What does it even mean, to have experienced “more” than anyone else? How do you compare raising a child to starting a company to performing as a top level athlete to losing a parent to ...
Mathematically minded nerds tend to forget that not everything in life can be turned into set theory :)
As a mathematically minded something, I agree with your first sentence, mostly disagree with your last one. There are a lot of nerds who think they are good at math when they are not.
There's a lot of potential life experience out there, not all of it good. And a lot of people go through extraordinary hardships that they didn't choose. A great example of someone who's experienced both the difficulties of running a business and the difficulties of running for your life is Intel chairman Andy Grove:
" He was born András Gróf into a not religious Jewish family in Budapest, Hungary, which was ruled by a military dictator whose government persecuted Jews. That Gróf was not a Jewish surname may have helped his family avoid some of the worst of the persecution. As a small child, Grove had scarlet fever, which not only nearly killed him but also rendered him partly deaf. With the advent of World War II and Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, Hungary abandoned its official neutrality and joined the Germans. In 1944, when the war went badly for Germany, the Nazis overthrew the Hungarian government, fearing that the Hungarians were about to make peace with the Soviets. The rounding up of Jews for death camps and slave labor soon began. Grove's father was forced to serve in the German army at the Eastern Front, where he endured appalling tortures for the amusement of German soldiers. Grove and his mother hid under false names with a Christian family; almost every day was a close call, as soldiers snatched Jews off the streets and out of their homes. Then the Soviets fought their way into Budapest, bringing with them more persecution (and the rape of Grove's mother).
Grove wanted to be a journalist, but he discovered that journalistic success depended on the whims of political correctness, and he decided to enter a field where subjectivity would not affect judgments about his work; he chose to study chemistry. In 1956 Hungarians tried to replace their Communist government with a democracy, and the Soviet Union in vaded their nation. There was fighting in Budapest's streets as young people tried to repel soldiers and tanks with small weapons and bottles filled with gasoline. Soviet troops began snatching young men and imprisoning, torturing, or killing them. Grove and his best friend, Janos Lanyi, fled to Austria, dodging Soviet troops, crawling in mud, afraid all the way. He had lived 20 years under murderous oppression, surviving by always remaining alert to the possibility that even a simple attempt to purchase a loaf of bread could cause him to disappear along with many other young Hungarians."
I've never heard this story, thank you for sharing. As hard as I (and many others in the West may try), I wonder if it's possible to bring as much determination to my field as someone from such harsh circumstance can. What an interesting person.