Classic explore versus exploit. When I was a young researcher I was given a lot of impossible opportunities. Tried 10 and did two pieces of disruptive work. That work has accrued hundreds of citations and whole research groups have received millions to continue to work on it. I didn’t see any meaningful money from that work. Now, I have a family and my research is based on requests that have deliverables and pay the bills. My skills in fact finding, synthesizing, and presenting the work is 1,000,000x better. But the risks are 10x less in this work and the pay is 100,000x more.