Ask a founder what nearly broke them and they rarely name a spreadsheet. They name the loneliness, the 3am doubt, the call from a family member gently asking whether this is really the right idea.

Darrah Brustein's widely-read account of the hardest things about starting a business, published on BusinessCollective, is notable for how little of it concerns strategy. Her list is almost entirely internal: the isolation of nontraditional hours, the financial austerity of the early years, the certainty that you are the only person who has ever struggled like this. She is blunt that the polished founder narratives we consume are a kind of airbrushing — the hard years exist, they just don't make the profile piece.

That gap between the public story and the private experience is where most founders lose their footing. Not because the work is too hard, but because they assume their difficulty is evidence of unsuitability.

What actually predicts founder success?

Psychologist Angela Duckworth's research points to grit — the combination of passion and perseverance applied to long-term goals — as a stronger predictor of success than raw intelligence or natural talent. Her work across West Point cadets, spelling bee finalists and teachers found consistently that sustained effort toward a consistent direction outperformed measured ability.

The implication for founders is specific and useful. The hard years are not a signal that you've chosen wrongly. They are the selection mechanism. Most people exit before the compounding starts, and exiting is a rational response to difficulty that feels like personal failure rather than an expected stage.

Grit is not endurance for its own sake. Duckworth's construct pairs perseverance with consistency of interest — staying pointed in one direction long enough for effort to accumulate. Founders who burn out are frequently not short on effort. They're short on direction, having spread the same intensity across too many pivots.

Where discipline meets leverage

Alex Hormozi's work for founders lands on a complementary point. His framing across $100M Offers and $100M Leads is that most struggling businesses are not suffering from insufficient hustle — they're suffering from a weak offer and too few ways of reaching people. His value equation holds that an offer becomes compelling when the perceived outcome and likelihood of achieving it rise, while time delay and effort required fall. Fix the offer, and the same effort produces different results.

His lead generation argument is similarly structural: businesses fail not from lack of activity but from dependence on a single channel. Build multiple reliable paths to customers and the anxiety that keeps founders awake loses most of its grip.

Put alongside Duckworth, the picture sharpens. Grit determines whether you're still there in year three. Leverage determines whether year three is worth reaching.

The practical translation

Three things follow.

Normalise the difficulty. Brustein's list is valuable precisely because it removes the shame from experiences most founders assume are theirs alone. Loneliness and doubt are stage-appropriate, not diagnostic.

Narrow before you intensify. If effort isn't compounding, the problem is usually direction rather than volume. Consistency of interest is the half of grit most founders skip.

Build systems that don't require you. The loneliness Brustein describes is partly structural — knowledge trapped in one head, with no mechanism for anyone else to carry it. Offloading what doesn't need your judgment is not weakness. It's what makes persistence sustainable.

Grit gets you through the hard years. Leverage decides whether they were worth it.