In a former life, I often played poker. A key concept that bad poker players fail to grasp is the concept of avoiding ruin. If one is to be a good poker player, one needs to be sufficiently bankrolled. One should only spend a small fraction of their bankroll at each game. For instance if one's bankroll is $1000 and they bet all of it on chance of tripling their money with a 50% chance of winning, half the time they will lose that bet be ruined, ie broken. A better strategy is to bet $1 with a chance of winning $3 at 50% probability, so that if you were to lose the $1 you will still have $999 more to lose and eventually if you continue playing your $1000 would have tripled without ruin.
This concept can also be applied in life, risk little at a time. When one innovates the goal is to extract some measure of value from the innovation, but there is always some risk involved. As an example, you came up with a idea for a website, a site dedicated to cats wearing top-hats. The risk you are taking are two fold, social and financial. You could be laughed at for the rest of your days ie social risk and also the monies spending on developing and marketing the site could be lost if the website doesn't recoup a profit ie financial risk. It is hard to assess the risk one can take reputation, thus it would be more valuable to assess one's financial risk.
A very conservative bankroll in poker is 200 times the max buy-in for one game, ie you would need to lose 200 games or more to lose your bankroll. My proposition is that when one undertakes a venture, he should be able to do it 200+ times without ruin, also the venture he undertakes would be sufficient profitable that it would pay for any loses sustained.
In essence, we are looking for opportunities with little risk with enormous pay off. Such opportunities tend to come with a high risk of failure on each individual attempt. Consider singing, each time a singer creates a song, it very unlikely it will become a hit, but if it does it will have enormous pay off. In ones lifetime one could make thousand of songs. It's opportunities like this in which one should seek to engage oneself.
Other examples of opportunities with little risk and enormous pay off:
1. Creating and selling Utility Software
2. Small Game Development
3. Writing blog[<---me]
4. Writing and selling short stories/novels/books
5. Writing and selling tutorials[<--I should try this]
6. Prove a mathematical theorem
7. Create Artificial General Intelligence[<---also me]