I was scrolling LinkedIn the other night, thumb moving, brain half-off, when a post made me stop.

The writer was a venture capitalist. He said his team conducted a review of one of their longest-running funds – 12 years of investments in 116 startups. They’d invested about $6.6 million, and 32 were still alive and growing.

The post was mainly about the research they’d undertaken to understand why startups fail. What actually caused it?

They expected the usual answers – timing, competition, product risk and fundraising. But they found something that surprised me, although maybe it shouldn’t have.

They found “almost every” failure traced back to what they called “personal founder landmines.” These landmines were personal issues that the founders had encountered. Divorce, cofounder breakups, substance abuse and significant priority shifts like “I want a job now,” or “My life changed.”

I put my phone down and stared at the wall for a second. It actually made a lot of sense to me after a few minutes’ thought.

And I’ll admit it: it felt like good news. Not because those situations are good. They’re painful. But because so many dream-chasers spend their energy worrying about what’s outside of them. This suggested the most common threat isn’t out there. It’s inside your life.

I’ve learned this the hard way.

Two years ago, I had a breakup with a business partner that nearly wrecked everything we were building. It was a dramatic explosion, and suddenly, every choice took twice as long. Simple tasks became heavy. Energy leaked out of the room.

The company didn’t stall because the idea was bad or the competition was too fierce. It stalled because the people running it had a breakup.

That’s the lesson: startups don’t run on computer code alone. They run on human beings. When the human breaks down, the machine doesn’t matter.

And this isn’t only a startup lesson. It’s a life lesson.

Replace “founder” with anyone who has a big goal: a student trying to graduate, an athlete chasing a spot, an entrepreneur trying to get traction. Personal landmines are the most significant issue.

Most dreams don’t die because the person wasn’t intelligent or the idea was bad. They die because life hits the person.

A hard season at home steals sleep and focus. A relationship crisis eats your patience. A partnership conflict slows every decision. A substance abuse habit takes time, money and clarity while telling you it’s “helping.”

When you’re early in a journey, there isn’t much cushion. There’s no big team to cover your shift. No system to keep things moving when you’re tired. It’s mainly you, day after day.

That’s why one word from that post stuck with me: momentum.

Momentum is the daily push that keeps a goal alive – the call you make, the page you write, the workout you finish, the uncomfortable conversation you don’t avoid. Lose momentum for long enough, and even a great plan goes cold.

In the early days, momentum is fragile. Miss one week of outreach and your pipeline dries up. Skip two weeks, and you start telling yourself it’s over. The problem is rarely one missed day. It’s the slide – small choices stacking until you look up and realize you’ve quietly drifted far from the person who started this.

So here’s the moral, in plain language: your most significant risk might not be your dream. It might be the landmines in your own life.

This is excellent news because we can fix what is going on inside us; we can’t fix what’s outside. And if most failures are the result of inner turmoil, as hard as that is, it’s fixable!

If you have a big goal, it’s essential to move toward it as quickly as you can, but it may be equally important to build yourself up and prepare for the storms of life because they will come.

And if you’ve already stepped on a landmine – if you’ve already lost momentum – this isn’t a life sentence. You can restart. You can repair. You can come back.

Big goals require talent, and more importantly, they also require durability.

Build the dream. And build the life that can hold it.

• Toby Moore is a Shaw Local News Network columnist, star of the Emmy-nominated film “A Separate Peace,” and CEO of CubeStream Inc. He can be reached at feedback@shawmedia.com.