Regret, Failure, & Resentment: How To Move On After Financial Loss

Hi, everyone. I don't want to do this episode. I've been procrastinating this episode. I've been procrastinating this and putting it off because it's hard to talk about, because it isn't fun to talk about. But I sent an email on this topic to my subscriber list, and I got more feedback from this email than anything I have done in the last year. It obviously struck a chord when I shared with my email list something that I was processing. And a lot of entrepreneurs said that they struggled with this and that my email gave them permission to think through it, to work through it. And so I spoke about it with a couple of people that I trust, and they said, ryan, you've got to do this. You've got to put this out there. And I think the only way to sort of start is by telling you a bit of a story. I've been going to church lately, and if you follow my work closely, that's going to confuse about 20% of you a great deal. I went to college to be a pastor. I left the faith in my mid-20s because I simply didn't believe that it was true. And I have found myself sort of compelled to pursue some sort of spirituality. And church is the best I got. Church is the best I have in my culture. And sometimes I have to close my ears and say, la, la, la, la, la, to about 20% of the message because I simply just don't agree or don't believe the things that a lot of the church believes. But yet I have found myself going and really enjoying it. And the last time I went, the sermon was about forgiveness. And the pastor did a really good job of talking about forgiveness in a way that I had never heard it described before. The pastor was sharing how all of us have been hurt by someone and all of us have probably hurt someone. And the truth is that most of us have hurt people and aren't thinking about it. We've hurt people and we might not even know it. But if we've hurt someone and that person hasn't let it go or forgiven us, they're carrying around however we hurt them, and we may not even be aware of it. I can express this in my own life. I can tell a story. I talk about it in my book where someone hurt me in high school. And I carried resentment for this person for years until I finally confronted him years after the fact. And he had no recollection of it ever happening. He even said it didn't happen. He had no recollection denied that it ever happened. And so I realized I had been carrying around this thing that only existed in my mind. Maybe I misremembered it, maybe I remember it exactly how it happened, but it only existed as the hurt that I carried around. And in the same way that other people carry resentment towards us, probably for things that we did that we don't even know of, the same thing happens for us where we carry around resentment for the things that we did, didn't do, or that other people did to us. And it exists only in our minds. The pastor went on to talk about forgiveness in a biblical sense and in a Christian sense. And during this time, I opened up my journal. It's right here, actually. I take it to church with me. I take it pretty much everywhere I go. And I made a list of the people that I was carrying resentment towards. There were eight people. Six of them were business contacts, which is interesting. One of them was a personal contact and the final one was myself. And all of them were from the past five years. I didn't have anything from childhood. I didn't have anything from my parents or anything from my upbringing. I feel really clear about most of that stuff. But I had a lot of stuff from the last five years and six of the eight of them and then myself were all business related. That said something about me, you know, what does it say? If all of your regrets of all the resentment that you carry around is attached to business or attached to money, that means that I'm attached to money. It means that I put a lot of meaning into that. I put a lot of meaning into business relationships. I put a lot of meaning into things going how I think they're supposed to go. There's something to unpack there. But as I looked at the list.

I saw this mirror of the last five years of my life, of all these things that I was carrying around with me. And if we don't know each other personally, we probably don't. You may not know that I had a hellish few years, an absolutely hellish few years.

Though. The long and short story is that most of the money that I made from my big exit I invested with people that I trusted. And there was fraud, and there was fraud I didn't know was happening.

Some people are probably going to go to jail. The FBI was involved. There's a really weird experience to.

Have calls with an FBI agent explaining what happened, explaining what my relationship was with these people. And I was never accused of anything. I didn't do anything wrong. I was just Involved with people that turned out to not be trustworthy. And I almost lost everything. And the last several years, I've worked to make up.

That loss. That was hard. It's been painful. It's been difficult. But as I looked at this list of people.

I realized something about myself.

And it was that, yes, these people hurt me. Yes, I had regret. Yes, I have resentment towards these six individuals, plus myself. But the worst part of it was not the money that I lost. The worst part of it was not.

The hardship of it. I'm fine.

I feel stupid. I feel stupid for trusting people that I shouldn't have trusted. I feel stupid for not being wiser with money. I feel stupid for making those decisions. But the worst part of it all is the resentment that I had been carrying around towards these individuals and towards myself.

