I believe most of you are missing the point. Bukowski was arguing this in favor of doing something you truly feel passionate about regardless of whether it succeeds or not. The philosophy doesn't work well for highly specific, practical-minded goals of an emotionally ambiguous nature: If you really want to be an artist that gets his paintings on display in the met, but see that you're not getting anywhere with it, you can easily let go and move onto something else. The important thing however is that if you have a wider, more fundamental dream (say to simply live for your art and experiment with it as long as you have the faculties to do so) for which you can spend your life struggling and be happy with the process itself, despite frustrations, then you can try different practical paths to success, experiment flexibly with them as needed but take sheer pleasure in knowing that the all-in journey was worth it even if some specific ideal destination wasn't reached. Considering it this way takes survivorship bias, luck and low probabilities into consideration but with an awareness that even if they might sideline you, the overall effort was simply how you wanted to spend your life.