On April 28, 1789, a group of crew members on the Royal Navy Ship HMS Bounty

forcefully took control of the vessel in perhaps the world's most famous example of a mutiny.

The mutineers put Captain Bly and those loyal to him in a small boat and set them adrift in the South Pacific Ocean.

The bounty and her reduced crew then sailed around for a while, and after some misadventures,

they eventually arrived at Pitcairn Island, about 1,200 miles or 2,000 kilometers east of Tahiti.

Pitcairn Island was the kind of isolated refuge the mutineers had been looking for.

It had enough resources like food and water, and its climate was mild.

Those aboard the bounty decided to make the island their permanent home.

To destroy the most glaring evidence of their crimes, they stripped the ship and burned it.

In doing so, the mutineers gave up their only means of ever getting off the island.

To burn your boats is another way of saying to burn your bridges.

If you burn your boats, you cut off all chances of escape. You're staking everything on being

successful where you are. And this brings us to birds. Some birds that long ago made their way

to an island or a similarly isolated place

ended up, in a manner of speaking, burning their boats. Because those birds had to fly to reach

their new homes, but then their ancestors eventually lost the ability to fly. Through the process of

evolution, they became flightless birds.

Evolution has cut off all chances of escape for them. Now, think of your own greatest talent,

your biggest advantage in the game of life. For you, it might be artistic talent or computer coding skills or perhaps bravery in tough

situations. My greatest talent in life, in case you were wondering, is being able to guess the time

within plus or minus 15 minutes, even when I haven't looked at my phone or my watch for like a couple hours.

But now that I think about it, I usually can't go more than three minutes without looking at my

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