How to become a successful failure!

Friends, today I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to teach you how to become a failure. Not because I want you to fail, of course. I always want you to win. I want you to build a better business, make more money, become more valuable, have more control over your calendar, and maybe even become the kind of person your younger self would be proud of.

The problem with most advice is that it's become so common, so overused, and so watered down that people hear it and immediately tune it out. 'Work hard. Be consistent. Add value. Take responsibility. Build relationships. Improve your skills. Think long term. Control your emotions. Invest in yourself'. I've been talking about these things so much over the last 10 years that, quite frankly, it bores me now. They've almost become empty platitudes at this point and when something becomes common, it has less value.

So, in this episode, we're going to do an experiment. We're going to invert the whole thing. Instead of asking, “How do I become successful?” we're going to ask a much more interesting question: “What would I do if I wanted to guarantee failure?” That question is a lot more useful than people realize because failure has patterns. Mediocrity has patterns. Being broke, bitter, resentful, stuck, underpaid, overwhelmed, and quietly angry at the world has patterns.

Most people don’t fail because they're stupid or untalented. They don't fail because the world conspired against them. People who fail at something do so because they keep doing things that make success almost impossible, and then they're shocked when life gives them the receipts.

If you know who Warren Buffet is, then you've probably also heard of his partner, Charlie Munger. Charlie was famous for this kind of thinking. He loved inversion. Instead of only asking how to get what you want, ask what would guarantee the opposite, and then avoid that like the plague. It's powerful, not only because it wakes up the brain from stale thinking, but also because success can feel complicated and far off in the distance. Failure is usually pretty simple.

If you want a bad body; eat like garbage, don’t train, get shitty sleep, and drink too much. If you want a bad relationship; stop communicating, keep score, avoid hard conversations, and treat the person closest to you worse than you treat strangers. If you want a bad business; don’t do any marketing, refuse to learn how to sell, underprice your work, avoid the follow up, blame the clients and the market, and spend all day pretending admin work and data entry is strategy.

You see? When you flip the framing of things in that way, it sounds kinda stupid obvious, doesn’t it?

So today, I am going to give you the failure playbook. These are the things you absolutely must do if you want to become a failure. Follow these rules carefully, and I can almost guarantee you will stay stuck, underpaid, resentful, fat, tired, pissed off, and you can eventually convince yourself the whole thing was someone else’s fault. Let's get into it.

Rule number one: You MUST be inconsistent.

This is probably the most important rule on the list, so don’t take this one lightly. If you want to become a failure, you must be inconsistent because you cannot afford to do the right thing for too long. Even a small amount of consistency becomes dangerous. Even a mediocre person who consistently does the right things can start to win, and that's the scary part. You don’t have to be a genius to get in shape if you consistently train, track your macros, consistently eat better, get better sleep, and consistently stop shoving garbage into your face. You do not have to be a marketing wizard to become known in your market if you consistently publish, consistently show up, consistently build relationships, and consistently say useful things to the people you want to serve. You do not have to be the greatest appraiser in the world to build a better business if you consistently answer the phone, consistently communicate well, consistently deliver good work, consistently follow up, and consistently make yourself easier to choose.

Consistency is terrifying because it gives ordinary people a chance to be extraordinary, and if you're committed to failure, which we absolutely must be for this experiment to work, we cannot let that happen. So, here is what you do. Start things with enthusiasm and then quit right before they have a chance to work. Post content for six days and then disappear for three months. Go to the gym for two weeks and then take a little break that somehow turns into two years. Reach out to two attorneys one time, hear nothing back, and conclude that attorneys don’t need appraisers. Send one email to your database, get a few unsubscribes, and decide email marketing doesn’t work. Try a new habit, miss one day, and then use that one missed day as evidence that the whole system is broken.

Failure protects itself by using rationalization and excuses, so be sure to have a few of those on hand because, if you get too consistent with anything on your list, there goes the failure and then all you're left with is results, and nobody wants that for you.

One of the easily identifiable characteristics of failures is that they are always starting over. There's always a new plan, a new notebook, a new app, a new guru, new diet, new business idea, a new morning routine, and a new strategy. But there's never enough repetition for the compound effect to kick in. Most people don’t stick with anything long enough for compounding to happen, and compounding is where the magic is.

