It is lonely doing hard work without some attaboys. Being some famous techie that people refer to you in droves by only your first name, or publishing a highly referenced paper, or exiting a startup with millions are great attaboys. But you sort of need to risk working hard and getting no cash and no attaboys. I think passion (that dirty word!) is needed to drive you to do the moonshot thing.

I often think we are a bee colony. We need lots of people trying ambitious stuff but few will get that attaboy kick. We need failures (otherwise everyone is not ambitious enough).