> It's telling me that I should rather focus on getting viral/lucky to get a shot at "success".

I'm pretty sure that's meant to be the general lesson of the last 20 years or so in Silicon Valley, but it's just survivorship bias in action.

You don't hear a whole lot about the quietly successful engineers who work a 9-till-5 and then go home to see their wife and kids. But you do constantly hear about the folks who made it big YOLO'ing their career and finances on the latest a startup/memecoin/vibecoded app...