On Failure, Frustration & Moving Impossibly Slow

Lately, you can’t open a search engine without finding a hit on “getting started”. Get started with that new diet. Get started with your new garden. Get started making money today. Getting started is key. You can’t accomplish anything without first starting.

The problem is, we’re so eager to start we fail to consider the middle, yet evidence would suggest few of us have an issue starting, but most of us fail to continue. When we stop moving forward, we feel confused, and wonder why we failed.

So we go back to the beginning, start something new because, we determine, the last thing we started just wasn’t for us: we picked the wrong diet; we grew the wrong vegetables; we didn’t make as much money as we deserved. After a while, we’re thick in the middle of another failure, and another, and another.

Most of us hop from one failure to the next, and we’re masters of spinning tales where our failures don’t reflect so poorly on us. It’s the only option for a quitter: justify the end.

I just didn’t have the resources, time, experience, knowledge, time, time, time.

Kanter’s Law

When you first find a place like BiggerPockets, the flush of excitement is palpable. Your pulse quickens. Dopamine floods your body. It’s love. Here is this thriving community of people who found financial freedom through real estate investing. And the message is unified. This is so easy, even a high school dropout can make champagne rain.

Sure, we hear the stories of failure, but there’s something suspiciously inspiring about those missteps. They’re funny, or poignant, or relatable. Everyone loves the “Homeless to Riches” story. The problem is, failure isn’t failure if it’s completed with victory.

Perhaps you watch sports. Your team might head into halftime losing the game, but if they come back and outscore their opponents and win, no one dwells on the poor, first half execution. A win covers multitudes of failures. And your team couldn’t have won if they’d quit at the half.

Intuitively, we all know we have to finish the contest if we want to win, but few of us are prepared for what the game costs. You can’t even take the court or hit the field unless you’ve conditioned. That’s true for whatever your journey is today. Perhaps you’re about to purchase your first rental property, and if you are, you didn’t wake up this morning and decide “I’m going to buy a rental house” and write a check. If you’re on the cusp of your first acquisition, you’ve already put in months of hard study and preparation.

But buying that house won’t make you a millionaire (unless it’s a house in San Francisco or Denver), and you should be prepared for hardship. You’re going to have a tough tenant, a water leak, a hail storm, a law suit, and a critter infestation. All your profits are going to be erased because of one stupid oversight. Bank on it.

You’re going to wake up nights in a hard sweat wondering how to fix a problem you just can’t seem to see through. And predictably, those moments are going to surface questions: Why am I doing this? Isn’t there an easier way? Wasn’t real estate supposed to be passive? I can’t even afford a bag of bagels.

We all go through this nasty, blindside, real-life-crapstorm. And while there’s plenty we can do to mitigate the massive ups and downs, there’s no such thing as a lifeproof life, sorry Home Depot. While we’re on major retail brands, you remember Men’s Warehouse, their slogan? Well, there’s a slightly less well-known saying I prefer: Trouble is coming, I guarantee it.

I recently came across a new law I believe is as profound as Newton’s Laws. It’s called Kantor’s Law, and if you don’t know it, you need to. You need to commit yourself to remembering this law every day. I dare say you should have it posted on the wall of your bedroom, so the first thing you see when you wake is Kantor’s Law.

No room for pessimists here, and don’t confuse this outlook with self-flagellation, but there’s too many BiggerPockets Pro members and not enough wealthy folks in this community. The issue is, it’s easier to stir people to action than it is to keep them committed. Visit any gym in November, and you’ll see: The price of admission is less than the cost of commitment. And there aren’t enough people out there doing the hard work of building an infrastructure to carry folks through the doldrums of the middle, perhaps because the funnel in the middle is a whole lot narrower than the funnel at the top.

But at the risk of appearing ungrateful, or naïve, don’t think I’m saying BiggerPockets only wants your Pro membership. The truth is, the forums, the podcasts, the video tutorials are all part of the solution for quitters. There’s ample inspiration, reading and listening to other’s stories. There’s truth and teaching in this community.

There’s also an unintentional lack of transparency. Failure never sounds bad in retrospect, but Kantor’s Law says “Everything looks like failure in the middle (emphasis mine).” We quit in the middle. We despair in the middle. We fear and stress and tremble in the middle.

How Kantor’s Law Applies in My Life, & Places to Look for It In Yours

Lately, I’ve been caught up in the cold shower craze. Physiological benefits, yada yada, but the idea is to take a five-minute cold shower daily. The initial plunge is always challenging, and the ring of the timer is always elating, but those five minutes! They’re tough.

