After my last post "about your chances of a successful venture":http://alexpooley.com/articles/2005/11/15/500-and-your-financial-freedom I am obliged to explain an important caveat. On average you will succeed based on your probability of success. However, reality may be a very different case because you may not follow an "average" path.
Say someone asked you to flip a coin four times with a heads representing a positive, and a tails representing a negative. On average you will flip two heads and two tails because you have a 50/50 chance. In reality you will also flip other combinations of heads and tails such as four heads and a no tail. Applying this to the original post you can see that even if you have a good chance of success, you may still be very unlucky and have more failed ventures than you may deserve. This is known as variance and is an important concept that affects every part of our lives.
Have you ever wondered about those people that become hugely successful at a really early age? While some cases may be entirely justified, some of the cases are probably due to variance. What about those people that never seem to get a break? variance.
Understand variance and learn to see it in things around you. You will start to see that success and failure are a lot more complicated than you originally thought. What does this mean for you? It means failure isn't necessarily your fault, so persevere. Success may have been luck, so watch the ego ;)