As entrepreneurs, we carry the burden on our backs of taking care of ourselves and our families and our employees and our customers. And when something goes wrong, we tend to take it personally. If there's a failure or we lose money or we hit a roadblock, we tend to take it personally. We tend to store that in the regret backpack. And over time, that backpack starts to get really heavy. And for me, for the last several years, my backpack was full. My backpack of resentment, my backpack of fear, my backpack of.

Anger towards these individuals and anger towards myself. That was full. And the resentment was the worst part. The worst part wasn't the money lost. My lifestyle hasn't changed much. I'm a simple man.

My confidence was hurt for a while, but this backpack that I carried around that was full of bricks of resentment towards these individuals and towards myself was what was weighing me down. That was the worst part. And it made me wonder for a second, who would I be if I just forgave all of it? Who would I be if I forgave each of these individuals? And most importantly, I forgave myself. And a really interesting thing went up in my mind as I started to play with this idea of what would it be like to just forgive it all, to just let it all go. And it was one of the first times that it felt like a fresh start. The idea of forgiving and letting it go and putting the backpack down like, it's over, it's done, but I'm still carrying it with me everywhere I go. When I think about that business deal, I'm actually thinking, will this make up for the last wrong? Will this make up for that? Ouch. That's on my record. And that doesn't help. That actually makes me Needy in a negotiation. It makes me needy with customers. It would make me needy with clients. There's no service that is in that relationship. If I'm thinking about trying to take bricks out of the backpack, the only way to let go of the backpack is to take it off and put it down. But we, as entrepreneurs, pick it up every morning and put it on and say, we'll work through it. We'll get through it. We'll make up for it. I remember one time I was on a coaching call with a student inside the 1%, and this student was very active in our community. She showed up for pretty much every live call, and she was in the hot seat. And we were working through her business, and she had made marvelous progress. She had nailed down exactly the business that she wanted to create. She enlivened when she talked about it, she had this clarity about how she was going to serve this group of people, and it was very obvious that it was going to be successful and make money. And she offered up on this coaching call. She said, I've spent over $20,000 trying to make a business work. And she alluded to the idea that she was afraid to take another risk in business because she had lost over $20,000 investing into this thing and into this thing and into that thing. And I said to her.

If you want this business to work, you're going to have to forgive yourself for the mistakes you made in the past. Not because the $20,000 is a ton of money, not because.

It'S not serving you to think about that, but because the resentment and the regret that she was carrying was preventing her from actually doing the work that she wanted to do. I have a friend named Sean who is a coach, an executive coach, Sean McCool. Look him up. And he said to me, when you're coaching somebody else, it's funny how you're actually just coaching yourself.

The advice that we give to other people is actually the advice that we wished we had had, or the advice that we wished we had listened to. And as I played with this idea of letting the backpack go and forgiving these individuals and forgiving myself, I was reminded that in that moment, I was coaching this person, but I was actually giving myself the advice that I needed at the time, which was that I had this record of wrongs. I had these bricks in the backpack, and I needed to forgive myself and forgive other people, not because it made the situation better, but so that I could be free to create what I wanted to create. I once heard it said that resentment is like holding a hot coal in your hand and pretending that the enemy is going to be hurt by it. But the whole time you're just hurting yourself. But that's not actually true. You're not the only person that is hurt by carrying around resentment and regret. If I think about how I've been acting while carrying around this backpack of regret and pain, I think about how I showed up while carrying that around.

Am I ever in a place of service when I'm thinking about past regret, Am I ever creating out of joy or love or just out of pure expression of what I want to create, Am I ever doing that? If I'm carrying around the weight of all the past wrongs that I have done or that other people have done to me, no. If I'm thinking about that, if I'm carrying that around, then I am at some level trying to get. I'm trying to take from somebody else. There's no amount of love or service or creativity that has room to exist when you are playing over the record in your mind of everything that has gone wrong. And I see so many entrepreneurs, and I probably see it because some part of this is in me. I see so many entrepreneurs who have something that they want to create.

But they're so obsessed with it working because they have this record of what hasn't worked in the past that they hold themselves back from ever doing the thing that they want because they're thinking about how they're going to extract from it from the get go. Yeah, we have, man.

