I hug the Internet because it makes it incessantly facile easy to discover talent. Not just "great singers" or "fast runners", but people who are near-unbelievably skilled in a very specific area of focus. They may very well live healthy lives while pursuing their gladdiction, but when you shine so brightly at a single thing (or maybe even a few things), it makes it stupidly easy to fall into the trap of believing, "That's all they can do." Or even worse, "They have too much free time on their hands."

No! What utter ballshemy! Indulging in developing an ability to its peak, utmost form consumes copious blocks of time, and thus, is the anti-free time! They may've had (past tense — a fundamental difference) free time, but they've converted that, and their energy, into eclectic power.

For example, take schoolteacher RyanGibsonStewart and his fellow contributors at the Heroes Wiki. I don't have cable and only watch a few shows on Hulu, Heroes being one of them. And there's no one better at documenting all the nooks and crannies of the Heroes extended universe (including the comic books and Evolutions game) than this tribe of people who've laser-beamed a shared passion. Every time after I watch an episode, it's a treat to watch raw discussions mutate into tidy character profiles, ep guides, and more. They've also got interviews, trivia, and much other miscellanea of sheer interest to the requisite Heroes fan. Do NOT miss their famous checklist, which ensures that even minor cross-references and causal events are updated. AMAZING.

In a very different direction but still all about the passion, have you heard of Selma at SlickDeals? Merespeak makes her out to be a young goth lady whose passion is… SHARING BARGAINS! With over 50,000 posts, you've to ask yourself, "What are the freakin' odds of that?" Well, if they are 1/6.6+ billion, then we've hit a jackpot here. As a legendary poster on SD, Selma references appear in other community members' signatures, and while some speculate she's a bot or a hivemind of multiple people, in her own words, she's not. Selma's doing something so incredibly at the edges of human that it creates cognitive dissonance and mistakenly prods our instinct to categorize it as inhuman.

The mindjunk of being awesome is that you're going to get dumbass comments which objectify you like a freakshow. But better to have those and be noticed, than never stand out…

I'll ask you again:

If YOU could be the best at something(s), what would it be?