When you write "Was alchemy or physics the long bet?" it seems you concede that Newton made a bet, and that it didn't involve money. That was my only point: We all make decisions that involve some amount of guesswork on risk vs reward, and it's not always about money.

For sake of argument, let's say Newton's reward was the advancement of human knowledge. He made some high-risk bets that didn't pay off (alchemy, theology), and some that did (physics, calculus).

All PG is saying is that when we look at famous historical figures, after centuries of deification, we tend to focus only on the bets that paid off, and ignore all the failures. But those failures are crucially important to who these figures were as people, and it does them (and ourselves) a disservice to only focus on the successes.