In general it is high risk and high reward. You need to have sufficient confidence in yourself that what you're doing is valuable to a community that is hostile

In general it is high risk and high reward. You need to have sufficient confidence in yourself that what you're doing is valuable to a community that is hostile to you. If your work ends up not being recognised as important, then your losses are much larger than if you followed the crowd and did incremental research. There is probably analogous stories with start up scene, incremental start ups get funded, those considered too radical are not given money. In science it is not obvious whether or not your work will be important or recognised as important until much later. From the point of view from the entire community it makes sense for individuals to go big risk, but for individuals sometimes you also need to manage your risk differently