During one of our recent 1:1s, my engineering manager mentioned this adage, and it changed the way I think about projects. When you start a new project, it's natural to assume that, unless some major mistake happens, things will work out. But in fact, the default end state of any new project is failure. This is one of those truths that's so obvious it's easy to overlook (as I have, for a long time), but if you look around, you'll see the evidence everywhere. The world is littered with the remains of projects that quietly fizzled out.

Why is this? It's not that people set out to fail. It's that, left to themselves, projects tend to stall. There's a kind of project entropy: unless someone is actively pushing things forward, momentum dissipates. There are always more reasons for something not to happen than to happen. Every project encounters obstacles: technical problems, disagreements, bikeshedding, distractions. If no one feels responsible for overcoming these, the project will grind to a halt.

This is why the most important factor in whether a project succeeds is not the idea, or the resources, or even the initial enthusiasm. It's whether someone cares enough to keep going when it would be easier to stop. Progress only happens when someone takes responsibility. Not just for doing the work, but for making sure the work gets done. That means solving problems as they arise, making decisions when things are ambiguous, and keeping the energy up when everyone else is tired or distracted.

If you examine successful projects, you'll nearly always discover that there was at least one person who simply wouldn't let it fail. Without that individual, the project would have ended up among the countless things that were almost done. So if you're starting something new, assume that, by default, your project will fail. Then ask yourself: who's going to make sure it doesn't?