I Lost $2 MILLION. Here's what happened.

Actually more than $2 million now that I added up more. Like two and a half. Maybe. Maybe more.

More so. I think the real reason why I want to make this video is just to get it off my chest. I produce a lot of content about money and success and being an entrepreneur and building businesses. And for a long time, I was kind of afraid to admit where I had failed and failed really big. There was a part of me that thought that if I share failures, that people wouldn't trust my advice. And the strange irony of it is, I learned so much more through my failures than I did through my successes. It just hurts. So the point of this video is, yes, I want to get some things off my chest. But second, I just. We're going to take the stigma out of failure because I have failed really big. I have failed spectacularly well. I have failed on a grand stage. And so if I can fail and lose millions of dollars in my failures and be okay with it, I hope that it sets you free to swing for the fences and miss and own it and be cool with it and do it faster than I did, because it took me a few years to be cool with it. And number three, I'm going to share with you some of the things that I learned as a result of these failures so that you don't have to make the same ones. Okay.

So I have one project in particular that has lost a lot of money. And I bought this business back three or four years ago, and at the time, it seemed like the right thing to do. I bought this business for $2.7 million with the intent of growing it and also launching other brands and businesses, but within the umbrella of this business. And my business partner and I had a really great thesis for where we were going. It just didn't go the way that we thought it would. And as of this video, I've lost about $1.5 million from that project specifically. And if nothing were to change, and I think it will, but if nothing were to change, I'll end up losing $2 million from that project in total. However, that's not the end of it also. Well, back in 2017, I had the best business year of my life. I sold a business. And after, you know, my. I had a 5050 partner, and after I paid taxes and after everything shook out, I walked away with about $5 million. And that $5 million, if I had just put into index funds, if I had just put it into equity, any, like, boring investment, It'd be like 10 or 15 million dollars. But I didn't. I invested it into other things. One of them being this business and also some other businesses that I shouldn't have invested in. In fact, I lost another million dollars from one of the investments that I made from the money that I had taken home from that exit. Yes, that hurts. Yes, it does not feel good to have lost that amount of money. Now, of course there's a little bit of this like coulda, woulda, shoulda going on and we've all got coulda, woulda, shouldas, right? Like we coulda, woulda, shoulda bought Bitcoin at $100, coulda, woulda, shoulda bought Apple stock at $10, coulda, woulda, Shoulda bought Tesla and held it for much longer than I did. Right. I mean, you could do this all day long about the things that you wish you would have done or hadn't done and how your life would be different if you had or hadn't done those things. And I carried that with me for years, especially the one where I bought this business. And I put a lot of heart and a lot of hard work into it and it just didn't work out the way that I wanted it to. Do you know how many times I played the numbers in my brain as I was falling asleep to make sure that I had enough money to make the debt payment on the business that I bought? Because we borrowed money to buy that business and like a large majority of everything that I've made ever since then has gone to service that debt. That hurts like that made me feel paralyzed for several years. That made me feel like a failure. And it didn't matter that I have other successes. I've built several million dollar businesses. I've had an eight figure exit. I run an investment fund that is working with deals right now that I'm very confident are going to have sizable exits. I've helped create hundreds of millionaires. I have people who recognize me on the street everywhere I go around the world. From people who say, not only, hey, I like your videos, but hey, I built a seven figure business because I watch your content. And yet I was for a long time carrying around what felt like this scarlet letter of a loss on my record because I had a few projects that didn't work out. Listen, I'm telling you all this. First of all, it actually just feels good to say all of this out loud. But second of all, I want you to know that I have experienced that feeling of other people seeing the successes and me knowing about the failures. And when you keep that Inside, all you ever think about is the failures. And you can't even accept the accolades that other people give you. It's like this terrible poison that is in you that just eats at you from the inside. And you know what I discovered throughout that whole process.

