Real Deal REInvestor Network

When you create a free social network for tens of thousands of real estate investors to come together for free and network and learn, do deals together and grow their businesses, plus put on events for people to come in and learn more, you get asked all the time by anxious aspiring investors some variation of the concept,“What will I do if I fail?”

 Here’s a novel concept.

 Pray that you do fail.

 I’d say most of the best lessons I’ve learned in business come from failing.

 I’m talking about losing all my money in more than one instance. I’m talking about testing marketing methods that make no one money but the salesperson selling them to me. I’m talking about failed partnerships, fractured joint ventures, theft of valuable property by people I trusted, countless dead ends I’ve gone down losing all the time and energy poured into the,, and properties and projects that not only didn’t produce a profit but actually lost all the money sunk into them.

 I still fail pretty often today, but it’s the spectacularly painful lessons from early in my career that stick with me today. The bottom line is this: if you have the courage to bounce back with lessons learned and get back on that horse, you’ll ride farther and faster than you ever would have if you hadn’t gotten a bloody nose first early on— and your losses will likely be less disastrous than they’ll be if your first major failure comes later on in the game when the stakes are higher.

 Because you will lose, you will make mistakes, and you will “fail” in real estate investing.

 For those who do succeed at their first attempts, the lessons learned from failure are not there to draw from when that first spectacular difficulty comes up and punches you in the gut. Many who haven’t learned the lesson of failure at that point have unfortunately gotten the wrong message from their success; they think they deserved it.

 Many times, I’ve seen and talked to people who succeeded in early real estate investments and they believed that those successes granted them some kind of magic power. You can see it in how they act and hear it in how they talk. If they were right once— especially if they were right when others around them told them to walk softly or even that they were wrong— then now they think that every action they take or every opportunity they decide to pursue must be a brilliant decision.

 If only it were that simple! No human being is infallible. And while we would all like to believe that we earn our successes through diligent work, sound education, our skills, foresight, and determination, the truth is that many people have these qualities and make mistakes investing or in business. To take it further, the successes we achieve often are realized for reasons we don’t expect and hadn’t had a hand in creating in the first place.

 Our own success teaches us little, particularly early on in any endeavor such as getting started as a real estate investor.

 Failure on the other hand, if you extract the lessons and seeds of next success from the experience, then failure teaches us not to fear failure because if you can get back in the ring again and fight then you haven’t failed. Failing in this manner only increases our appreciation of successes, and ensures that we won’;t make the mistake of believing we can take our next success or investment for granted.

 The annals of entrepreneurial history are filled with stories of failures giving birth to successes. Many spectacular successes, men like Donald Trump, Henry Ford, Conrad Hilton or Andrew Carnegie are marked by spectacular escapes from failed attempts at success, bankruptcies and failed businesses and investments. But with each failed or broken dream, powerful entrepreneurs like these men learned what they had to learn, dusted off the debris of failure, and got back into action.

 So, when I tell those people who ask “What do I do if I fail?” I tell them stories like these. “Do the best you can to prepare for success,” I tell them. “Determine a path and take focused action and keep taking action”, I say to them, and “Do whatever you have to do to keep going when you fail, and apply the lessons from your failures because you may just be right around the corner from the success you seek.”

 That’s all you need to be concerned about. Believe me, when I say “prepare yourself for success” there’s an element there that includes what to do to take away a successful learning experience from results that could be termed “failure”. You need a backup, plan, of course…but don’t let the worry over what you will do if you fail hold you back from taking action.

 In fact, be comforted when and if you get less than hoped-for results on initial real estate investments (or business projects in general for that matter). Few entrepreneurs of any stripe, including real estate investors, succeed at the level they’d hoped on their first attempts.

 Thomas Watson was known for saying: “If you want to double your success rate, then double your failure rate”. I couldn’t have said it better. The true failures are not those in my estimation who reach for a goals and come up short. The true failures are those that never try.

 By trying, failing, and then applying what we learn, we get on the journey to success.