It's not exciting magic or overnight success magic. It’s boring magic. It's the kind where you do the same important, albeit boring and unsexy things over and over again until the market starts to trust you, people start to remember you, your skill starts to deepen, and your confidence becomes earned instead of imagined. So, since we're trying to fail, it's imperative we stay inconsistent.

If you want a little extra rocket fuel for this first rule, be random, be emotional, only do things when you feel motivated and excited. That means we only market when we need money. We only work on our business when business is slow. We only improve our health when our waistline starts filing formal complaints. Friends, success loves rhythm and consistency. Failure thrives on randomness and unfocused emotion.

Rule number two: You MUST be unreliable.

Inconsistency is about your relationship with your habits. Unreliability is about your relationship with other people. If you want to fail, make sure people can't count on you. Be late, miss deadlines, forget what you promised, overpromise and underdeliver, say yes when you really mean no. Say you'll call someone back and then don’t. Promise the report will be done Friday, then act annoyed when Friday arrives and people expect the report.

This is a fantastic way to destroy trust without having to do anything dramatic, and here is the best part: you can still tell yourself you're a good person. All you have to say is, “I'm just busy.” You can say, “I have a lot going on.” You can say, “People are way too demanding.” You can say, “Clients don't understand how hard this work is.”

People don’t refer you because you meant well. They refer you because you solved their problem, reduced their anxiety, made them look good, and did what you said you were going to do. This is one of the simplest business principles in the world: do what you say you will do, unless you are trying to be a failure, which is what this is all about.

Trust makes people choose you again and again. If you want to fail, make trust expensive for people. Make them pay once or twice for trusting you and referring their friends, family, and clients to you. That'll show em! Make them wonder where things stand. Make them follow up three times. Make them explain the same thing twice. Make them feel like they're bothering you when they ask reasonable questions. Then, when they stop calling, blame the market.

If you want to be successful at being a failure, it is imperative that you never let your potential clients and customers get too comfortable with what I call a 'reliability streak'. You do what you said you were going to do a couple times in a row and then, all of the sudden, they think you're reliable. Friends, a true failure doesn’t slip up like that unless it's part of a bigger strategy of really sucking them in and then blowing up the whole thing in extravagant fashion. Be consistent with the inconsistency and unreliability if you want to be a failure. Don’t screw this up!

Rule number three: You MUST blame everyone else.

This is one of the great failure classics and a hallmark of some of the greats. If you want to fail, you must never take responsibility. Blame the market, the interest rates, the AMCs, lenders, real estate agents. All of them! Blame attorneys, technology, and for sure blame appraisal waivers. Don’t forget to blame AI, which is a super convenient scapegoat right now. Of course, blame your competitors, your parents, and your traumatic childhood. Be sure to blame your spouse, the government, and most definitely the guy in the Facebook group who charges less than you and does way more volume than you.

Remember this: there is always someone available, and let's be honest, sometimes other people and other things really are part of the problem. Sometimes the market really is bad. Sometimes clients really are cheap. Sometimes technology really does disrupt industries. Sometimes lenders really do treat appraisers like replaceable vendors. Sometimes the economy really does squeeze people. I am not saying external forces do not exist because they absolutely do. It’s just that, to be a failure, you have to focus on all of those things and then shift all responsibility onto them so that you don’t have to do anything about it.

That's called responsibility and failures don’t play that. They avoid it at all costs. Once you admit that you have a role in the outcome, you lose the comfort of pretending you're helpless. Then you'd have to act, and what fun is that. That sounds like a lot of unnecessary work to me! It's so much easier to just blame everyone and everything else. If you want to be a failure, stick with the blame everything else strategy.

Rule number four: You MUST wait for perfect conditions.

If you want to fail, you must become very patient. Not patient in the wise, disciplined, mature, long term way. I mean patient in the weak, pathetic, cowardly way. Patient as a disguise for avoidance. You're waiting until the market improves, until interest rates come down, and until business picks back up. You have to wait until you are less busy, are more confident and more skilled. You'll definitely need to wait until your website is perfect and your logo is better. It's typically best to wait until the kids are older and the economy stabilizes. Take it easy until you feel ready. This is a great way to do nothing while sounding reasonable, and the beauty of waiting for perfect conditions is that the perfect conditions never arrive.

