Rob Foglia

Failure is a good thing.

I can think of countless times when there’s been somebody on stage or some book that’s been somewhere along the lines of “you’re either winning, or you’re learning.” There is no failure. Failure equals learning. All that type of thing.

Failure is growth. And they’re right. That’s the thing, these people are right when they’re talking about that.

But I think there are two types of failure that we don’t talk about the difference enough.

One of those types of failure is when we fail at something that we kind of wanted to do but didn’t really want to do. Maybe there was a job we were trying for that we kind of wanted, but it wasn’t our dream job. It was an alright job, a fine job, and yet it didn’t work out. We failed. And our heart wasn’t in it all the way. Man, I think that failure kind of sucks.

That failure feels like you’re going after something that is just not important, but you’re doing it for a reason. It could be a financial reason. It could be because some step you took along the way you were unsure about, and now there’s some sort of lack of clarity in the actions that you take. And yet, the reality is, when we fail at doing something that we have no real interest in doing, something that we’re like, “yeah, it’s a job,” that kind of failure sucks. It can feel defeating because your heart wasn’t in it. I think the psychological aspect behind it is that we failed doing something that we never really wanted to do to begin with. There was something else that we wanted to do, and then when we fail, it’s like, man, why did I do that? The learning aspect, the “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn” type of thing, feels lost.

And it’s not always lost. Sometimes a failure in one avenue can absolutely parallel learning in the avenue that you want to learn within. If you have a job that you don’t really want and you fail at it, it could absolutely be getting you ready for the next job. So I’m not saying that it is worthless. What I’m saying is that it’s natural to feel like, “man, that sucks,” because our heart wasn’t in it all the way to begin with. Even if it was in it 90 plus percent of the way, if it’s not in it 100 percent of the way, that little sliver of your heart that is not in it all the way, man, that’s what makes failure feel like a kick in the gut.

The other type of failure, though, is the failure that we talk a lot about in the inspirational self-improvement circles, right? The “sometimes you win, sometimes you learn” aspect of things. When you’re going after something that feels like a calling, something that feels like this is why you’re on this earth, then yeah, there is absolutely no such thing as failure because you’re doing something that you just absolutely love to do. Whether it works out or whether it doesn’t work out, it can absolutely be a stepping stone to take you to what’s next.

That type of possibility of what’s next, regardless of whether it’s a win or a loss, is why that type of failure is usually a catalyst for improvement and growth. I think the key difference here is that one of these things feels like a life’s mission, and one of these things feels like a job. I think too often in life we get lost while not pursuing our life’s mission. I see it in the real estate space all the time. I see these agents who talk and act like their whole life’s purpose is to sell homes.

Man, that is such bullshit. I’m not trying to be rude. I’m not trying to rain on someone’s parade about their life’s dreams or anything like that. But man, that is such a small percentage of the population whose purpose is real estate. The reality is, of the two or three million real estate agents in the U.S., however many there are now, if 99.99% of them weren’t here, the industry would be unaffected. What these agents are really saying is that they like the income that they get from the industry. They like to be able to support their family through real estate, and that’s important to them, and that’s understandable. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that, right? To feel like you want to support your family and your loved ones, and financially support yourself with real estate. Real estate can be a great avenue to do that. But the reality is, for most people, real estate was not why you were put on this earth.

So when you fail at it, it feels like a kick in the gut. And yet you’ve got these people that are up on stage, like Gary V and Gary K and all these others that are trying to rally the troops, so to speak. Man, it’s so hollow to me. It just is. Because the reality is, when these agents fail, just like I said earlier about how the first type of failure can absolutely be a learning experience that you can take with you in a different avenue, and hopefully that different avenue is something that is a life’s purpose. But man, if your heart’s not 100% in it, then you shouldn’t be doing it.

I’m not just speaking about this theoretically. To be honest, this is more of a post-mortem for me in terms of my coaching career. A coaching career that never really got off the ground. I started Real Estate Reset Coaching last year in hopes of making an impact on agents, but also to replace my sales income. I wanted to replace my real estate sales income and really just sell maybe a home or two a year when I had a past client that I wanted to work with come out of the woodwork. I wanted coaching to replace that. I believe there’s a message that’s here in the material. I have a message to teach. I have the ability to make an impact on others. But what I learned is that I didn’t have the following as a coach. I kind of threw one last Hail Mary effort over the last month or so to try to see what happened.

