> Teaching people they'll be successful as long as they're willing to "eat shit" for years may create a handful of winners but it will also cause a ridiculous amount of ruined lives (not to mention families and relationships)
Totally agree. Telling people to "eat shit" is terrible universal advice.
> if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place
Agree again.
That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it. Terrible universal advice can be decent advice to specific people. If, as you said, you are fortunate enough to have downside protection from family, it can be less risky than it generally is. On the other hand, if you are sure you'd be happier having tried and lost than never tried at all (and know just how bad this flavor of losing can be), it may be the only choice.
Most people aren't like that. But some are. My point is to avoid over-correcting. Don't "eat shit" because a shithead on the Internet told you too. But if you really feel that's what you must do, don't not do it because someone on the Internet told you not to.
Side note: anecdote comes to mind. Advice is a person talking to their younger selves.
Sure, but this can be reduced to "it's worth the risk if you have a financial safety net to fall back to if you fail or burn out". In other words "the high risk discourages people who are not already well-off and the high reward primarily benefits those who are".
Or more simply: if you have a few tens or hundres of thousands of dollars you can fall back to even if everything goes wrong, it's worth the chance to become a millionaire/billionaire. If you don't have that safety net, you'll most likely ruin your life unless you're extraordinarily lucky (i.e. lucky enough to win even without the advantages nearly all the other winners already had).
Meritocracy is biased towards affluent starting positions.
> That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it.
I mean, you can do some back-of-the-napkin math and at least get a ballpark figure on the worthiness of an endeavor. 'Expected Value' is the term in stats. It's not too convoluted to run through the math here, but you can expand it as you need. Yes, things like 'freedom' and 'autonomy' are hard to quantify, but you can estimate them somewhat.
Totally agree. Telling people to "eat shit" is terrible universal advice.
> if you lose the roulette, you're probably in no state to lament to anyone how terrible of an idea it was to play in the first place
Agree again.
That said, just because something depends predominantly on luck doesn't mean it is never worth it. Terrible universal advice can be decent advice to specific people. If, as you said, you are fortunate enough to have downside protection from family, it can be less risky than it generally is. On the other hand, if you are sure you'd be happier having tried and lost than never tried at all (and know just how bad this flavor of losing can be), it may be the only choice.
Most people aren't like that. But some are. My point is to avoid over-correcting. Don't "eat shit" because a shithead on the Internet told you too. But if you really feel that's what you must do, don't not do it because someone on the Internet told you not to.
Side note: anecdote comes to mind. Advice is a person talking to their younger selves.