[pluma]

It's only ever "worth it" if it works out. It's never "worth it" if it didn't.

This is basically the survivor fallacy: you didn't win because you risked ruining yourself, you won because you got lucky. Risking to ruin yourself just meant you increased your chances of winning (while also significantly increasing your chances of losing).

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).

Imagine playing Russian roulette with only one empty chamber but afterwards everyone who survives also gets a toin coss to determine if he also wins a billion dollars on top.

Sure, if you win, it was totally worth it because you came out of it unharmed and you have a billion dollars.

If you win the roulette but lose the coin toss, hey at least you were ever so close to winning the billion dollars. Maybe you'll write an inspiring blog post about how waking up before dawn and doing push-ups helped you come that far and about your plans to win that coin toss if you get another chance in the future.

Or you are sour about losing the coin toss and traumatised from the roulette but people now just lecture you about how you held the coin wrong and you should be lucky you even made it to the coin toss because if you fumbled the coin toss you really weren't skilled enough to win the roulette or you should have played for a few more rounds after nobody else was left because then you'd have definitely performed better at tossing that coin.

But 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.

And if you look at the really successful ones, you'll notice they actually sometimes shot themselves but their parents or family were rich enough to make sure they wore a bullet-proof helmet.

It's luck. Risking your health and social life just slightly increases the number of coin tosses while loading more bullets in the chamber. Look at how many entrepreneurs are putting themselves out there and working themselves to death, then look at how many are billionaires -- heck, look at how many are millionaires. The rest that just vanishes? At best they gave up and decided to do something else.

[JumpCrisscross]

> 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.

[pluma]

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.

[Balgair]

> 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.