There is a moment in every build that no one warns you about.
Not the start, when the idea is fresh and everyone is excited. The middle. The long, quiet middle, where the work is just fixing the same thing again, and no one is watching.
I have lived in that middle for most of my career. Building products used across 20 countries in Africa, I learned fast that the idea was never the hard part. The hard part was the hundredth fix on a feature nobody would ever praise. The temptation, every single time, was to believe the people winning out there had simply been luckier than me.