For sure, the vast majority of people taking the roundabout path don't achieve his level of success.
I just mean it's interesting how there don't seem to be more young people trying to emulate his particular route. Many claim they want to be "the next Steve Jobs" or achieve the same level of success, but then just go the same route as every other ambitious person.
That's because the "independent thinker" route (Steve Jobs' route) is going to look different for everyone by definition. Whereas you can look out onto the "yellow brick road" anytime and see who is on it.
Ambition and independent thinking are pretty much orthogonal. Cultivating boatloads of both is rare, but can allow for great moonshots.
> Job's level of success. We never hear about them.
Success != hearing about it.
You don't hear or know about most people success, or failure, for that matter; even huge ones. You know about a very small subset of these. That's fame.
And I'm just not sure that "being a found of a billion+ dollar company" was what Jobs considered his own success; but a consequence or aside part of it. Actually, no one knows but him.
What you're saying makes sense, I just think GP wanted to say something else entirely and borrowed the word "success" for that.
You do hear about people making it big and creating profitable companies (one possible definition of "success")... But how many of these founders nowadays are hippie-like figures with a multidisciplinary education? Not that many, if any.
