Falling in love will cost you two close friends
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I am guessing If you are a founder, your time for social life will be very very limited, and a startup will cost 2 or more close friends.
One thing I found out, is that in general (for guys at least) is very easy to catch up and reconnect even after a long period of time of disconnect, as long as they are in the same stage lifes (eg. both being single, or not having kids, or both having a domestic life and kids, etc.). The disconnect becomes more permament when one enters a completely different stage of the life (having kids, will the major one), than the other friend.
Seems like a net gain to me ;-).
Of course, the fun part is when you break up after a long relationship where your social circles are very mixed. You run the risk of losing all your friends. Which sucks.
On the upside, I didn't lose any friends. On the downside, she lost many.
Extreme example: when the Spanish conquistadors landed in the Americas, they immediately burned their ships, so they would have no way of escaping back home to Spain in case things didn't work out. They would either conquer an empire or die.
Obviously, there are situations where burning your ships isn't warranted. But frankly, gambling on the success of the relationship is not the best way to keep your friends, either. It's a tradeoff.
Sometimes in life you have to burn your ships. I hope everyone finds someone worth burning their ships for.
funny thing was, they mostly did both!
Even if I hadn't read that, it wouldn't make sense. Ships of any era represent large capital expenditures. No navy would give up a ship unless it's unusable or can't be defended; worst case, they'd sail home empty with a skeleton crew.
"Those of his men still loyal to the Governor of Cuba conspired to seize a ship and escape to Cuba, but Cortés moved swiftly to quash their plans. To make sure such a mutiny did not happen again, he decided to scuttle his ships, on the pretext that they were no longer seaworthy. There is a popular misconception that Cortés burned the ships to prevent further mutiny, instead Cortés scuttled all but at least one, which were simply ran aground. This misconception has been attributed to the reference made by Cervantes de Salazar in 1546 as to Cortés burning his ships.[7] This may have also come from a mistranslation of the version of the story written in Latin.[8]
With all of his ships scuttled except for one small ship with which to communicate with Spain, Cortés effectively stranded the expedition in the so-called New World and ended all thoughts of loyalty to the Governor of Cuba. Cortés then led his band inland towards the fabled Tenochtitlan."
As you say, gambling on relationship success may cost friends; I chose my friends and believe I am happier for it.
And probably the love relationship too!
It's like knowing that 50% of marriages end up in divorce. True, and damn irrelevant when trying to decide if you should propose or not. Individual marriages have either a 100% or 0% chance of success, and calculating the probability of those outcomes is not greatly informed by the "national average."
Not true at all.
The subjective probability (which is all you have to make a decision from) is reflected by incomplete information, but is never 100%.
But even the objective probability (as far as such a concept is even coherent) isn't either 0 or 100. It's somewhere in between. Maybe under one set of circumstances the marriage will work out perfectly, but under another set of circumstances it won't. That's random. In one possible world the husband could arrive home at 5:12 and find his wife with another man, in another possible world he arrives home at 5:17 to find his wife freshly showered. That's random, or at least stochastic enough. In one possible world a stray gamma ray gives their child leukemia and the couple grow closer by going through the experience together, in another possible world no such thing happens, the husband goes back to work shortly after the child is born and slowly becomes alienated from his wife until divorce happens. Think you have a good enough marriage that adultery or alienation aren't going to become problems? Well throw in the multitude of circumstances which can cause people to change over time, and you'll find random factors there, too.
Which is something we think we know that just isn't so, and (as you point out) is something not too relevant at the individual level.