"Inadequate" - At What?

I often hear about someone or else being “inadequate.” My question is: Inadequate – at what?

Bill Gates is not an adequate physical match for a gangster. Yet Bill Gates is a multibillionaire, and the gangster is behind bars. Obviously Mr. Gates must be adequate at something.

Would people use their strengths to compensate for their weaknesses? I do not see why not. If you have a strong brain but are not gifted with natural physical strength, you would use your brain to get ahead, and I do not expect people to act differently. Similarly if someone possesses a fertile imagination but is not good at logic, then such a person would be expected to use her creative talents to do what the people who are good at logic and only at logic cannot do.

The problem becomes when this whole adequacy thing becomes binding on people. It is wrong – completely wrong. No human being is an adequate match for a tiger. He uses better technology to outsmart the tiger, and in so doing advances the lot of humanity. We owe quite a lot to this process; and to somehow pathologize it is to deny a very important force in creating the world that we have now.

And, even worse, it is to deny the world the contributions of the very same kind of people who have made the present state possible.

So when someone is being called inadequate or anything of the sort, the correct response is, At what? Most people are good at some things and not others. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with people using their areas of superiority to compensate for whatever weaknesses they may have.