The successful "thing" could not be easy to find

In 2008 I decided to start my own company with the goal of never having a boss, with no intention of ever hiring anyone. This was my solopreneur dream.

I tried a lot of things to make this dream come true.

Some things didn’t work. Some kind of worked. Some worked for a short period of time. I did some bets on the wrong horses.

But eventually, I found “my way” and things started to work as I initially imagined them.

It only took a decade to happen. Almost exactly 10 years during which I tried countless things.

I won’t bore you with the full list, it’s very long.

But let’s say I tried building tons of products while working as a freelancer/contractor for other companies: iOS/macOS apps, CMS plugins, and had tons of half-finished SaaS ideas. Looking back, I feel like I was pulled in all directions by my ideas. Probably those ideas weren’t even good. Some early successes were promising but they didn’t get the results I wanted.

But this week I stumbled upon a trend of people sharing their failed projects, and I was thinking:

“Hey, maybe my past is not different from many people’s past”.

Everyone tries a lot of things, and eventually one works.

The outliers are the ones that try one or two things, and immediately they get initial traction (or even a big hit).

Very few people go around boasting about their failed projects. They only talk about successes, prone to survivorship bias.

Survivorship bias or survival bias is the logical error of concentrating on entities that passed a selection process while overlooking those that did not. This can lead to incorrect conclusions because of incomplete data. —Wikipedia

So we get into thinking “we’ll never make it” because we’ve tried a couple of things and we haven’t hit "the right one”. While in reality, everyone has roadblocks and you just see the successes, ignoring the troubles they had to reach where they are today.

Keep trying.