The professional skills of an individual make sense only with respect to a context in which they are desired. Our educational institutions fail to create good professionals because of their inability or unwillingness to create the right setting for imparting and testing the skills that they intend to. What comes out is not someone who is refined by education, but someone whose natural skills are rusted, yet still can be in shape with slight professional oiling, and certain other skills which he can claim he possess coz his education has misled him into believing himself as what he is not, nor trained him adequately to really acquire that skill with an adequate degree of skillfulness. (Equally applies to her but using only him for convenience). Often people get into jobs demanding the latter set of skills, coz that's what their degrees say they possess and then they end up with stressed and distressed careers. And often the former set of 'natural' skills are abandoned or forgotten, since either the market for such skills is not that lucrative or one is not able to find the right gaps in the market where they can fit in with their natural inclinations. But then, it is very stupid to expect every individual to also be skillful at marketing or positioning and stuff. To an extent these are survival instincts, but when the question is just of being optimum and sub-optimum, the instincts of survival are not invoked, coz there is no life at stake. One can be sad and dissatisfied and still spend a whole lifetime.
Therefore the issue is of economics. The fight for a bigger and bigger claim for the available resources and amenities of the world leads one to make compromises in the choices he makes. To begin with, choices are about basic necessities, but then choices are sticky and one can't generally jump in another boat once in the middle of the ocean, coz all boats you crave for are far far away. You can swim across, but the ocean we sail is heavily infested by man-eater sharks. So you go on sailing in your boat, which you hate, but that's your life. You wait to reach the shore, where your boat takes you. You would get off your boat and freely walk into the woods. Perhaps you'd still regret you didn't fight the sharks and reached the other boat that went to the shore you'd have liked better. Or perhaps there is only one shore and all boats lead you there. Or perhaps you'd just laugh at the meaninglessness of it all. Your journey defined by the choices you made. But at that point, it's just some more walk. A walk of regret or a walk of a satisfied life. Yet in the wilderness, into which you walk away, it's only dark and lonely. You wait. As do the sharks that you always dreaded.
