You only hear about the people who succeeded when everyone told them they would fail. The many that failed when everyone said they'd fail don't often make the news.
People usually have good reasons why they say negative things. It's worth understanding the negative sentiment.
For example, victims of certain types of fraud are often warned repeatedly by friends and family that they are going to be defrauded. Some still go ahead and lose staggering sums of money.
It's important to really listen to the naysayers, if only to understand the risks. Then you can make an informed choice as to if you'll try your hand at something that's potentially costly.
I just needed a hobby to keep me from getting bored and depressed. I had adapted a screenplay and made plans to write a novel, but my interest in programming had been sparked by an early exposure to Super Star Trek and the profound realisation that this illusion was being created by a magical recipe.
I wanted to learn these arcane incantations so that I could fill this black void with my own Universe. Whether it be CRT, LCD, LED, or Plasma, I have been trying to find a way to bring worlds of light to the darkness of a computer display ever since. Yet, as the scale of my endeavour dawned on me I realised that it would be better to spend a couple of years creating tools that I was comfortable using than rely on C++ as others recommended.
Unfortunately, my estimate was out by an order of magnitude.
Some twenty years later I have only managed to wrangle the process of research and (re)design to a point where I am finally ready to write a comprehensive specification of my multiparadigm "live" programming language and its alternative document-centric graphical user interface only after a self-imposed deadline made at the beginning of last month - otherwise, I'm sure I would still be amusing myself exploring endless "rabbit holes".
Despite this delay, I feel that my project is stronger as a result. I really didn't know enough about computer science when I started and I have found that I need to grok OOP and FP to know that they aren't appropriate for my needs. I was denied the opportunity to study the subject at school and had to travel to Foyle's in London to buy obscure computer books for years before unlimited broadband became affordable. Admittedly, I was paranoid that I would find myself several years into programming my videogame only to discover that "high productivity", "spare me the details", programming language was weak in some respect and could not accomodate the retrofit of some unanticipated, but very necessary, feature. Hence, a lot of the work I have done has been defensive: trying to create a future roadmap that specifies how concurrency and parallelism would work even if I plan to leave the implementation of these features until much later.
Hopefully, it won't be too long before I am using an integrated suite of development tools (created with my own language), to build my own procedurally-generated intergalactic MMORTSFPSRPG (Massively-Multiplayer Real-Time Strategy First-Person Shooter Role-Playing Game), or "adventure" if you prefer. Without my language/tools I very much doubt I would be able to complete such a grandiose endeavour unaided, and I very much prefer working alone without social expectations or professional deadlines - despite how much of my disposable income it has cost.
I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but you tell a good story! If you are serious and you really want to deliver something rather than enjoy the daydreaming about how great it's going to be (something I suffer from myself sometimes) then you should know that it's time to put fingers to keyboard. You've got a dozen of years of effort in front of you. Have a look at the story of Robert Szeleney and SkyOS for instance.
Well, I've written about thirty million words on the subject, but I don't think it will take me 12 years to implement an initial prototype, more like two and then several years for all the tools that I want to make with it which will come to define its API, it should evolve over time with only me using it - I don't want to find myself in the same situation as Dennis Ritchie and Bjarne Stroustrup when a redesign was impeded by their early versions being adopted by comparatively few users and want the total freedom to change the design of my language if absolutely necessary with it only breaking code that I have written with it myself. Indeed, the likelihood of me making my language public is quite small as I know how every new language gets a hostile reception on here, Reddit and Slashdot. Really, I'm only doing it to help solve my own problems like Larry Wall did with his Perl scripting language.
If I had started implementation sooner I would have made something naive and half-baked. I did not have the benefit of a formal education in Computer Science and I probably wouldn't have attempted a project of this size if I had known all of the work that was involved. Walter Bright wrote a compiler by himself and Paul Woakes wrote Mercenary unaided and Elite was made by just two people, with David Braben on graphics and Ian Bell doing the trading (okay, three if you count the novel included in the box by Robert Holdstock), but that is still just 1% of the staff of a Ubisoft game like Assassin's Creed employing a whole bunch of artists, animators, scriptwriters, voice actors and composers for an estimated thousand man-years to create its content-rich high production values - all of which can be circumvented with procedural content generation as in No Man's Sky (initially, just four developers), and supplementary user-generated content such as or the seven million user-created levels in Little Big Planet, or about seven thousand competitive Halo 3 maps on the Forgehub community website.
Rather than waste mine and everyone else's time "doing the sensible thing" and writing another Tetris clone, I've gone and jumped straight to what I wanted to do, mindful that I will need productivity boosting tools in order to make it and that to write those all by myself I will need a highly productive exploratory programming language and that in order to make THAT it would help if I knew what the hell I was doing and did PLENTY of preparatory reading so that I didn't go in to it uninformed.
I agree too. I don't regret a single second.
True, the business didn't work out.
But what I've learned is so much more, than if I would keep working a perm job...
The startup experience changed my life for the better.
It will help me to make another business without mistakes.
I've learnt who my real friends are.
How to control the fear of uncertainty.
Etc etc etc...
People usually have good reasons why they say negative things. It's worth understanding the negative sentiment.
For example, victims of certain types of fraud are often warned repeatedly by friends and family that they are going to be defrauded. Some still go ahead and lose staggering sums of money.
It's important to really listen to the naysayers, if only to understand the risks. Then you can make an informed choice as to if you'll try your hand at something that's potentially costly.