• scarilog@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    I do know one guy who went through with it simply because he thought that the thing that he invented was so cool that he couldn’t stop working on it.

    What’s wrong with that? If it was commercially viable, then that’s a great reason to make a startup.

    • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      There’s nothing wrong with it in the moral sense, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. This guy was ultimately successful. However, he had to spend years living very modestly, working very hard, and borrowing money. That whole time, he was under a huge amount of stress because the whole endeavor could easily have ended in failure, leaving him with nothing.

      That’s not something most people would want to do even if they were capable of it, and I actually wonder if he would have been better off if he had gotten a normal job instead. He wouldn’t have as much money as he does, but he would still be quite comfortable, he wouldn’t have gone through panic-attack levels of stress, and maybe he would have married and had a child (which made him very, very happy) a lot earlier than he actually did.