There are many people who are adherents of the concept of adequacy. They are all very wrong.
I was described as being inadequate when I was making $80,000 a year, had a beautiful girlfriend and was taking martial arts. Some people can simply forget the ugly nonsense that others tell them; I cannot. I have to refute the nonsense.
And the refutation with which I've come up is: Adequacy is a concept that applies to machines, not people. Furthermore, it is a concept that would pathologize everything that has taken the man from caveman to man on the moon. 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 humankind.
It is said that necessity is the mother of invention. According to the believers in the concept of adequacy, a farmer is a farmer because he is an inadequate hunter; a laborer is a laborer because he is an inadequate farmer; and an office worker is an office worker because he is an inadequate laborer. In all of these cases, someone has applied intelligence toward solving problems of the previous state of affairs. These were people who were not satisfied with the previous state affairs and sought something better. By the standards of the previous order, they were inadequate. Yet they took matters to a better level.
It is this spirit that is essential toward all human progress. Not striving for “adequacy”; actually improving the world. Humanity owes nothing to “adequacy striving” and everything to ingenuity. It is this ingenuity, and not “adequacy striving,” that should be encouraged and supported in people.