How sweet it is! Failure that is!

I'm paging my way through Jack Cummings "Real Estate Finance and Investment Manual. 9th Ed." Its an overly whelming intimidating book of 600 pages of information on real estate with some very dry writing. After weeks I'm on page 59.

Granted, I do highly recommend this book. In those 59 pages I have been inspired, educated, and brainstorming ideas about financing, real estate, business practice, negotiation, etc.

One of the quotes that stuck out with me was "It is a good idea to remember that the sweetener of success is failure."

Just think about that for a minute... How is failure sweet?

Well, as I listen to podcasts and read more and more material on BP and offline I notice a trend in real estate. Being an investment, one must be willing to accept failure. Investments will have their ups and downs. Not every deal turns into a profitable deal.

So again, how is failure a sweetener?

When we are striving for success, for that profitable deal that we can be proud of, you know, the one that will fulfill our goal we have in the back of our mind that sense of failure. For those starting out that failure may be the sense that your family judges you for not making a steady quick profit right away. For others with some more experience that failure may be losing a deal that has been in negotiation for months, perhaps a short sale gone bad?

This sense of failure makes the accomplishment of success all the better. In other words, failure is the yang to the successful ying; you can't have the good with out the bad. If we didn't have failure we wouldn't have success either. Failure is what gives us the sense of accomplishment. Without it we would have just done something - just another thing.

By taking this different approach to failure being a sweetener one is instead looking at failure as a motivating factor. With this simple change of mindset failure becomes something that can drive someone towards success.

I recently listened to an interview with the director of Men in Black, Barry Sonnenfeld. He is a very peculiar guy who fantasizes about being a cowboy sitting on a saddle when directing movies yet he is afraid of horses. Sonnenfeld described past experiences that have shaped him such as his overly worrysome mother who can drive him crazy with guilt trips as well as how he's been injured over and over by Will Smith (completely at Sonnenfeld's fault).

What he said that stuck with me was something he said in the interview that seems to be his driving philosophy. It was something along the lines of how he lives in constant fear; that way he is never let down. I didn't quite understand it until writing this post and tying it together with the sweetness of failure.

What I can surmise is that Barry Sonnenfeld and Jack Cummings use the awareness of failure as a motivating factor. Accept the risk of failure, prepare for it, and overcome it. If one doesn't over come it, then at the very least one should learn from it. You can see this in the not so awesome film he directed call Wild Wild West. It was definitely not an academy award winning production, entertaining yet, but it was not the end of his career.

What are some of the other quotes you live by that drive your personal philosophy? Its fascinating and helpful to learn how others deal with keeping themselves motivated and inspired.