It's not just risk mitigation; it's expectimax optimization, which sometimes involves absorbing additional risk rather than just mitigating or minimizing it.
When we examine the path others took to achieve extraordinary success, this isn't even what we're doing.
Instead, we're often looking at companies and people that took outrageous risks that will nearly always fail, and luckily ended up in just the right academic path, met just the right collaborator, entered just the right industry, had nobody else bother to compete with them, had an opponent make a fatal mistake, were noticed by just the right person, avoided the ubiquitous pitfall, et cetera.
Luck has an enormous influence on what actually ends up on top. You can do deliberate optimization, and many of these people/orgs did some, but post-hoc reasoning that everything Amazon or Einstein were doing on their path to greatness must indicate radically greater decisionmaking powers than all others is extremely incorrect, and worse (because we think in narratives) extremely misleading/convincing.
Many times, what got people to the top are high-risk, high-reward options. Buying lottery tickets (or the equivalent).
