> You might decide to cultivate an interest in accounting, but be really bad at numbers since a young age, and will always be at a disadvantage towards someone that is innately good with numbers.

This implies some very linear progression as to working with numbers ability, which is not really how these things work. And it's accounting, you do not need to be a numbers genius.

What you are saying is mostly true for hyper-competitive fields like music, sports, acting, etc.

The problem is, today almost everything is highly competitive. In the 60's you could have a degree in something that is not aligned with the persons natural talent, and still make a career out of it, because there where so few people with a degree.

Now, if someone takes a degree in something that they are not naturally talented in and still tries to make a career out of it just out of sheer persistence, it's not enough anymore.

There's no space for things to be more competitive than any other time period. These things are population driven and you're always generally average in the middle of some population, so the various effects will cancel out. It might have been less competitive for someone with a degree, but more competitive to get a degree in the first place.

Progress is generally not made out of sheer persistence. I think the problem might be with perceiving persistence as important, when the important thing might be doing the right thing at the right time, trying to increase the opportunity pool, etc.

I can totally buy that someone might not be able to find the information to become an accountant, or that someone might have issues with test taking, but the idea that someone should not even attempt numeric professions because they had some difficulty numbers growing up is absolutely preposterous. Where does that put all the programmers who didn't know what a for loop was until college?

It just doesn't follow, at all, lots of people can learn new concepts quite fine or better outside of the school environment. The only important factor is whether the job is in demand and accounting appears to be in demand to me.

The thing is, if someone is forc example not good at numbers growing up, they where probably good at something else.

Everybody is good at something, its a matter of trying different things out.

We will be better of persuing our natural tendencies and talent areas, and spend our persistence there rather than in some other area that we are not naturally gifted at.

There is usually a natural overlap between the areas we are interested and the ones we are talented.

If we follow that intersection of interest and talent our changes of being able to make a career in that area are higher.