You take funding because you think it'll increase your personal rate of wealth increase.
Loans are the simplest to understand -- it's leverage. If you think you can double your money in a few years with a business plan, and that opportunity scales passably well to more money than you have in your bank account, you can take out a loan. To use your language, leverage is just "betting on yourself" even harder.
Taking on investors is different in that you can't ruin yourself doing it, but similar in that it increases your resources in a way that you hope will more than pay off over time against the cost.
You absolutely can ruin yourself doing it. The more outside capital you have, the larger the expectations of eventual returns are. If I take $100M in risk capital, I have to surpass $250M in returns or it was a failure. Simply doubling the money, even if done in mere years, is a failure. So from that perspective, investor money is actually worse than loans. I agree that loans are good for leverage, and banks are much less likely than investors to change the terms because they are senior and covered somewhat from downside. Investor money very much can ruin a perfectly good business with outsized expectations right when it starts working.
Loans are the simplest to understand -- it's leverage. If you think you can double your money in a few years with a business plan, and that opportunity scales passably well to more money than you have in your bank account, you can take out a loan. To use your language, leverage is just "betting on yourself" even harder.
Taking on investors is different in that you can't ruin yourself doing it, but similar in that it increases your resources in a way that you hope will more than pay off over time against the cost.