The Real Estate Investing Journey

Failures will come. At that point you have a decision - you can either be a failure - which simply means that after a failure comes you quit and declare whatever you were going after impossible, or you can try again and try something different because you learned from your mistake.

By the way, don't fall into the trap of blaming others or circumstances for your failures. Own up to your mistakes and take responsibility for them, or you will repeat them over and over. When you identify something as your responsibility you can then deal with it and change it. When it is someone else's fault or something else's fault, it is out of your control and it will continue to master you. Own it, control it, change it.

When failures come, shortly to follow will be discouragement. Again at this point you will have a decision to make. This time you can let discouragement tell you that you as a person are a failure, so why even bother. Or, you can choose to listen to people who have already succeeded in the area you wish to and use their success stories to pull you out of that discouragement funk and pick yourself up and continue. One common thread among people who have succeeded is that they DO NOT GIVE UP! They are tenacious. Once you hear God about what direction He wants you to go, be tenacious.

We battle these two problems ourselves, and probably will continue to do so. They are internal issues that seek to magnify reality to something that seems insurmountable. Rarely are things as bad as they seem, but learning about and identifying these two emotional issues that cause people to quit is the largest part of the battle. After identifying them, dealing with them is relatively easy.

In this article we mention a deal that fell through on a technicality. We had a signed offer on a house that was a great deal and we allowed ourselves to get excited about the house and emotionally wrapped up in it. We paid to have it inspected and already had our plans laid out. The day before closing they had to back out on our contract because the bank put the wrong house number on the legal documents when they foreclosed on the house the first time. We were upset/angry/just about any other emotion you can name. Ashamed to say, but we did not trust God that He had our best interests at hand at the time. We are learning and growing and hopefully we are better about not getting excited about any deal, it's just business. A house is just sticks and bricks and numbers.