The theory of strong interactions is an elegant quantum field theory known as Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). QCD is deceptively simple to formulate, but notoriously difficult to solve. Part of this difficulty stems from the diverse set of physical phenomena that fall under its domain. In this talk I show how systematic limits of QCD, known as effective field theories, provide a means of
isolating the essential degrees of freedom for a particular problem while at the same time supplying a powerful tool for quantitative computations. The adventure will take us from the fine structure of hydrogen, to weak decays of B-mesons, to the behavior of energetic hadrons and jets in QCD.