> the vast majority of real life is not D-Day or crash landing in the Hudson
Sure, but a significant portion of life is spent interacting with the results of other people's work. When you get into a car, would you rather that its microcontrollers were programmed by someone who
A: Felt continually distressed and defeated that he had not thoroughly mastered sailing, animal husbandry, military history, rhetoric, first aid, copy-editing, painting, masonry, carpentry, and several other skills.
B: Felt fulfilled that the only domains in which he had deep knowledge were microcontroller programming, cooking seafood to his wife's taste, and the emotional/medical meanings of their child's sounds -- yet that they had merely a hobbyists' knowledge of hiking, sketching, kites, anime, and the history of flight.
Because I'd rather a world with more of B and less of A.
Further supporting your point, that is perhaps why they are called “Generals”, IE: they have mastered enough areas that they are now generalists able to approach many subject areas and problem sets.
- conn a ship: It mentions no naval career. It does mention fishing, so there is a decent probability that he could handle a canoe. But if that is the standard for "conn a ship", then this whole argument is basically just "people should have hobbies" which...okay sure. And they already do.
- design a building: No mention of this. He attended West Point, which is also an engineering school, but that is very weak evidence. I went to MIT and the only building design I've ever done is that of a shed. Again, people should have hobbies.
- write a sonnet: Google searches for "poetry by Dwight D Eisenhower", "Ike sonnet", "Eisenhower Sonnet", and "Sonnet by Eisenhower" do not turn up anything. Maybe he wrote poetry to his wife, but we have no evidence of it. Again, people should have hobbies.
- balance accounts: I'm happy to just assume this to be true as part of his career's focus in being able to organize troops.
- butcher a hog: His father worked as a railroad mechanic and then at a creamery. They were not wealthy. There's no mention of his working in agriculture. He did like hunting, so its totally plausable that he could dress a deer. But he didn't work on a farm or in a slaughterhouse or meat-packing plant. Why would someone who owned pigs waste the meat/time/money to teach someone how to slaughter them as even a hobby?
- set a bone: Plausable, but I see a number of sports-related leg injuries.
- program a 1973-era computer: He died in 1969
I could go and try to research this more thoroughly, but it is hard to prove a negative and time is a global variable.
[1] https://www.nass.usda.gov/Statistics_by_State/Washington/Pub...
I have a hunch that Eisenhower himself was probably a person who could do most of the things on that list.