There is always something. There is always a reason. There is always a legitimate obstacle. There is always a world event, a family issue, a market shift, a personal inconvenience, a financial pressure, a technology change, or a psychological drama available to justify delay. The people who win are not operating in perfect conditions; they're simply operating anyway.

This is important when it comes to failure because if you start to take action even when things aren't perfectly seasoned and ready for you, you might actually see some results and that is definitely not what a successful failure does. You MUST wait for everything to be perfect before starting.

Here's the thing I've learned from, not only studying successful traits and habits for several decades, but also doing some of this myself: the people creating content are not doing it because every video is perfect. They're doing it because they simply started. Most early content is bad. Mine was bad. Yours will be bad. Everyone’s first stuff is bad. Bad content published consistently beats brilliant content trapped in your head. A messy offer made to the market beats the perfect offer you're still thinking about. A mediocre conversation with a potential opportunity beats the imaginary lunch and learn you've been planning for eighteen months.

Failure loves preparation, but only when preparation turns into procrastination and inaction. Planning is good. Strategy is good. Thinking is good. But at some point, you have to put the thing into the world and let reality respond. If you want to fail, which is what we're going for here, stay in the lab forever. Keep tinkering. Keep polishing. Keep preparing. Keep pretending you're almost ready. It looks and feels responsible, and the constant movement without actually accomplishment is a sure path to failure.

Rule number five: You MUST confuse being busy with being effective.

This one is everywhere. If you want to fail, fill your day with activity that makes you feel important but doesn't actually move anything important forward. Check email forty-seven times, refresh the order portals, read appraisal forums, reorganize your desktop, clean up your folders and filing system, tweak your website font, make a new spreadsheet, debate on Facebook about some inane thing that Fannie or Freddie are doing. At the end of the day, collapse into your chair and say, “I was slammed today.” Get on a coaching call with me and explain how you’re so busy that you couldn’t possibly have started any of the things you told everyone in the last call were vital for your success.

Busy is one of the great hiding places for people who don’t want to face the truth because the truth is often not, “I need more time.” The truth is often, “I keep spending my best energy and attention on low value work because high value work scares me.” Sending the email scares you. Making the call scares you. Recording the video scares you. Raising the fee scares you. Following up with the attorney scares you. Having the hard conversation scares you. Creating the system scares you. So instead, you stay busy. Busy gives you the feeling of effort without the discomfort of progress.

This is where a lot of entrepreneurs, and especially appraisers, get trapped. They become decent at the technical work inside the business and terrible at the work of building the business and creating margin. They complete orders. They answer questions. They handle revisions. They deal with fires. They stay buried in the day-to-day machinery and technical work because that's what they tell themselves the work entails. Then they look up ten years later and wonder why the business still depends on them for everything and it's because they never actually built an asset. They just survived repeatedly and over an extended period of time.

Survival can feel noble for a while, but if you are always surviving, you are not building. And if you are not building, you are vulnerable. So, if you want to fail, you MUST protect your busyness and avoid being effective in any meaningful way. Tell everyone how slammed you are. Just make sure you never ask, “What did I build today that makes tomorrow better?” Because that question ruins everything.

Rule number six: You MUST avoid difficult conversations.

On our path to becoming a failure, we must do everything in our power to avoid any conversation that requires courage. Do not talk to the underperforming employee. Do not tell your business partner the arrangement no longer works. Do not tell the client the fee is higher. Do not tell the lender the conditions are unreasonable. Do not tell your spouse what is really bothering you. Do not tell your friend the truth. Do not ask for the referral. Do not ask for the sale. Do not tell someone no. Avoid, avoid, avoid! Let the resentment build quietly. Let the problem grow roots. Let the unspoken thing become the culture. This is a wonderful way to destroy relationships while maintaining the appearance of peace and that, my friends, is a sure path to failure. Nice work!

Failure loves unspoken truths while success requires clean and prompt communication. Clean communication means you say what needs to be said before the problem becomes toxic. Our lives and businesses are often a reflection of the conversations we are willing to have, especially the tough ones. As long as you continue to refuse to have honest conversations, you’re on the right path to failure. I'm proud of you!

