How to Fail Forward to Be Successfully Unemployed

A lot of people are talking lately about fear and worry about buying the first property and doing it right.

In 2005 or 2006, I was watching TV at 2:00am and an infomercial came on for a real estate company offering a seminar that promised to teach you how to invest in real estate with no money down.

The seminar was free, so I decided to go.

At the seminar, there was a guy onstage who was hyped up and talking about the Lamborghinis he owned, his big mansions, his Rolex watches, etc.

He said that we could be as successful as him, but we had to go to the back of the room and pay $1,000 for a two-day seminar. So, I decided to pay $1,000 and sign up and go to the two-day seminar.

The information was so general and so broad that you couldn’t do anything with it.

At the end of the second day, the speaker said if you want to learn about rental properties or flipping houses, you had to pay more, like $40,000, for another seminar.

They had a big price tag for these courses. Each where just a money making scheme for them (it seemed). There is no way it should cost $40,000 to teach someone how to invest in real estate.

Fail Forward On My Own

I decided to move forward on my own. The speakers at the seminar said if you get a deal you will make money. They said don’t worry about learning the business or finding financing, because if you get a deal, people will come to you.

When I was 25 years old, I found an eight-unit apartment complex, and went to look at it with a realtor. The second time we looked at it, the realtor asked me how I was going to pay for it.

I told him that I am an investor and I can get other people’s money, I have private funding, and I can get a loan. I actually had no clue what I was doing, I was just saying words I had heard at the seminar.

I didn’t have the down payment or any investors.

At that time, I didn’t have the business built and I didn’t know what I was doing.

This would have been detrimental had I continued down this route. There are so many wrong ways to do this business.

There are so many ways to lose money and so many pitfalls, and there are only a few right ways to do it.

At Master Passive Income and on our YouTube channel, we teach you how to do it right. There is different and new content on YouTube that you can view by going to www.masterpassiveincome.com/youtube.

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Fail Forward and You Will Be Successful

When I was younger I was going from place to place, wasting my realtor’s time. Had I continued, I would have failed horribly.

I want to talk to you today about the idea of failing forward instead of failing backward.

We don’t want to fail and not learn anything or not get better. This is the last thing you want to do.

You want to fail. I don’t try to fail, I try to be successful, and I try things. I recently turned 41 years old and I quit my job when I was 37 years old. When I was 27, I was trying everything.

I didn’t want to fail, but I knew that if I tried it, did my best, worked hard, eventually I would come out of it and do well.

Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, as long as you get back up when you fail forward.

Failing is Not Bad If You Get Stronger From It

When I played football at Fresno State, I learned that failing isn’t bad. The harder I got hit, the more I learned how NOT to get hit.

Failing forward is picking yourself back up again and learn from the mistakes.

What do you do when you fall off a horse? You get back on and don’t give up.

Sometimes when my family and I are skiing, one of my will kids fall and say they don’t want to ski anymore, and they will go sit down. When I question them, they say they are done, because it hurt when they fell.

I tell them quitting is not what our family does, we push forward, put our skis back on, and do an entire run, because we do not end on something bad.

We want to fail better.

If we failed and drove home, the last thing we will think about is falling.

If you get back up and ski the entire run, you will realize you aren’t going to have failure in your head, you will have success in your head.

Embrace Failure to Get As Much Out of the Lessons You Learn

I learned From my Successes, But Not as Much as I Do From My Failures.

When you embrace failure,

• you will learn
• get better
• realize what you did wrong
• pull that mistake out of your process so you never do that again
• Leave in your processes the things you did right.

I dwell on my failures and I think about them until I figure out what is wrong and I don’t do that again.

I always fail forward.

I created the Ultimate Real Estate Investing System, the Real Estate Wealth Builders, and the membership community, because I realized what was wrong and what was right.

The Ultimate Real Estate Investing System is a step-by-step system where you do x, y, and z. With the Real Estate Wealth Builders we went through 13 steps to buy the first property.

I hesitated to share that, because it was condensed and dangerous, because there are so many things to learn in this business.

Get 1% Better Every Day When You Fail Forward

With this, I am helping them realize that we fail forward. We are not trying to fail, we are trying to succeed.

If you put it in your brain that every day you get 1% better than the day before, it doesn’t seem like a lot, but after an entire year, you are 365% better.

