I think the "risk" part of "ambition/risk" part of is what the OP was referring to, and I think not recognizing the relationship, in a kind of rampant survivorship bias, is a bit part of the problem with contemporary society.
I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward.
This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile.
I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.
I'm not really critiquing what you wrote, because I'm not sure how it applies to what I'm thinking, but to me it seems like there's a danger in assuming that degree of success in life or lack thereof arises from lack of ambition per se. I think as ambition increases, so does risk, in general, so lack of success could be due to lack of ambition, but many very ambitious people who just have been on the bad side of circumstances, in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
I worry a bit about an implicit assumption that we often make that someone could always have "tried harder," which seems to be the argument of the essay now that I think about it. If a failure situation arises, we tend to pick it apart and look for what the person did wrong, and then if we find anything, ascribe blame to the person. In some situations--maybe always, that sort of introspection is helpful, but often I worry it misses the broader picture, in terms of the value of what was given up, or why that person was put in the position to begin with. We also don't scrutinize success as often to look at stupid decisions that could have panned out very poorly, and blame the individual--often there's an implicit pass, like "oh this person is so lucky," as if that luck is an attribute of the person, and marvel at that luck instead as if it's something to reward.
This essay kind of hit hard, because at middle age I've realized that the field / career area I'm in is in crisis, a sort of house of cards, and at some level driven by fundamentally unethical or unsound phenomena. My choice is basically to suck it up and just go along with it, or ditch the whole thing and start over as if I was in my 20s. If I ditch things, I feel like I'm by definition a failure by many, and ignoring this compounding benefits idea, but if I stay with it, I'm just supporting a system that I feel resentful about and that I think is going to fall apart eventually one way or another, even if some are inevitably going to be remaining at the top of that rubble pile.
I guess one way to think about it is this: in life, for most things, that compounding benefits curve is accompanied by a compounding costs curve, and sometimes the difference doesn't look compounding at all.