
That’s it. That’s the philosophy.
In this post, I want to explore the concept of “gifts.” What is a gift, exactly? How do we discover our own? And what does this mean for the way we should treat each other?
The idea of “giftedness” has seen its share of controversy in American culture. On one hand, the notion that everyone has something to offer has gained popularity in recent decades, in response to the recognition that intelligence tests fail to capture the full range of human potential. As the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman writes in Ungifted, “We each have unique ways of enriching the world, many of which are not reflected in that single IQ score.”
On the other hand, scholars like Jean M. Twenge have warned about the dangers of the “self-esteem movement.” Telling every child that they are the world’s next creative genius, she argues, has bred a “culture of entitlement” that sets young people up for disappointment when reality falls short.
We need a more nuanced account of giftedness, one that honors human potential without handing out too many participation trophies. That is the account I want to develop here.
1. Gifts are not (just) talents.
Today, when we say someone is “gifted,” we usually mean they have extraordinary talents or abilities that set them apart from their peers. In The Gift, Lewis Hyde describes gifts as an output of the “creative spirit.”
The problem with these definitions is they put gifts on a pedestal, giving the impression that they are possessed only by the truly “gifted” among us.
I’d like to offer a slightly humbler definition.
From the point of view of potentialism, a “gift” is anything you do that gives you a sense of meaning and helps others. Under this view, writing a symphony is a gift—but so is organizing a food train for your pregnant neighbor. Starting a business can be a gift—but so is taking care of an aging parent.
Gifts often draw on distinct strengths and capacities, are refined over time, and feel deeply personal. They produce a sense of “fit”: the feeling that our abilities are well-suited to the task at hand.
Sharing our gifts is necessary for human wellbeing. As psychologist Martin Seligman writes: “The meaningful life [is about] using your signature strengths in the service of something larger than you are.”
This ability to experience meaning through contribution is common to us all.
That is our gift.
2. Gifts change over time.
Understanding gifts as meaning-making contributions, rather than singular talents, helps clarify the role they can play in our lives. It shows that people rarely have a single gift; instead, they usually manifest a range of gifts that evolve over time.
Early in life, educational institutions—high school, college, vocational school, apprenticeships—help us acquire the knowledge and training that will let us discover, cultivate, and share our gifts later on.
Someone might spend the first part of their life pursuing a fulfilling career in public administration. Then they might step back and spend a decade or two raising a family. Later on, they might sit on a local community board, or host weekly neighborhood gatherings, or moderate an online message board. Each of these is a distinct gift tied to a certain phase of life.
The psychologist Todd Rose in The End of Average calls this the “pathways” principle: the journey to a fulfilling life is long and winding, filled with unexpected detours and pit stops. We cannot predict what gifts may materialize as the journey unfolds.
One consequence of this perspective is it takes the pressure off. Instead of feeling like we need to find that ONE THING that we are uniquely good at, we have countless opportunities to pursue new ways of sharing our gifts.
3. Your gift doesn’t have to be your job.
“Find your calling.” “Pursue your passion.” These refrains echo through graduation speeches and self-help books across America.
Implicit in these phrases is the belief that our jobs are a primary source of meaning in life.
This is fine for the few who are fortunate enough to get paid to follow their dream. But what about everyone else? As David Graeber explains in Bullshit Jobs, all too many people labor each day under the belief that their work has no meaningful impact on society.
But by the definition of gifts I’ve proposed, this is fine! A gift doesn’t need to be something you’re paid to do. The world is full of what Adam Mastroianni calls niches—little corners of the world that you and only you can fill. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find one and fill it.
Consider my neighbors Doug and Natalie, who host a little gathering every Friday evening on their porch. A handful of people show up, sip a beer, and chat about the weather or the New Orleans Saints, while WWOZ, the local radio station, plays in the background. It’s not a flashy event, but it really ties the neighborhood together.
Doug and Natalie aren’t paid for this. Neither would describe it as a professional calling. But their porch is an anchor in the neighborhood.
What a gift!
4. Gifts are context-dependent.
Popular culture tends to think of people’s gifts as emerging spontaneously: think of Matt Damon’s character in Good Will Hunting.
In fact, gifts emerge in dialogue with the needs of one’s environment. By definition, gifts must benefit others, and so if a particular strength or talent is not “in demand,” it doesn’t qualify as a gift.
Consider the time period in which we are born. If Albert Einstein had been born 100 years earlier, he likely would not have been a world-famous physicist. Similarly, history abounds with examples of people being in the “right place at the right time.” Bill Gates, for instance, has credited luck as an important factor in his success.
Conversely, throughout history, many people have been denied the opportunity to realize their gifts because of the time period in which they were born.
But local events shape our gifts, too. Unexpected life events may force us to pursue gifts that weren’t originally on our Bingo card. In Lord of the Rings, for example, Frodo and his friends are compelled to leave the Shire to carry out a much more consequential mission—destroy the Ring of Power. Similarly, every year, thousands of Americans forgo promising career opportunities to tend to less glamorous obligations, such as caring for an elderly parent or raising a family.
This means that identifying your gifts is not merely a matter of navel-gazing or self-reflection. It’s an active process that takes into account both your own strengths and preferences and the needs of others.
It also shows that gifts are often determined by forces outside our control. Not only can we not control our genes and parents; we also can’t dictate which of our particular skills and interests will be most useful to others. This suggests that part of wise living involves cultivating that idea captured in the Alcoholics Anonymous phrase: the “serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”
5. The value of gifts is scale-neutral.
In today’s culture, we idolize the startup entrepreneur who founded a unicorn company; the inventor who saved millions of lives. Yet the value of a gift does not depend on the quantity of lives it touches. Instead, it depends on what let’s call the “goodness-of-fit” between the capacities of the giver and the needs of the environment.
