Part of it is that achieving success through means other than the standard things you’re supposed to achieve success by doing well at can feel like cheating, possibly for some sort of signaling reason. Part of it is there are serious psychological and social costs not only to doing things that other people don’t do, but to doing things for different kinds of reasons. Part of it is you’re suggesting the benefits of what you call being strategic are larger than they really are by focusing on available cases where it changed someone’s life and ignoring a great many forgettable and hard to pinpoint cases where it was just a time/energy sink, or where considering it was a time/energy sink, or where there was good reason to believe the relevant strategy had already been taken into account by whatever caused you to be doing the default thing, or where there seemed to be such good reason absent an appreciation of the world’s madness.
Part of it is that achieving success through means other than the standard things you’re supposed to achieve success by doing well at can feel like cheating, possibly for some sort of signaling reason. Part of it is there are serious psychological and social costs not only to doing things that other people don’t do, but to doing things for different kinds of reasons. Part of it is you’re suggesting the benefits of what you call being strategic are larger than they really are by focusing on available cases where it changed someone’s life and ignoring a great many forgettable and hard to pinpoint cases where it was just a time/energy sink, or where considering it was a time/energy sink, or where there was good reason to believe the relevant strategy had already been taken into account by whatever caused you to be doing the default thing, or where there seemed to be such good reason absent an appreciation of the world’s madness.