Learning to Fail Leads to Achieving Success

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This lesson is one that is invaluable to you - once you clearly understand its true meaning...

It is so easy to admire whoever it is that you admire, and aspire to achieve similar results as them - but do you really know what it took them to get where they are today?

Probably not.

You see, behind every meaningful and sustainable success - without exception - are numerous failures.

In many such cases, there are hundreds or even thousands of failures and missteps behind the scenes - and each one was a learning experience - and another step toward the achievement of what you now see as their success.

Why is this important for you to know?

Because if you do NOT realize this then you have unrealistic expectations and false beliefs about what is truly necessary - and when your initial efforts fail to produce the results you are hoping for, you will likely do as most people do and quit trying - or head off in pursuit of the next shiny thing.

Then you will repeat this broken pattern again and again - until someday you eventually figure it out.

Maybe you already have figured this out - and if so that is great!

If not - then as of this moment in time you now know this, and if you use it then you can save yourself years of wasted time and effort.

Real Estate

I started investing in real estate and then got my license as an agent when I was in my early twenties. Back then the internet didn't exist as it does today and information was harder to get access to.

Even the listings themselves were in great big books that came out every week that were about four inches thick.

Training for sales success was almost non-existent at many firms and basically, it went something like this" Welcome to the company, here is your desk and your phone - now go sell some houses..." and that was pretty much it.

Other than the mechanical technical training of legal requirements and principles of real estate from a contract writing requirement perspective - you were otherwise on your own.

So I had to seek out information and learn on my own.

I spoke with other agents who appeared to be successful. I bought and read books on my own and attended seminars and I purchased correspondence courses when I could find them.

Most of it was garbage and didn't work - and so many of the things I tried didn't work. So I failed.

Geographical farming was one such tactic I tried. This is where you pick a neighborhood and knock on every door trying to make contact with people and establish a relationship. While the underlying principles are sound (especially with the technology available today!) back then it was a colossal waste of time and energy that would have been far better used on other more productive and higher leverage strategies.

But I did not know that at the time!

I knocked on thousands of doors and talked to hundreds of people. I did free consultations and free comparative market analysis on countless homes.

But it failed to produce results most of the time. So I failed again and again, but I kept trying. I learned and tried every real estate sales tactic I could find. Again and again, I failed.

I failed fast too - because I was trying like hell - and then a funny thing started happening before too long. I sold my first house and I earned a few thousand dollars in commission!

Once I sold the first one I KNEW I could sell more, and so I did.

All of those "failures" taught me countless valuable lessons. One was how to get over myself and get over any fear of speaking to other people I may have ever had. Another lesson was to learn how to get past dealing with rejection to the point that it flows off of me like water off a duck's feathers. I sold more and homes and I learned a little more with every deal I made.

They All Quit Before Achieving Any Success...

At the same time as I went to school to get my license, there were at least twenty or more people in that same class with me. By the end of the first year, almost all of them had quit - most without ever completing a single sale.

Not one.

Over the years I went on to sell and list many more properties than I can even remember now and I made tens of thousands of dollars in commissions along the way. I also continued investing in real estate myself and I was always trying to learn more and do better.

Keep in mind this was long before all the house flipping TV shows and all that - this was back in the Carlton Sheets era and the beginning of that even.

Did I make money? Yes, I did. I made tens of thousands of dollars over the years in residential real estate - but what nobody usually mentions is that I also LOST tens of thousands of dollars too!

While I loved the real estate business (and still do!) - I did not love the instability of sporadic feast or famine income, and I was frankly burnt out and tired. So I went into property management with a large real estate company and managed a portfolio of over 200 residential units. The money was not as good - but at least it was stable and predictable.

I had a ton of fun and learned some very valuable lessons in the process - and I also discovered full-blown office politics for the first time.

It didn't take me too long to realize that I hate office politics and office nonsense of all kinds. So I began to consider what I liked and what I didn't like in work and in life and I started looking at other ways to make a living for my family and myself.

