Your mistake is thinking that "works out" is an external thing that happens, or doesn't. You're going to have a hard time being satisfied with anything else if that's your belief. That belief will also screw with any employed career you might have.
I've failed at majority of the things I've done, but I can always try again. The biggest problem with me was that I took problems as problems to be dealt with, but in fact they were teachers to be learned from. It's something really, really clichéd but the subtle meaning in it is something that takes frustratingly long to grasp. I think that it derives directly from the fact that I cannot change my environment, but I can always change myself.
No one ever is, but you can always make a choice.
But after I put in a couple years as an employee -- where I learned a lot and paid off my debt -- I quit again. Cuz life's too short to make crap, which is inevitably what happens if you work for somebody else.
How about that?
What do you think you will learn from hearing stories of people who gave up?
As I explained further down, my hope is to learn more about the risks of entrepreneurship to inform my decision about what to do with my life. I don't want to go into this naively.
I know this is hard to grasp, because it's counter-intuitive, but it's true.
My entrepreneurship approach is extremely low risk. (That sob story above was from consulting. Anyone can get taken by a conman.) It's a SaaS we built in our part time.
My business is growing 15-20% in revenue each month; even if we didn't touch it again, it'd earn more than $120k in the next 12 mos, but since we are working on it, by the end of 12 mos I expect our outlook to be greater than half a million for the year ahead of that.
See, I'm not worrying about "externalities." I'm not looking for funding or partners. I'm not trying to get somebody other than my customers to approve of what I'm doing and pat me on the head. I'm not trying to get bought (in part because I've seen how miserable people are after their startups are bought, they become employees again, watch BigCo destroy everything they've built.)
The only thing I'm gambling with is my time, and honestly, I've wasted more time sitting on my ass being sorry for myself than I would have wasted on this product if it fell apart tomorrow.