If you’re not familiar with my whole story, about two years ago, I published a book, Real Estate Reset, and that book is all about a countercultural approach to the traditional real estate sales business. Traditional real estate sales is 24/7, always on, grind, grind, grind. It’s that grind culture that suffocates creativity and, honestly, extinguishes the flame of life. It just makes me sick. It makes me sick to see, and I still see it all the time, left and right. And yet I wanted to teach agents that it doesn’t have to be that way. Real estate is a good career, because there are a lot of life’s purposes that are not going to pay the bills out there. Real estate can help you pay the bills when you’re going after your life’s purpose on the side, or maybe real estate’s on the side and your life’s purpose feels more like a full-time gig.

I digress, though. I wrote this book, and I published it about two years ago, in a way to bookend my sales career. To say I have downsized my business. It’s now just me. I’m just taking on the business that I want to take on, and I am going to explain to agents that life can be this way. I’m going to live it. I knew that I was going to be letting go of a lot of the pull I had in the industry. I was no longer serving on the ALC (Agent Leadership Council) at Keller Williams. I had stepped away from my leadership commitments through Keller Williams Young Professionals. I knew that I was no longer going to have the platform that I used to have. And that’s okay.

I wrote the book. I published the book. I was hoping it would get out there. And man, it was a success that I got it done. So many people have a half-finished manuscript on their desktop, on their computer, that never sees the light of day. My book saw the light of day. Many people have read it. I’ve impacted lives that I don’t even know I’ve impacted at this point, because I’ve sold copies of it. It’s not like this has been a failure. But it hasn’t taken off the way that I was hoping it would take off, and so in that aspect, there’s a little bit of a failure to it. And that’s okay.

But the real thing, the reason I’m talking about this being a post-mortem for the coaching aspect of things, was that last year I decided I was going to take a role as a broker, and start a coaching company, a coaching business. Try to get this coaching business off the ground and see what would happen. See if I could get coaching clients. See if I could teach people the ways of Real Estate Reset and really make an impact the way I wanted to make an impact. The problem I ran into, and I see this in hindsight (I didn’t see it at the time), was that people looked at me as a real estate salesperson, as a peer, and not as an expert in the industry. It’s like that old saying, that you can’t be a prophet in your own land. I was a peer to them. I wasn’t a coach, an expert, a leader, a thought leader. And that is what it is.

At this point, the failure of that feels like a dead end, because that’s not my life’s purpose. That’s not my life’s passion. Because of that, I need to move on from those coaching dreams. I can make an impact as a teacher, which I like to do, and as long as I’m getting paid to teach or to speak, I’m more than happy to do it. But the coaching aspect, trying to build a Real Estate Reset coaching brand, I think it’s time to stick a fork in it. It’s done. And that’s okay.

I think it’s okay because the clarity of admitting this, saying this out loud, writing these words, is opening up to me the fact that my heart was never 100% in it. Don’t get me wrong. Every word that I wrote in that book, every word meant something to me. This was a message I really, really, really want to get out into the real estate community. On a scale of zero to 100 in terms of how much it means to me, it’s probably in the low 90s. It means a lot. And yet the reality is that’s not a 100. A 91 is not a 100. And that’s the difference.

The difference is that the failure like this feels like a kick in the gut. Yeah, I can take the lessons that I have learned from this experience and apply them to the rest of my life, find the direction in it, and learn the lessons that the universe is trying to teach me through this experience. And yet it still feels like a little bit of a kick in the gut, because it wasn’t a 100 for me. It was not a 100 out of 100, “this is why I’m on this earth” type of feeling.

I get that feeling, that 100 out of 100 feeling. It’s in my gut. It’s in my belly. I feel it when it comes to music. When I’m writing. When I’m creating. When I’m performing. When I’m playing with my band. There is no downside to any of that, to me, whatsoever.

That’s the thing. That’s what I was talking about in Real Estate Reset. The book itself is all about helping somebody fund their life through real estate so that they can pursue the things that they care about. For me, I think I got off my own brand for a year or so. The last year, as I started the coaching company, as I became a managing broker for about 6 months, I was chasing something that didn’t need to be chased, because it wasn’t there. It was never meant to be there for me. The thing that’s meant to be there is some real estate sales for me, as I pursue the thing that really lights me up. And that’s music.

So it’s a failure. Failure is the thing that can help us see the truth. Despite what some people could say, it can absolutely feel like a kick in the gut. But there are absolutely ways that we can take the failure and the lessons that we learn, turn around, and make these lessons applicable to the rest of our lives.

That’s my hope for me. That’s my hope for you as well. And I want to encourage you to go out there and be irreplaceable.