One day I saw an ad in the local paper for a free seminar on trucking and a hiring event in a neighboring city. I have always loved to drive. I started driving cars (a chevy van with a 3 speed on the column) when I was about eight years old or so - and I was operating farm tractors and heavy equipment shortly thereafter. I thought about it - then I called the number, got my ticket, and off I went.

I Began to See Patterns of Repetition In Human Behaviour

The training class I went to in order to get my initial training and get a commercial driver's license (CDL) had about twenty or so people in it too.

Several of them quit before the end of the first phase of training. More quit during the second phase of training weeks later, and by the end of the first year there were exactly two of us left with that company from that class!

Just two...

Somewhere along the way, I heard of the 80/20 rule - and while it has to do with producing results - it also began to become apparent that it also has to do with failure vs success rates among people as well as their individual productivity in all areas of life.

To put it another way - most people are always going to quit most things they start before ever achieving any success at all that matters much.

Quitting vs Failing vs Success

Another key lesson is that there is a difference between these things that matters. Sometimes people quit because they realize they have chosen the wrong thing to pursue for them at that time - and they intentionally make and informed decisions to change course.

Nothing wrong with that either.

Others quit because they think they can't succeed - so they quit trying - even when the thing they are doing is very important to them and they desperately want to be successful at it.

Everything is wrong with quitting in this case!

Many others give up and quit simply because they fail to understand the true price that is required to achieve success. They do not realize how long it really takes and how much work it really takes too.

Since they have inaccurate and unrealistic expectations - based on misinformation and or a lack of information, to begin with, they get easily frustrated and throw in the towel long before getting anywhere close to achieving any kind of real results that actually matter.

What This All Has To Do With You...

No matter what your goals are the reality is that you are going to fail.

I can almost guarantee you of that... and it will probably happen again and again to you too.

But here is the other side of that - if you keep getting back up and keep climbing back into that arena again and again - you will achieve success eventually!

Study and learn from other people. Take courses, read books - use training manuals. Follow models and mentors. Get a coach. Use the communities available to you - including this one!

And keep working every day to make a little progress - to learn and apply at least one more new thing. Keep working hard to develop your skills and get better at your chosen craft.

Get comfortable with rejection.

Learn to communicate better. Do better.

Do these things - and your success is assured - the only question is how much time it will take, and even that depends on you too!

Until next time my friend, be safe and make progress - and always remember;

Choose Your Own Course, Build a Better Life

Best regards,

L.D. Sewell

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Recent Comments

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I never consider something a failure; I choose instead to always consider it a lesson in what not to do next time. Even when bad things happen in my life, I try to figure out how to turn that into a lesson which I can share to help someone else in the same situation. It's helped turn some sad things into something useful, which I treasure.

That is a very good way to look at it - and to benefit from it all too.

Great insights here LD, we all fall down and fail in what we do from time to time, some of us more than others!

But each little fall prepares us better for the future and as long as we have learnt something from each failure then we will grow and be more successful in the future.

Very true.

This is the real deal, so much failure, so many challenges, even when you put in so much effort and money. And yet you are still here stronger, wiser, and more determined in your efforts even in other fields of endeavor - great indeed, thanks for sharing LD 👍

To turning failure, hardships, and challenges into Success 💪

This is a wide ranging post with good practical advice. Good luck with the real estate venture. My wife and I got into real estate in the late 90's thinking about retirement.... everything got hammered in 2008, but it has pretty well come back. The places we have pay for themselves so its a great investment.

Glad to hear your real estate investments are working out for you. Yes, things do indeed run in cycles, and real estate always eventually rebounds. That's why I love both real estate and trucking because they will both always be profitable over the long run - so long as there is any economy at all.

It's the long run that counts. My dad taught me to invest, but he only invested in public utilities...He used to say people will always need gas and electricity.

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