The Success That Taught Me the Wrong Lesson

I was 24 when my small events company in Porto Alegre landed the largest contract in its two-year history. A corporate client, a three-day conference, a budget that was more than I had earned in the previous eighteen months combined.

We delivered it well, the client was satisfied, and I walked away from it feeling like I had cracked the code of running a business. That feeling - confident, validated, slightly invincible - turned out to be the most expensive thing the contract gave me.

The problem was that the contract had come to me largely through a personal connection rather than through anything systematic I had built. My university professor had recommended me to the client. The success was real but its causes were not what I thought they were.

I believed I had proven my pricing model, my operational process, and my ability to win competitive business. I had proven none of those things. I had proven that I could execute well when handed an opportunity through someone else's trust.

For the next two years, I made decisions based on a confidence that was not grounded in the evidence I thought it was. I expanded overheads too early, hired two people I could not yet sustain, and pitched for contracts in a manner that assumed the market would keep coming to me.

When the referral pipeline dried up, as it did, I had a business that was built for a volume of work it was not generating independently. The retrenchment was painful. I let both employees go, which was the hardest thing I had done professionally, and spent a year rebuilding on a much more realistic foundation.

The second version of the company - slower, more disciplined, more honest about how business was actually won - has been profitable for four years running. The lesson I keep returning to is about the story you tell yourself when things go well.

Success has causes and those causes are not always the ones you assume. If you do not take the time to understand why something worked, you will optimise for the wrong things when you try to repeat it. Early success, especially, can install a confidence that is wider than the actual evidence base.

I earned my confidence eventually. But the confidence I had at 24 was borrowed from a lucky break, and I spent two expensive years finding that out.