How to turn your career failure into a success. That’s what I want to talk about today and I want to share a story with you. Yesterday I graduated from New York University’s prestigious Schack Institute of Real Estate with a Masters in Real Estate, Finance, and Investment. It was a long journey for me. I’m so grateful and thankful to be able to have accomplished this, completed this goal of mine, and have grown my network. I’ve learned so much and met amazing friends, investors, and partners from all over the world. This has been a truly life and career-changing experience, but it wasn’t easy to get there and it wasn’t easy to finish it. Rewind seven years. I was reading the last of seven denial letters from graduate schools. Not one school gave me a chance. Not one. Applying to go back for a JD MBA, dual law and business degree, I was devastated. I was scared. I was hurt. I was sad. I was frustrated, I was angry, upset. You name the emotion. I felt it.
I realized in that moment, as discouraging as this was, I had been in similar difficult places before. I had gone through harder circumstances, faced bigger challenges, and I didn’t give up on myself then and I certainly wasn’t going to give up myself this time. So what I did is I took that emotion, all that negative energy, and I started to pivot and shift the focus and perspective to building a mindset of inspiration and mobilization. I wanted to take all of that emotion and manufacture it into a driving, motivating inspiration for me to succeed and achieve my goals. No matter the challenges. I took the no’s that somebody gave me and searched for the good in them. I decided in that moment I was going to be an entrepreneur. I was not going to let my fate rest in the hands of others.
Control What You Can Control
I was not going to let other people tell me whether I was good enough or not to achieve my goals and pursue my dreams. In that moment, I made arguably the most impactful and influential move of my entire career. To pivot and realize that I had to be the decider and the creator of my own future. I had to put myself in the right opportunity, surround myself with the right people, marshal the resources, and create my own life and career. I knew that I liked real estate. I knew that I had an education in business. I guess you start being a real estate agent there, right? You put those together.
So I got licensed. I started to get transactional experience. My first year was tough. I didn’t make any money. Not a single sale. Only $40,000 of debt. It was challenging, but I didn’t give up on myself again. And that second year I sold almost 10 million dollars in real estate. Made close to $300,000 of income after not even filing a tax return the prior year. I started a real estate team. I started to grow and scale. Within two years I built a personal brand that had become widely known as the go to agent and team for luxury properties in my market in upstate New York. Then started to diversify into hospitality development. I bought a resort as a real estate investment. I started to buy properties to diversify and do other things that complemented my skills. Then with a couple of years experience I realized something. I still wanted to go back to school. I still wanted to improve my skillset, broaden my network, and elevate my career. So I applied to the most prestigious school in real estate for graduate level education, New York University, The Schack Institute of Real Estate.
And I got in. They took a chance on me. They let me in for their two-year master’s program. I was ecstatic, so happy and excited. I took that, ran with it, and got everything I could out of the experience in that program. I just walked the stage, virtually I might add, on Zoom live stream with my mom next to me yesterday. But nonetheless, I walked in, I graduated, and I finished. It was such a heartwarming experience because it showed me that you can turn a career failure into a new success all by how you perceive it. How you respond to it. And how you pivot from it. There’s a lot of things in this life, including this current crisis, that is outside of our control and beyond our measure of influence. How we respond, how we pivot, adapt, and move forward is what dictates whether we’re going to be successful and happy or not.
Shift Your Focus and Priorities
I had to shift my perspective, be resilient, and persevere through the challenges. I found the motivation and inspiration to keep working, to not take no for an answer, and it all worked out. That big door shutting in my face opened up a far greater door. I’m so fortunate to be here now having started and successfully grown several seven-figure plus companies. I never would have done this had I gone the other path that I thought I was supposed to be on. The world told me no, but I didn’t let it keep me down. I shifted my focus and manufactured a success from it. Now it’s not to say it didn’t take hard work, wasn’t without a setback, or wasn’t discouraging and challenging. It was all those things and more. But I never gave up on myself. My ironclad mindset of committing relentlessly to my vision and persevering through those challenges is what set me apart and allowed me to get to where I am today.
I hope this was valuable. I hope this was inspirational. I hope that you can turn your failures, whether they be professional or personal, into some of your greatest successes. It all comes down to how we perceive it, how we pivot from it, how we respond to it, and how we manufacture from it. That’s what sets us apart. If you get any value from this, please leave a comment on this and share it with somebody who could also be inspired by this. That’s my mission. I want to help equip, train, educate, and inspire people to achieve their best life and to really achieve their potential. To your success and happiness. I’ll talk to you soon.