You are worth more than you think

As a human, your perceived value is extremely dependent on your location. What's considered 'cool' somewhere is 'weird' somewhere else. I understood this pretty early on: When I came to France, fashion of the youth was weird to me, nevertheless I understood that for them, they looked 'cool'. Communities, on every level from a friend group to a continent, have unwritten rules that the crowd follows, as we all are afraid to be different, even if some are more and some are less. These rules might be stupid or subjective, but they always exist. Understanding this makes a person more independent and freeminded.

The wrong market

In Eastern Europe, speaking multiple languages is the ultimate flex, while in the West being good at STEM subjects is put forward. While looking at masters in research in France, my profile was just not a fit for them, while I got accepted to the best universities in Spain, Germany and the UK.

Ricardo's comparative advantage

In economics, Ricardo's comparative advantage says that your value was never a fixed quantity to begin with. It's a relative price, and relative prices only exist in relation to a specific market.

Formally, if $a_{LW}$ and $a_{LC}$ are the labor hours a person needs to produce a unit of Wine and a unit of Cloth, comparative advantage in Wine holds when:

where the starred terms are the same ratios for the other person. Notice what's absent from that inequality: no term ever compares $a_{LW}$ to $a^*_{LW}$ directly. Absolute skill drops out of the equation entirely. All that matters is the ratio, your cost in one domain relative to your cost in another, measured against someone else's ratio. A person has no intrinsic value; they have value relative to what else that market can produce with the same labor. Meaning a different $\frac{a^*_{LW}}{a^*_{LC}}$, and suddenly the exact same person is comparatively advantaged rather than comparatively priced out.

Move the cask

That's the part people miss when they take rejection somewhere as a verdict on their absolute worth. Ricardo's whole point is that absolute skill is almost irrelevant, a person can be worse at everything in absolute terms and still have a clear place to specialize, because trade isn't about being the best, it's about being relatively less redundant somewhere than somewhere else. Someone can be wine in a country already saturated with wine, standing in a market that's pricing something else entirely. Move the same cask across a border, and the whole opportunity cost equation flips.