but to get there you need much more dedication and smart work than you currently do as employee
so, instead of trying that, you choose to lease 8 hours a day to a corporate overlord
you will earn money, but no legacy and no respect
Working a regular 9-5 that pays me well is so much better than the stress and time sink of starting my own company. It's stable, it's easy, and it gives me plenty of time and money to spend with my family.
Not everyone searches for meaning in their work. I enjoy my day job, but my satisfaction in life comes from what I do off the clock.
My family is my legacy and my respect. IDGAF what my peers think of me - why does that matter? I get a raise based on performance each year, and that's enough for me.
You could grow as a person, you could be very passionate and driven, etc. - but you could also end up quite depressed when things die down (speaking from experience sadly).
I still think startups are awesome, but if you view work as a transaction, having a good corporate job can be a better transaction for many folks, especially if work is only a part of your life, not the defining feature. Time with your children when they are young is often the easiest to explain, but same goes for time with parents/grandparents, time to work on passion projects, etc.
At a former employer, I was part of a team of a couple dozen engineers and digital designers who were working on an LTE remote radiohead and base station product. Around the time we were releasing this product, Fabrice released this [0].
Fabrice is a tremendous talent, in our world he would be analogous to a Kobe Bryant or a Wayne Gretzky, so I find it flatly obnoxious that this is the bar that's being raised in this thread.
It doesn't matter how hard I eschew the bullshit in my life and everything else "standing in my way" to try to build a legacy. I am not like Fabrice. It's unlikely anyone in this comment thread is like Fabrice. There are so very few people who are on his level, you could probably count them all on 2 hands. It's absurd to think that this is what everyone eeds to strive for in life.
The reason I'm asking these things is that we often hear the words legacy and respect in specific contexts similar to this one, but there isn't much follow up as to what this respect and legacy entails for the individual or exactly why it is so important compared to other aspects. This is a crucial part for our life plan because we consider people like Fabrice in retrospect after they have already succeeded, in a fun twist on the anthropic principle, but we don't consider the alternative Fabrices who have failed in other universes and risked everything for legacy. And we rarely consider the past Fabrices in our own universe from previous generations whom we have already forgotten despite their success.
Success is not guaranteed at all, and the statistics show more than half of them fail.
I guess.