A hard lesson that I had to learn recently is that my worst investments in the capitalism.com fund were in entrepreneurs who needed the money. Because if they needed the money, then they're trying to take from the business in order to live a lifestyle, rather than infusing the business with love and service and goodness to customers. I was working with an entrepreneur, a client last week who had so much resistance to doing the work required because they were just thinking about it not working. They were playing over the records of what had gone wrong in the past. And I said, the answer is right in front of you. You have customers who love what you have. You have customers who want what you produce, and you're just not loving on them. And then it occurred to me that I'm doing the same thing by carrying around this backpack, by carrying around this resentment, by carrying around this record of what went wrong over the last few years. So it's not true that it just hurts you. When you carry around this resentment, you hurt your customers. You hurt your audience, you hurt your family, and that directly costs us money.

Isn't that ironic? When we have this perception of loss and when we have this regret that we carry around and we start trying to make up for it, we hold ourselves back from customers so we don't serve them. We hurt, we. We hold ourselves back from our audience so we don't think about them, we think about what we can get out of it. Or maybe I just do that. I know some of that is in me, but when I talk about this, other entrepreneurs say, yeah, me too. And that costs us money. Because money shows up when we are actively thinking about creating service for other people. And that can only come from a place of abundance. It's really hard to come from a place of abundance when you're carrying around the regret, when you're carrying around this record of wrongs, of what has happened to you, what you did, what you did to others.

The only pivot through that is to forgive it. Forgiveness is the only unlock. Forgiveness is the only way that you can clear that. We try to drink it away, we try to self development it away, we try to meditate it away. That's me. We try to distract ourselves away. We try to numb ourselves by pursuing new projects.

But that catches up to us. In fact, it adds to the record of wrongs, it adds to the backpack. Because then we're mad at ourselves for being distracted, we're mad at ourselves for drinking, we're mad at ourselves for eating it away. We're mad at ourselves for procrastinating it away.

And so the backpack actually gets heavier and heavier as we go through. The only way through.

Is to forgive it.

Forgiveness of the people who wronged us.

Forgiveness of ourselves.

And when you actually do that, then you have a clean slate.

When you don't have the record of wrongs playing over in your mind, you can actually be present.

When you don't have the voice in your head saying, you coulda, you shoulda, you shouldn't have.

Only then can you be present with what is.

And once you're present with what is, then you can actually create something amazing. And the truth is that once you forgive the past wrongs and you're present with what is.

What you create based on that experience.

Is more fulfilling, often makes way more money. It occurred to me that the only thing standing in my way of making way more money than I have ever made in my life, the only thing standing in my way from making so much money that it makes those losses look like a blip on the radar. The only thing standing in my way is my unwillingness to forgive.

And I don't want to forgive.

Because I'm mad at them, because I'm mad at myself.

But the only way through is forgiveness. Something else that the pastor said during the sermon was.

That the person who is forgiven much loves much.

That the person who is forgiven the most, has the most love, has the most gratitude, has the most grace, because they know that they've been forgiven of much. And love is what I think we all want more than anything. And I've been wondering to myself lately what blocks me from being in that place all of the time.

When you've experienced that heart opening experience where you just want to give, where you just want to create, where you just want to be in service, you know that you would give up everything for that. You would give up all the money, you would give up all the fame, all of the attachments, you would give up all of it to be in that place all the time. Well, what's standing in the way of me having that? And I think for me it's just carrying around that resentment. It's just carrying around those bricks.

Because if it's true that he who has forgiven much loves much, then.

He who is holding back forgiveness is holding back their love.

So he who wants to love must first forgive. And so in some way, all of the things that went wrong are opportunities for me to feel and express more love, more service, more creativity.

When I wake up in the morning and I play over the thoughts in my head about what went wrong or what, how bad I fucked up or.

What I should have done.

Or the embarrassment that I felt over trusting some people that I shouldn't have trusted.

That it's like bending the hose.

If the hose flows. Money and love and creativity and joy and service and all the positive emotions that we want to feel.

Every time I pick up the backpack and put it on, it's like bending the hose. It can't flow anymore.

So you have to unbend the hose.

In order to have it flow again.

