When ambitious competitors who can't accept loss or normalcy enter into a field that's saturated with skilled rule-abiding players, they'll cheat.

Hypercompetitive fields will always surface cheaters given enough time. Then regulations pile on to fight the cheating, which makes it harder for honest people to do the good work.

We do not punish cheaters like these as much as we should.

When the stakes are high, non-compliance with the rules or the law might be worth the risk, see professional athletes and drug cheats, right?

Karma and integrity seem to be treated as an overdraft. But these folks are hardly held back by the systems they work in.

If I remember correctly, you need to be nominated by someone to be considered for the 30U30 list. Some of the people on those lists will literally run their own campaigns to get on the list, meaning that they'll pay people to nominate them, pay PR firms to run stories and campaigns. Other people do seemingly nothing, and just get nominated by legit people that admire them.

So, I'm fairly certain lists like that will attract some amount of unscrupulous narcissists.

You know, after all this time Lucas Duplan doesn't seem so bad. His hubristic sin was posing for a photo burning fake hundred dollar bills. That just seems like a random Tuesday now.

"that gets you on", ie. the kind of personality that literally pays & hustles to be featured on such a list to fuel their own ego?

colour me surprised

people still seem to think that forbes scouts the world for the best talents instead of the lists being basically a paid ad

Yes? I mean, 30U30 has probably some, let's say, "PR steering" behind it

Not "Pay2Win" but possibly something less involved

Not sure it's exclusively a U30 thing. When it comes to grift and fraud, a well known 79 year old comes to mind.