Realistically?<p>Because I'm too risk averse to try high risk and high reward pursuits like starting my own company, or doing moonshot projects. Imagine the aversion people have to starting projects from scratch in a stack that they don't know and apply that to bookkeeping, laws and regulations, billing, marketing and other aspects that aren't focused purely on code.<p>I'm also the kind of person that doesn't want to sell snake oil by being a charming salesman, in contrast to the droves of borderline-scammers out there making projects to extract money from people who don't know any better (also applies even to many early access games, many of the crypto projects, the various lifestyle gurus etc.), in addition to knowing that <i>many</i> of the things I could built have already been built by others and built well.<p>At the same time, I'm not brilliant enough (e.g. an outlier) to have breakthrough successes and not focused enough to achieve greater success through sheer effort, which would make me sacrifice my health, time and relationships. Having a stable 9-5 where I still do good work might be better in that way rather than working 80 hour weeks for a company that might still go under in the end, survivorship bias in regards to success stories should probably be kept in memory.<p>In other words, I wasn't lucky enough to born with great inheritance or to be at the right place in the right time and other forms of success do somewhat elude me for now. Not that having employment, health, quality of life and good relationships isn't success in of itself, just not the kind that people glorify and chase.<p>That said, in regards to most things, people who are good at a craft have failed more times than others have even tried. Unless they're in a regulated sector, then they might just be in jail.<p>I will say that it's still immensely cool to see when the stars align and people who are smart and hard working enough end up in the right place at the right time and we get awesome stuff like entire industries starting up (e.g. how VR is getting more mainstream, to <i>some</i> degree the whole LLM thing, the rise of ARM processors etc., advances in graphics with the likes of Unreal Engine, programming languages like Go filling in all sorts of niches, people getting up and making engines like Godot; not that all of it is focused on money, but it's still cool). Neither someone's innate abilities, nor hard work, nor luck should be discounted.