You are exactly right. But there is also a certain element of luck. I have two examples. I opened a winery as a main hustle because wine was my passion. I quit my high paying job at a tech firm. I invested hundreds of thousands of dollars. I took the right education and made world class wine that was rated by the best people in the world (Wine Advocate, Wine Spectator) and we did all the right marketing. We even hired outside marketing experts to tell us what to do. In the end it failed and I lost a lot of money. It wasn't that I wasn't making good wine or we didn't have a good story, it was that there was too much competition and they were outspending us to get to the top. Our sales just stayed flat and declined even though we put more and more effort into it. Eventually I had to pull the plug and go back to a desk job. I've watched countless wineries come and go because of the same exact thing.

My second example is one of success. I started a blog in 2009 rating products from a certain place. I was a hobby and I didn't try to monetize it for like five years. I didn't even know that was a thing. Finally got on Google Adsense and was making some extra money but it was just enough for couple of nights out for dinner a month. I kept plugging away writing more and more. In 2020 I made the threshold (for number of visits to the blog) to get accepted into one of the big ad management companies and with their help I have greatly expanded my revenue and might make $50k this year working about 5 hours a week on this blog. I kept working and learning and working and learning. It's been almost 14 years and it's finally starting to pay off.

I think the biggest thing people can learn is about the sunk cost fallacy. When to pull the plug on something that is going bad. Most people stick with something far too long and then things get really bad.