Is I'm still here. I'm still playing the game. I'm still really successful. I'm still really good at what I do. I'm actually better at what I do now because of all those failures, because I can advise all the entrepreneurs I work with to avoid those pitfalls. Entrepreneurship is not a one year plan. That's ironic because I literally wrote a book called 12 Months to $1,000,000. But entrepreneurship is a life sentence. I'm going to be playing this game for another 60 years. I'm going to be playing this game for decades. I'm. I'm going to make tens of millions of dollars because I know how long I'm going to play this game and I know what I've done up to this point and what I'm going to do moving forward. And yet I couldn't shake the one failure because I felt such shame around it. And the minute that you just like, accept it for what it is and deal with it and grieve it and process it, there's no more shame around it anymore. And the irony of that is that that's when you're in a powerful position to change the situation. The more that you can accept the situation for what it is, the more power you have to change the situation. I couldn't fix the business that I was trying to fix because I was carrying around such shame around it and that I wasn't in a position to be able to adequately address the problems that the business had. I had to accept it, deal with it, process it, and now move through it to even have the clarity of the decisions to make, be able to turn that thing around. The strange irony of entrepreneurship is that when you can forget about the results that you're going to get and you go all in on the customer that you're wanting to serve and you're creating products for them that they're gonna love, that's when you profit. That's when you get all the accolades. Elon Musk wasn't nobody until he almost went bankrupt building a company that other people loved. He didn't become the richest person in the world until he built the company that solved a problem that pretty much everybody in the world wanted to solve. That's why Elon Musk is Elon Musk people see him now and say, must be nice. But he was serving other people for decades before he got any accolades. Entrepreneurship is about being really fucking humble for a really long time and being in service to other people for long enough that you start to get the reward and then everybody looks at your success and your results and then you get a little bit of ego and then you forget about the humble roots you came from and then you slam get humbled and you remember that this is not about you. It is all about your customer. I have been guilty of saying to clients that I'm working with, who are they're talking about? Well, I want to make more money and I want to grow this thing. I have been guilty of interrupting them and saying, fuck you, you don't matter. Only your customer matters. And I only know that. And I can only say that from a place of love. And they know that I'm saying it from that because I've made the same mistake and just became like a downward spiral. But I'm still here. I'm still playing the game. I've still got lots of wins, lots of. I've still got as much motivation and inspiration and knowledge and experience to be able to carry me into the next chapter of my career. But it took a lot of pain and shame to get to the place where I could finally just accept that. I've got losses too, and really big ones. So here's what you need to know. You're going to make mistakes. You're going to make errors. I've made them. I made really big ones. And they hurt. The bigger you get as an entrepreneur, the bigger your mistakes are going to be. This idea that as you grow, you're going to make fewer and fewer mistakes is wrong. Because you're going to grow faster and faster and do things on a bigger and bigger scale. That means that your mistakes are going to be million dollar mistakes. You will never stop making mistakes. You will never stop losing at things. You're just going to win bigger and lose bigger. So I lost $2 million. It's actually a lot more than that. And I'm better for it. And I'm almost to the point where I'm thankful for it. Not quite there. It still hurts. It's still not fun to talk about all the time. But I know I'm better for it. And I know that because I'm better for it, I will have the opportunities that far surpass what I have lost. And somewhere along that journey, I'll be grateful for the losses. Hey, thanks for watching this video. Thanks for watching this whole rant. If you made it to this point in the video, let me know in the comments. I've got a special surprise for all of you who watched it this far in this video. If you the Cliff Notes to My Book. I wrote a book called 12 Months to 1 Million and I talk about some of these failures inside of the book. The book sold tens of thousands of copies at the time of this video. It's the number one business book in the country as far as I know. And I've got the Cliff Notes that you can download for free so you can decide if you ever, you know, want to spend the 20 bucks on the book. So if you go to capitalism.com 12, you can learn from all these failures. And I put the failures and the wins into a process to build successful businesses. And guess what? Even while you're doing that, even though you've got a roadmap to clear success, you're gonna sell failures along the way. You're still gonna have setbacks along the way. I still do when I start new projects. Failure is part of the process. Failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of success. It is part of learning what what not to do so that you can focus more on what to do. Hope you found value in this video. If you're an entrepreneur who's on your journey to build a business that matters, subscribe to this video. You're my ideal person to work with because I've made this mistake of doing things that don't matter. And those are the projects that lost me a lot of money. The projects that I really believed in, projects that mattered, were the ones that made millions of dollars. So. So if you're an entrepreneur who's building something that matters, subscribe to the channel. Reach out. Let me know you're the type of person that I love to help. Thanks so much for watching. I appreciate it. Talk to you soon.