"I'm sure it did. But Grandfather's got oodles of money," said the girl. "Me too. I'm very well-off. I multiplied my inheritance and the life-insurance money I got on the stock market."
She took a key out of her pocket and opened the elevator door. Back into that overgrown vacu-pac elevator.
"Stock market?"
"Sure, Grandfather taught me the tricks. He taught me how to choose among all the information, how to read the market, how to dodge taxes, how to transfer funds to banks overseas, stuff like that. Stocks are a lot of fun. Ever tried?"
"Afraid not," I said. I'd never opened a fixed-term compounded-interest account.
The elevator moved at its requisite impossible ascending-or-descending speed.
"Grandfather says that schools are too inefficient to produce top material. What do you think?" she asked.
"Well, probably so," I answered. "I went to school for many years and I don't believe it made that much difference in my life. I can't speak many languages, can't play any instruments, can't play the stock market, can't ride a horse."
"So why don't you quit school? You could have quit any time you wanted, couldn't you?"
"I guess so," I said. "I could have quit, but I didn't want to. I guess it didn't occur to me to do anything like that. Unlike you, I had a perfectly average, ordinary upbringing. I never had what it takes to make a first-rate anything."
"That's wrong," she declared. "Everyone must have one thing they can excel at. It's just a matter of drawing it out, isn't it? But school doesn't know how to draw it out. It crushes the gift. It's not wonder most people never get to be what they want to be. They just get ground down.
~Haruki Murakami,
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
