A Remarkable Life Requires You to Overcome Mediocrity, Not Fear

While I think the OP does add some useful nuance to an often oversimplified topic, I would say that I am happy for him that he has had it so easy. Happy because he has apparently never known anyone whose is very smart and very hardworking, but whose success and happiness in some novel area has been actively sabotaged by parents who use love as a weapon with never an iota of remorse.

To have such a person dear to your heart is to peer into Mordor. And, yes, encouraging such a person to chuck their parents' love into Mount Doom may be the best course.

This is the best page of career advice I've ever read, and I think that our current culture will quite inevitably bury it in a locked safe, in a concrete vault, in the Marianna Trench.

What's the real point of the Courage Culture? It's to build a cult of bravery and manliness in order to sucker people into bleeding themselves dry for a chance at a big break, but most especially for someone else's immediate profit. As michaelochurch will inevitably arrive to say, the Courage Culture is what VC-istan uses to exploit the young, strong, smart, and ambitious people who aren't exactly very wise yet.

Yet the advice is correct. Success doesn't come from the one tiny spark of an idea that kindles into a bright fire, guarded and fed against all odds in a battle for glory. It comes from being in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills and the right willpower to see where there's a demand for something and fill that demand.

The upside is, despite place and time mattering greatly, skills and willpower also matter greatly, and are fully under your control. There's also very relevant advice from Paul Graham for the place-and-time issue: stay upwind, if you can. Keep yourself positioned where lucky chances can find you and you're ready for lucky chances. Once you've got skills and an ability to position yourself upwind, it's just a matter of time and combinatorics.

That was the first hard part. Then comes the second hard part of actually doing the hard work. But if you even made it through the first part, you've probably got the willpower to apply yourself to the second part.

I'm gonna stop ranting now.