Now what's interesting is I think, I don't know this for sure, but I think that if you've been carrying that around for years like I have been, then there's like, there's a backlog. There's a backlog of love and joy and creativity and all the things that want to move. And if that's true, I have so much of that on the other side. I have so much that I want to give. I have so much I Want to create. I have so much I want to do. That's like. There's like a never ending flow on the other side of that. The only thing preventing it from flowing is unbending the hose. And that requires me to forgive, forgive myself, forgive other people.

And I want to be there. I want to be at that point.

I want nothing more than for that to just flow out of me all of the time. And I don't care what happens when that flows. I don't care how much money I make or how good I look if that's flowing, don't care.

And when you're in that space, you don't care either.

And the only thing holding you back from doing that is you carrying around the record of your wrongs.

The only thing preventing me from being in that place is me carrying around a record of wrongs.

Me playing over what happened over and over and over again and projecting that into the future.

But if I forgive it.

I truly forgive it. And if you forgive it in the biblical sense of it.

Then there's nothing to forgive. It never happened.

The only thing that was gumming up the pipes was your resentment in the first place, was your unwillingness to accept it in the first place.

At least that's been true for me.

A lesson that I have learned while examining this is that every mistake I've ever made, every regret I've ever had, was done from a place of selfishness in the first place.

I invested in these projects because I thought they'd be profitable.

I invested in that firm.

Because it looked like predictable money.

There was nothing, nothing.

In that business, in that firm with those people.

That was about loving on other people, creating good work for other people. It was about creating a return.

It was about getting passive income.

It never entered my mind while investing that money. How is this gonna make me proud?

How is this going to make me.

Proud to be a part of it no matter what happens?

You know, I've given money to people and I knew it wasn't going to create a return. That money is lost. And I don't regret it for a second.

Because I was never doing it from a place of selfishness. I did it out of love.

So every mistake I've made in business, every mistake that I have made in investing, every mistake I have ever made in content was done out of selfishness. I have never made a mistake out of love.

I have never had a regret when it was done out of love.

But I have a lot of regrets from times that I was being selfish.

One thing that this experience has done is it has shown me how selfish I am.

I teach.

To the entrepreneurs that I mentor. I teach them that your business needs to be about a person that you serve. And I am loud.

About that because I know the cost of doing the opposite.

I know how hard it is to build a business.

That is there for your own selfishness.

And yet most of us do it.

I want to say, and I'm not going to do it anymore, but I might.

I know I have selfish tendencies.

And I may have to forgive myself for more mistakes in the future.

But I am.

At least aspiring.

To forgive everything that I've been carrying around in my backpack. And I hope that me being this open and vulnerable with you.

Gives you permission to do the same.

Because our community of entrepreneurs, everybody hates Internet gurus. We all hate them.

We all hate watching how they drive around in fancy things and wave their money at you because it's about them. It's not about you.

And I aspire to be different.

And you as a business owner, you as an entrepreneur.

Will have so much more success.

If you're in service to other people. But most importantly.

There'S no joy in building a selfish business. There's none. I was on a live call once with Alex Hormozi, and he said this was a mic drop moment. I said, the beautiful irony of entrepreneurship is that.

In order to get what you want, you must be humble enough.

In order to help other people first. And entrepreneurship has a way of humbling you to the point where you can only think about other people, and then you get everything you want.

And I hope I've learned my lesson.

And the idea that.

I can be an am forgiven of much.

It was like the portal opened and I had a little bit of space to see what my life could be like if I just forgave it all.

And I want that life.

I want it for myself. I want it for my kids, want it for you.

And I think when you're in that mode, you want it for everyone.

And we, as entrepreneurs lead the charge.

Because you only win if you're in service to other people.

And you can't be in service to other people if you're carrying around the resentment of all your past failures.

And all of your past failures are actually you just playing over the selfishness of your past. You wanted something. You were selfish. It didn't go how you wanted, so you resented it, and you put a brick in your backpack. Every time I've made a mistake, it was made out of selfishness. I wanted something out of. Didn't go how I wanted. So I put a brick in the backpack, and we're all carrying around our backpacks. And so the only way through is forgiveness.

Forgiveness of ourselves for our failures. Forgiveness of our past, for how epically selfish we were, how epically selfish we are. Forgiveness for the people who wronged us. You don't have to do it.

But it's the only way through.

I wish there was another way, but it's the only way through. And I'm not there yet. I don't live this yet, But I aspire to. And I hope that this gives you permission to do this. Thanks for watching. See you.