A useful concept here is flow, coined by the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. Csíkszentmihályi suggests that the most meaningful moments in our lives occur when our skills and aptitudes are perfectly suited to the needs of the environment—think of a baseball player so locked in that the ball seems to slow down, or a surgeon for whom a difficult procedure feels almost effortless.
Csíkszentmihályi writes:
“The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”
While such moments often happen in sports or absorbing work, they may unfold on a more prolonged scale, too. The key idea here is “fit.” Fit is the feeling of rightness that arises when our abilities match the challenge. That sense of fit, I suggest, is an important part of what it means to share our gifts.
The kind of work that elicits flow varies widely from person to person. For some, it may be engaging in high-level intellectual work; for others, something more seemingly mundane.
As an example, a close friend of mine has an adult brother with developmental delays. For years he languished at his childhood home with no direction. Then his parents found him a job as a dishwasher at a local restaurant. The job was perfectly suited to his aptitudes and attention to detail. His mood and behavior changed rapidly, as he began to view himself as having something valuable to contribute to society.
He had found his gift.
6. Gifts are “collectively emergent.”
Our culture tends to view people in a zero-sum competition, where my win is your loss.
Yet when we see society through the lens of gifts, the picture changes.
Gifts are capacities that both give meaning to our lives and contribute to the lives of others. Because our own wellbeing depends on developing and sharing these gifts, helping others flourish means helping them develop theirs as well. The more I cultivate and share my gifts, the more I ensure others have the same opportunity.
This is the principle of the collective emergence. Gifts do not emerge in isolation, but through relationships of mutual support. Each person’s growth expands the possibilities for everyone else’s growth. It’s a flywheel. As the civic leader Eric Liu puts it: “We’re all better off when we’re all better off.”
This suggests that we pursue our individual potential not just on our own behalf but on others’ as well. There is, at the heart of gifts, a sense of shared fate. (I’m reminded of the conversation I had with Pete Davis in which he described democracy as “co-creating our shared world”.) Conversely, when we fail to fully realize our gifts, we are shortchanging not just ourselves but also the people around us. In this sense, developing our gifts is a moral act.
It also highlights that it’s in my interest to ensure other people are developing their gifts, too. In contrast to the zero-sum view, I want other people to thrive. When other people are realizing their gifts, I will reap the benefits. This means I should be on the lookout for opportunities to to help people identify their gifts. While this work often falls on parents, teachers, managers, it is something we can all do. It also means we should all support social policies that ensure everyone has access to the conditions they need to develop and share their gifts.
Gifts, in sum, show our interdependence.
7. Gifts are personal.
The book-turned-show Handmaid’s Tale offers a cautionary tale about how gifts can go awry. The story depicts a society in which women are told that their gift is bearing children for elite couples.
While this arguably benefits the couples, it’s not great for the women.
The point is: no one can tell you what your gifts are. The process of identifying and cultivating the particular capacities that bring meaning to our lives and help others is ours alone. Life, in this view, is a “journey of discovery”: an iterative process of experimentation and reflection that helps us to identify our gifts over time and share them with others.
Of course, there is a balance to be struck here, since young people are notoriously bad at knowing what’s good for them, and the accumulated wisdom of society does contain useful truths that can help us on our journey. It would be foolish to ignore these truths completely. Furthermore, we’ve already seen that circumstances can call on us to pursue gifts we didn’t ask for.
But at the end of the day the choice is ours alone to make. This is the root of our agency.
8. Gifts take work.
In popular culture, gifts are often portrayed as remarkable talents that spring unbidden from people in their early years of life. (Think Tiger Woods playing competitive golf at age 5.)
In truth, gifts are often the result of a much more laborious process.
The Harvard psychologist Jon Jachimowicz writes about something called leidenschaft. A German word usually translated as “passion,” it more literally means “the ability to endure hardship.” His point is that the things that give us the most meaning in life—our gifts—are often the result of painstaking effort.
The Bottom Line
I’ve suggested that instead of seeing gifts as amazing talents, we should see them merely as abilities which, when deployed, help others and give our lives meaning. When we do this, several things happen:
We stop seeing gifts as confined to the few and start seeing as common to us all
We stop seeing gifts as singular pursuits and start seeing them as varied and malleable
We stop seeing gifts as cosmically predetermined and start seeing them as environmentally contingent
We see the value of gifts as dependent not on the magnitude of its impact but on the goodness-of-fit between the capacities of the giver and the needs of the environment
We see society not as zero-sum but positive-sum
We see realizing our potential not just as a personal, but also as a moral, pursuit
We start judging society based on its ability to ensure everyone has access to the conditions that make sharing their gifts possible
We come to appreciate the important role we each play in helping others develop their gifts
We begin to recognize the personal qualities—patience, grit, humility, courage—that sharing our gifts requires
In short, redefining gifts in this way opens the door to a reality in which our ability to identify and share our gifts becomes a building block of a flourishing human life and a good society.
This, in turn, has important implications for how we ought to structure the “social contract”—a question I’ll tackle in the next post.
Want to learn more about potentialism? See below.
Among those you see as on the skeptical edge of acceptance for this kind of idea (e.g., classic conservatives, centrists, etc.), how universally shared is the foundational premise that “everyone has a gift”? The study question you shared in the previous chapter describes agreement on “potential,” but those two words and concepts are not interchangeable.