Grow some crops? An invading army will come and steal and trample them.
Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse.
Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.
That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases.
> Start a trading enterprise? Your ship will get raided by pirates or you die of tropical diseases.
Again, most of the time that didn't happen. And you often didn't die of tropical diseases either.
> Mine for coal? A coal heap will bury your town or you'll die in a collapse.
Most towns were not buried and most coal miners don't die in collapses.
That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.
Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.
That doesn't change the numbers involved. Most things that farmers sowed for most of history didn't get burned by invading armies.
> That actually didn't happen the waste majority of cases.
It happened in many prominent cases. Egypt, for example, was called "the breadbasket of Rome."
Also, it should be pointed out that our history is not full of industrial revolutions. There's the one that we're still living in, and arguably two or three that fizzled depending on exactly how you count and where you draw the line, and that's it. Industrial revolutions aren't easy in the real world!
That's why so many great civilizations were founded in places with good geographic barriers around a productive interior. Ancient Egypt for example had the Nile and was surrounded by vast deserts, which weren't feasible to cross at the time. On the other end of history, the US has similar advantages.
Egypt's food production was certainly critical to its success, but its isolation was both its defense and its downfall. Other civilizations competed with each other and advanced their technology, while Egypt existed happily in isolation, unaware of new technologies like bronze and chariots. After the camel, along with ships able to carry significant cargo, Egypt's food production became a juicy target, and it was conquered by one civilization after another.
Remember, risk is probability x severity. In your first example, the severity of not growing crops is starvation vs. the severity of wasted toil in agriculture. I'd imagine the probability is probably higher, too.
It's not different from the vast majority of real world history.