You are competing with millions of other people, no matter what you try to do. There are limited SERPs positions, limited user views, limited etc etc
There are no rules.
Maybe a person needs to fail to learn so they are more experienced than other people, they might eventually make $100,000 per year.
Maybe a person might think outside the box, dedicate weeks to reading up on others who have gone down the same path, learn from other peoples' mistakes, and without failure earn $200,000 per year.
Another person might have $500,000 funding to start a business, keep making mistakes, not learn from them, and the business might completely fail.
There's no rules. If you want to compete you can't think like you have to do this or you have to do that. You create the rules.
The people that really want to win will win - maybe they fail along the way, maybe they're cunning and they don't need to, but if you give up when you fail you guarantee that you'll never do anything you're proud of because people always mistake failure for the end of the road, when it's just a time to pause and rethink the plan of attack.