I have a twitter account that’s semi moderately famous (like 8K followers). Every month, one or two people pick my brain on how to grow their own accounts online.

They want to be able to spread their work. Get in touch with people. Build their network.

BUT

They’re not willing to take risks.

They don’t want to look foolish, cringe, or a complete idiot (like I am most of the times).

They’re not willing to make posts that might suck; they only want to make posts that are a sure shot hit.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way.

They want the rewards. But they’re not willing to take the risks.

I am a moderator of a tech community where people routinely ask for suggestions on tools to improve their lives/work.

They ask something like this – Any open source libraries (preferably tried and tested) that helps with scraping websites where user needs to login and tokens expire every hour?

(This is not a real question, but a close approximation of what kind of things are asked.)

No one has a tried and tested solution, but people respond with solutions. None of them solve the exact kind of scraping the poster wants.

The poster keeps arguing about why those will not work (without really trying), and eventually gives up.

They could have just tried the solutions, and documented their experiences. Something might have worked (i.e. they could have had the reward), but they were not willing to risk losing their time or putting in the work.

Again not willing to take the risks, but desperately looking for the shortcut that gives out the reward.

What’s the point of this post?

If you want a reward, there will be some sort of sacrifice required from you.

It is perfectly fine to not take any risks. Just don’t be bitter about not getting any rewards afterwards.