"Competent to execute" is far more important than "working hard enough." Elon Musk splits his life between Tesla, Solarcity (now part of Tesla, but essentially independent), The Boring Company, SpaceX, and Neuralink. He also dabbles in a slew of other projects. That means he works at most 8 hours per week on each of those. Is that working hard? It's hardly working.
Unless you've done a circuit where you've been in many roles in companies, and have experience in tech, marketing, management, sales, finance, legal, etc. running your first startup is almost guaranteed to bomb, but you're also almost guaranteed to pick up some of that experience. The basic model -- many risks, a few successes -- is great for both personal growth and being a successful entrepreneur. Indeed, I'll say Elon is partially successful because he can leverage experience across those companies.
I do agree many people aren't in a position to do this. Restrictive employment agreements, financial obligations, and family obligations certainly can eat you up alive.
And it is you that is missing the point. Many of us cannot try enough times to succeed. As stated in another comment, if I try 2-3 times and fail I am back to not only square one, but maybe on the street.
* Start a project in spare time
* Validate technology (prototype something)
* Validate market demand (talk to customers)
* Validate business model (estimate costs/revenues/etc.)
* Otherwise mitigate risk as appropriate for the business
Most of these are pretty deep dives; it's not a one-evening project. In most cases, people (like Elon) become minor domain experts. On the other hand, these are also not job-quitting deep dives; one isn't on the street if one fails.
Perhaps for every few dozen such deep dives, something which looks really plausible comes up. From that point, it's largely a matter of good execution.
I think the key difference between my friends and Elon is that Elon tries to do Really Big Things which change the world. My friends might start a business which e.g. applies machine vision to a new vertical, or adds some kind of automation to some industrial process, or similar.
At this point, all have lives, families, etc. and aren't working 70+ hour weeks. Failure rates for their businesses aren't all too high either. Most business they start seem to at least pay the bills for the boss and the employees (with a few much bigger successes, and a few failures).
I'm not saying that's most folks, but that is most folks in my community. But they've universally managed people before, they can code well, they can do math well, they've built out a reasonable network of contacts, etc.
My premise is that there are way too many people who haven't built successful software companies because they a) never even tried.
And, that the reason many of them never tried is because of rationalizations that the "successful" people must have had some special quality that they themselves could never possess, and that therefore it would be pointless to try at all.
Which is a shame.
"Maybe what you're really seeing is Confirmation Bias and, again, everything you have to say is worthless."
"Which is annoying."
"Because it misses the point."
But I think in general it's a trend against the idea that successful people or projects are successful because of a particular sequence of steps that could, if replicated, make an observer successful also. Whereas, as you point out, it's more about this meta thing of how we do our best to recognize good conditions for success, and then keep showing up. If the chances of success (especially really big success) are small- trying more times increases your odds.
I think people, broadly speaking, understand this idea, and all the yelling about confirmation bias has roots in real instances of people bragging/advising/publishing books/whatever based on anecdotes about things that happened during their specific successful project, with less recognition of how much coincidence matters.
And yes, you can't benefit from coincidence if you don't show up. If you aren't trying in the first place. If that is your actual premise, it's not very obvious to me from your post. Honestly the tone of your post felt more like complaining/whining that people won't listen to your advice when you want to give it and how frustrated that makes you, than a sincere attempt to talk about the pros and cons of repeatedly taking risks on new projects when you could be doing other things.
This is something I notice in the reactions to other people's posts. I'll read something, nod along to a bunch of good ideas and overall wisdom, then come read the commentary here dismissing the whole thing.
Oddly, thinking about it now, it's something that never seems to happen to my own advice. Perhaps it's so self-evidently obvious that my success is random chance and bad ideas that worked in spite of themselves, that nobody ever felt the need to point it out.