I think there are actually very few people who would take such a risk, even though I think it's a necessary risk if you want to be part of "huge, if true."
I beg to differ - we will never know the number of people who take such risks due to survivorship bias. I have a hunch that a lot of people through the ages took risks that never paid off and they never got famous, instead, they bankrupted themselves, got committed into asylums or lived their days in anonymity. No one writes biographies about them, if they did, no one would want to read them.
> dare to spend years of your life grinding away (in relative isolation) on something that seems crazy, with no guarantee of any success, but full of promise.
If I were to come up with a VC creed, it would probably be very close to this. Distill it down to concise Latin and you got yourself a bona fide VC Firm motto.
It cost me a year (1/90th of my life? 1/75th? 1/50th? less?) to realize this. From what I understand, I'm far from alone -- and basically every career path risks this cost.
Emphasizing this nugget of truth by placing it at the bottom of your post is commendable.
Well darn it, that's how we were taught in engineering school.
I suspect that the personality trait most closely associated with creativity like this is a lack of fear of embarrassment. When someone tells me something I have suggested is wrong I respond by asking questions to understand how they understand the topic so that I can learn from them. When you tell someone who has vested their self image in being right that they are wrong they take it personally and respond dismissively. They fight to have their point of view validated rather than understand a counter point of view. But this makes them unwilling to share partially understood topics because it could expose them to being 'wrong' in public.
Other times people self censor their own thinking. I get so frustrated when someone says "Well I thought that might be a solution to the problem but assumed it would be too expensive." That is an example of someone who had a creative idea, self censored it, and it had to come out through someone else in order to reach the collective consciousness of the group. I try really hard to have people not self censor but it is so ingrained sometimes.
And all of that then feeds back into the genius/hero narrative where the narrative of a person includes only their noteworthy accomplishments and so the perception is that people like that only do noteworthy things, and then they are impossible to live up to.
Dare to ask stupid questions, it could make you the smartest person in the room.