Learning from mistakes

"Failure should be a teacher, not an undertaker" (Denis Waitley). This little tidbit of wisdom came to me today from a blog that I get an email from every day - Jack's Winning Words. Jack is the retired pastor of my church - Jack Freed and his blog is
http://jackswinningwords.blogspot.com

You should bookmark that and go there daily for some good daily advice.

So, anyway, taking Pastor Freed's word to heart and applying them is essential in the real estate business. I used to get frustrated at how many little failures I'd encounter almost on a daily basis - things like not getting a listing or not getting a price reduction or not getting a bid accepted. Those things can mount up and start to depress you, unless you can find a way to look at all of them as learning experiences. Real estate sales is very much an OJT job. Everything that you really need to know you learn on the job.

The real estate course that you have to take to pass the test to get a license you quickly learn has almost no useful content, in terms of your day-to-day real estate job. Even the marketing courses that most companies have just provide a good framework for further OJT knowledge. I used to compare it to mine sweeping by stamping one foot out ahead of yourself. You'll know that you've hit a mine when you step on one and it blows up in your face. Likely, you'll learn from the experience and you won't step there again. It can be a painful process, but most companies (certainly ours does a good job of this) have mentoring programs and close management (broker) supervision of newer agents to try to guide them around the first few mines.

So, after a while, I stopped beating up on myself (after all there were already enough people standing in line to do that) and started trying to use every failure that I encountered as a learning experience. And I can report, without fear of contradiction, that in real estate sales provides lots of learning opportunities. I also learned that the worst thing you can do is not ask someone if you don't feel that you understand something or some nuance of the laws and and rules governing real estate sales. In real estate, as in most of life, there really aren't any dumb questions, just people too dumb to ask.

I still don't like failures and I doubt that I ever will; however, I'm a lot less hard on myself for not knowing the answer to every question or situation that comes up. There's always someone in our office who may have already stepped on that particular mine and who now knows the answer. Or, at least, I can go ask my manager without feeling that I'm somehow supposed to know everything already. In fact, I suspect that I'd be in more danger of really making a mistake if I thought I knew it all. So, bring on the failures. What doesn't kill me makes me stronger and I'll learn from every failure.