If you are constantly moving forward, embracing failure, and learning to never do those things again, you will absolutely be better.

If you are 365% better, that is 3.5 times better than you are right now. If we shoot for 1% better every day, we will get better and better.

Done is Better Than Perfect to Fail Forward

So many people are waiting for the right deal and for everything to be perfect, but if you never actually pull the trigger, what is the point? You are learning for the sake of learning and not getting anything done.

We want to get things done.

If I waited for the perfect deal, the perfect property, the perfect mortgage and everything, I would be nowhere near where I am now.

Out of the 30 plus properties that I’ve bought and have as rental properties, maybe two or three of them were perfect. They are not all perfect.

With my one-on-one coaching students, I try to get them their first win. Get that first win as fast as possible and fail along the way. You are going to fail and you need to figure out how to not do that again.

With coaching, we sidestep these hurdles, we learn, and we fail forward from my mistakes.

Learn From My Mistakes So You Don't Have To Make Them Yourself

A smart man learns from his mistakes, but a wise man learns from other people’s mistakes.

This is why I have this podcast.

Embrace failing forward and realize that done is better than perfect. If you find yourself getting into failure, fail fast. Get in and get out as fast as possible.

Fail, learn, and move on.

If my kids fall when skiing, we get back on the ski lift and try again as fast as possible so we can move past that failure.

Fail Often to Fail Forward Better

When you fail often, it is because you are trying new things and you are breaking out of your comfort zone.

It is so easy to keep doing the things we normally do, because we like it or we are comfortable with it.

If I stayed in my comfort zone, and if I did not fly out to view my first property, I wouldn’t have realized I didn’t need to fly out and see the property.

Keep moving forward, fail often, or put yourself out there to fail, and you will get better and better.

If you continue to fail at the same thing, you are probably doing something wrong. Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.

We need to learn.

If something happens and we don’t learn from it or change from it, we don’t get better and we will just be banging our heads against the wall hoping it will get better.

Done is better than perfect, embrace failure, fail fast, fail forward, fail often, learn from those failures, and get 1% better every day.

If you get one rental property that makes you $250 per month, after expenses, that is $3,000 extra every year.

If you have 10 properties, that’s $2,500 per month and $30,000 a year. Imaging having an extra $30,000 a year!

Learn from Your Failure is the Goal of Failing Forward

If you fail forward, get out of your comfort zone, learn, get coaching, and buy that first property, you are going to learn so much!

I love when my students buy their first, second, and third property, and they stop being students. I want to teach them how to fish!

It really is a step by step process that I learned by failing forward.

As things worked, I left it in the system. As they didn't work, I took it out of my system. This is something ANYONE can learn as long as they put effort and time into doing it right.

Teaching How to Fail Forward

Same thing with my children, I am not going to just give them properties, they will need to work in and learn all about the business and how to buy their own property.

I was working on my computer when my oldest son, Elias, asked how much money he and his three sibling had together.

I didn’t know the answer, and I asked him why he wanted to know.

He was realizing that they are making .05% interest or some low amount in a bank account and they each had between $500 and $900 (they are ages 7, 9, 10, and 12), and they each make about $.30 of interest a month.

He wondered what would happen if they pooled their money together, bought a property, and made $250 or more per month.

That was a great idea! I always recommend having a minimum of $10,000, but together they have about $3,500.

I told him to save up a little more and I will teach him how to buy a property.

As we move forward, we may fail, and we probably will, we pull ourselves up, we get back on the horse and we don’t let that happen again. We learn from it and move on.

Get going!

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.

There is no time like the present.

Even if the market does or doesn’t crash, we still make $250 per month in passive income from each property.

We buy houses that are $30,000, $40,000, or $60,000, so if the value is cut in half, you aren’t losing that much. It is a loss on paper, so you don’t lose the money unless you sell it, and it will go back up.

If we buy a $300,000 property and it gets cut in half, that is $150,000 of a loss, which is why we don’t buy those properties.

We buy houses that are a maximum of $120,000.

Now What To Do With Fail Forward

Get out there, keep learning, check out my YouTube channel and don’t put it off.

Do it right now so you can fail forward.

Done is better than perfect.

Don’t wait for that perfect property, because it will probably never come.