And I’m willing to bet he never went to lacrosse camp.

Or to a four-day tourney of any kind in Orlando.

In fact, I’ll bet he never even went to economics camp or sat three afternoons a week at age 12 with an economics tutor. And, further, I suspect his wonderfulness was not celebrated when he had been something less than wonderful. I’ll guess neither his anxious mom nor a $100-an-hour tutor helped him with a lightly plagiarized 10th-grade Middlemarch paper; nor did his parents encourage him to pack his résumé with papier-mâché. He did not, I’ll bet, endure a six-week intensive SAT prep class or snort Adderall before sitting to take the test. Probably his parents did not hire a pricey consultant to shepherd him through the college-application process; nor did they lean on his teachers to let him retake tests on which he did poorly, or, better, to just change an unwelcome grade because the, um, cat died.

He goes on and lands where truth tends to land … in the same place it has landed for centuries… a place where a certain someone said years ago hid the secret to life – or the greatest commandment. Somewhere on loving others runway.

Considering his kids, McCullough says:  I recognize my kids—like my students—are no more or less important than anyone else’s, no more or less deserving of happy, productive lives, lives that shake a joyous fist at mortality, lives that matter beyond themselves. They know it, Nobels or no Nobels.

Yes … our kids are special. Just maybe a different kind of special than they think, than we’ve groomed them to think. They were each created to be or do in their own unique way – with their eyes off themselves on and on to those for or with whom they serve/be-firend/co-work. When we get to that point, we might find out just how special we all are.