It was more luck than you think.

For the last 7 years, I have been building software for very successful companies and entrepreneurs. I’ve watched dozens and dozens of products come from vision to fruition. In this process, I watched many of them become very successful and make a lot of money, while many of them failed miserably.

One common type of founder that I worked with was the one coming from a previous successful exit — someone who had just sold their first company for millions of dollars and was now coming back with their “next big idea.”

What was very interesting to me was the level of confidence they had in the success of their new idea. It was wild. I sat through meetings where these founders would say things like, “and after MVP, we are going to get $X million dollars within 6 months. It’s foolproof!” or “once we finish this feature, we will have millions of users! We are going to disrupt the industry!”

While I’m a big supporter of confidence, optimism, and forecasting, I want to emphasize that I observed a little too much confidence in these very rich and successful founders. It was a sense of, “since I’ve done it before, I can do it again” type thing. I felt that their previous success blinded them to the possibility of failure.

It seemed like, in a way, they were trying to prove the first time it wasn’t luck. I mean, I have tried to prove it myself many times. Every time I made a good choice or something went well in my life, I always had my ego knock on the door and say, “Good job, Mauricio — your dedication, routine, and experience really made it happen!”

And while I think these things are definitely part of the ingredients in the recipe for success, I think that we often forget a very important ingredient: things we can’t control (luck).

I love the example given by Jason Zweig in the book The Psychology of Money, saying that while Bill Gates was an incredibly smart, dedicated, and brilliant person, but the fact that he went to one of the only high schools in the world with a computer at the time probably played a huge role in the success he’s had.

Well, since the point of writing this is to motivate, here is the lesson for Mauricio:

Success isn’t just earned — it’s also granted by timing, circumstances, and chances we don’t control. Stay humble, stay grateful, and never assume someone’s struggles are due to a lack of effort.