I ran a large, somewhat infamous hacker house, and watched the beginning of a few unicorn founders. My observation is that everybody talks about being an entrep

I ran a large, somewhat infamous hacker house, and watched the beginning of a few unicorn founders. My observation is that everybody talks about being an entrepreneur, but the only people that actually do are the people with no other options. They'll never admit those painful and repeated failures at normal employment, or other areas of normal life. For instance, I have rarely seen men in relationships succeed. Their partner loses respect for them very quickly, and they will spend all their time job hunting until they either take a job or get dumped in horrible embarrassing ways. Partnered women usually end up quitting in disgust or dumping their partners to gain the benefits of being single when soliciting potential investors. Everybody that made it had some kind of family support or side hustle that supported them through it. This is not about money to survive, but some kind of consistent positive affirmation. One category that I didn't see a lot of is the fully-employed side-hustler, so that may also exist with a completely different set of characteristics. Incidentally, according to the article, I should be a prototypical entrepreneur, and I've certainly always known this, but, wow, the level of misery I experienced from everybody close to me has been overwhelming every time I've started anything. I've been 'lucky' in the sense of finding some kind of a way into a job when it got to be too much. I've been homeless, I've been to war, I've done ultramarathons, but this is nothing compared to the more normal types of people problems that nobody ever talks about. My plan had always been to make only enough money to survive for a few years of freedom. It turns out that this was easy, but didn't solve the right problem. As a non-success, I still consider myself one of the lucky ones. I've seen people, who seemed to have it much better than I, get into much worse situations, and several didn't survive it. Steve jobs said you can't connect the dots to success looking forward, and this is obviously also true of disaster. It's easy to forget about these people, or only remember the bad dots. I think about what to tell my son about all of this. I want him to never feel forced into anything. If he feels good about a job or a relationship, he should feel happy to continue it. But he should know that those things may change to hurt him, and he should never get into a situation where he feels stuck. One important thing about this is that I believe that the law and the culture is strongly against him, and seems to be getting worse. He should not expect success in this environment, and I'd advise that it may be wise to go somewhere less hostile, even at the expense of financial opportunity. Most young people don't realize that the majority of middle-aged men in this country are legally barred from leaving their state of residence without permission. So the conditions for success seem simple, and the people that win big often don't seem very impressive, but the failure conditions are often larger and more hidden than most people understand early in life. You're not competing just with your mind, but your entire life situation to support your ideas.