I’ve also been doing burpees daily. For the longest time, my wife and I did burpees together, and the phrase I remember us saying each time was, “Why don’t these ever get easier?” You’re winded, achy, slow, and jiggly, and that doesn’t change in five months, not much.

Oh, also, did I mention we’re currently living in a mostly condemned house slowly rehabbing it, in other words, the dreaded live-in flip. We have a motto around this house, “Things are always harder than they should be,” and that applies to getting a door to fit the jam without pinching, scraping, or sagging: should be simple, but has caused more rash curse words than the last episode of Lost.

So why put ourselves through the suffering? Why should you push through the agony you’re feeling at having to evict sweet old Ms. Murphy for nonpayment?

You push through because everything looks like a failure in the middle, but no one who’s achieved their dreams can remember the middle. In a very real way, you’re all alone in a vast desert.

My hope is you find some comfort in these words, that you’ve come here searching for a sign that it’s okay to give up, and that instead you find it written in bold, all capital letters: DON’T QUIT NOW. YOU’RE STILL IN THE MIDDLE.

On Course Corrections

Listen. I’m in the middle too. I’m writing this to myself and hoping when I send it out into the world it helps at least one person who feels how I feel. The middle is gross and nasty and maggot infested. I’m busier than I’ve ever been now that I have four rental properties and a live-in flip on my hands, an income too small to quite make ends meet, not to mention three young boys, and dreams of finally, finally, after more than a decade of disciplined effort, breaking through with my novel. No one ever said it would be this hard (thanks for that Coldplay).

And you know what? I need to adjust how I’m doing things. You might too. Maybe you’ve gotten where you are, which is further than most people do in this journey, by doing it yourself. Perhaps you’ve figured out private capital and finding deals, and attracting good tenants, but you realize in a paralyzing, early morning revelation, the loans, and the tenants, while sustaining themselves, don’t spin off enough cash to pay your other bills (I’m raising my hand, waving it in the air “That’s me! That’s me!”).

Could be you think short-term rentals are the way to correct the shortfall in your budget, but you see all the learning that needs to happen and can’t manage to step toward it. Or maybe you think flipping raw land or wholesaling off-market houses can cover the gap.

I bet you’re tired as heck of replacing outlets and running pipe. You probably wish you could hit the beach occasionally, or buy a decent car instead of pushing all your hard-won cash toward another stupid bill or property acquisition that won’t make you more than a hundred extra bucks a month. A hundred bucks hardly feeds my family for a day lately. And if you’re like me, your budget is above reproach. It’s not like you’re eating ribeye steaks—ever. More like powdered milk and hydrated vegetables.

Don’t quit. Adjust.

If you need to go back to the W-2 for a time of respite, maybe that’s the right choice. If you have to sell off an asset to gain some breathing room, maybe it’s okay. Don’t quit. Adjust.

I’m betting you the answer to what feels like total failure is probably waiting for you on a walk around town, some fresh air, and a time of quiet. It’s more than likely you know what needs to change, but it’s also likely you don’t have the blueprint to make that change a reality. That’s okay.

Before you started buying rental houses, you didn’t really have a blueprint on how to do that either. The problem is, now that you know how breathtakingly hard this journey is, when you think about starting a new journey to correct your mistakes on this first journey, you actually have a baseline of how incredibly hard results are, and that makes it challenging to act.

That’s why this is the time where you have to face what so many other people refuse to face. The middle is absolute crap. I’d rather use a stronger word, but these are family-friendly waters we’re swimming in. The middle is when you have to accept that Tom Brady’s arm isn’t going to carry you in the second half. You’re going to have to rely on your running game. Kyle Schwarber’s bat isn’t going to dig you out of the hole. You have to look to the bench.

These are poor analogies, but that’s because there’s so little said about the middle. The middle is harder than anything, and the bad news is, no one can define how long the middle is. I’d like to believe I’d have started writing seriously even knowing it was going to be fourteen years and counting without a reputable publication to my name, but I wonder.

Accept the beauty of the beginning, that naïve optimism for what it is: Jet fuel. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s jet fuel. We go forward into the unknown so easily because we’re full of jet fuel, but few of us remain in space once we see how incredibly empty it is. Sadly, you can’t walk on the moon until you’ve accepted the journey for what it is, and it’s no surprise few have ever set foot on lunar soil.