With your career you are trading time for money. It makes complete sense to optimize that. Most of the professional work you do will not be what you would work on in your free time anyways, it’s work to make some other person rich.
Maybe? Like--define optimize. VC-chasing (alluded to by the great-grandparent poster elsewhere in-thread) is almost certainly less optimized from an EV perspective.
If it's one's dream, absolutely chase it--but it should not feel obligatory because you absolutely can have a lot of happiness now without precluding later happiness, too, if you so wish.
Nor did I say one had to optimize. I just said it makes sense if someone chooses to do so.
If you're only trading time for money in your career, IMHO, you don't have a career, you only have a job.
At the least you should also be trading your time for expertise, networking, and accomplishment, although I would also recommend some degree of self-actualization and everyday enjoyment (if you're in a position to seek for those).
Unfortunately in academia it only matters if you hit your grades, which are gamed to hell and back. So you really can't tell at a glance if an A student is going to be good or bad, I hired based on a transcript once and got burned so badly that I'll never do it again.