Rule number seven: You MUST consume constantly and create almost never.

This is a modern masterpiece. Failure requires that you keep learning but never produce anything. Read more books, listen to more podcasts, watch more videos, attend more webinars, buy more courses. Fill your head with more knowledge and information, but do not, under any circumstance, publish something of your own. Do not teach. Don’t make the video or write the article or host the class. Do not send the email or build the asset or take on that trainee. Do not put your thinking into the marketplace because then failure starts to slip away. Just keep consuming. That way, you can feel intelligent without ever becoming useful to anyone else, especially yourself.

Let me be clear, I love learning. I've built my whole life around learning. Most of you know already because I've talked about my morning routine of researching, reading, studying, and then writing that I love to learn. I am not anti-learning; what I am is anti BS-ing yourself into thinking that you’re building or creating something if all you do is consume.

I get it, learning and consuming feels safer than being judged for something you've created and put out into the world. Consumption is private where creation is public. Consumption lets you stay comfortable where creation exposes you. When you create, people can ignore it, they can disagree, they can unsubscribe, and they can criticize. Trust me, I know because I've been creating content for at least 25 years and it always comes with that risk. But creating more than I'm consuming has also been the single most valuable thing in my own growth and evolution for all the same reasons somebody might not do it. It's pushed me out of my comfort zone and exposed my thoughts and ideas to the world for examination and feedback. That is why creation is powerful. It forces you into reality so, whatever you do, consume more than you create lest you find yourself on a track toward success instead of failure.

Understand, your market does not care how many books you read if none of that knowledge becomes value for them. Your clients don’t care how many podcasts you listen to if your communication still stinks. Your business doesn’t care how many courses you bought if you never implement what you learned. Information is not the same as transformation. At some point, you have to turn knowledge into behavior, behavior into skill, skill into value, and value into something other people can experience. If you want to become successful, you have to create. If you want to fail, which is what we're focused on today, keep preparing to create.

Rule number eight: You MUST protect your ego at all costs.

If you want to fail, make sure your ego is more important than your growth. Appraisers, listen up on this one because the appraisal industry is absolutely filled with big egos. And this one is subtle because ego rarely announces itself as ego. It usually shows up as certainty or false expertise. “I already know that.” “That will not work in my market.” “My clients are different.” “You don’t understand my situation.” “I tried that once.” “I have been doing this for twenty-five years.” “That person got lucky.” “This industry is different.” "They must be cheating somehow." Maybe. Or maybe your ego has built a beautiful little fortress around your current identity, and anything that threatens that identity gets rejected before it has a chance to teach you.

If you want to keep growing, you have to stay coachable. If you want to fail, protect your ego and don’t let anyone ever tell you anything that threatens its fragility.

Now, let’s bring this home. The point of this episode is not to be cute. The point is not sarcasm for the sake of sarcasm. The point is not to mock people who are struggling. The point is to juxtapose the typical advice that often falls on deaf ears with its opposite to wake your brain up to how silly some of these thigns sound when you hear the script flipped.

Struggle doesn’t mean failure and success never means you've reached the end. But failure is when the patterns we just talked through become your operating system and you defend them. Failure is when you stop learning, you stop taking responsibility, you protect your excuses more than your future, you let a bad season become your identity. Failure is when you would rather be validated than challenged. And its when you keep asking for answers and direction while refusing the behavior changes required to create something different.

So, here's is the personal audit I recommend sitting with for a while. Where are you being inconsistent? Where are you being unreliable? Where are you blaming others instead of taking ownership? Where are you waiting for perfect conditions? Where are you hiding inside busyness? Where are you avoiding the conversation? Where are you consuming instead of creating? Where is your ego blocking your growth?

Nobody is asking you to fix your whole life by Friday, so just pick one or two things to focus on with this work. My recommendation is to pick the one that stings. Pick the one that made you a little defensive and one you wanted to argue with. Pick the one where your mind immediately said, “Yeah, but Blaine, you just don’t understand my situation.” That one is usually the door. As Joseph Campbell is famous for suggesting, 'the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek."

If it's inconsistency you struggle with, build a rhythm so simple you can't talk yourself out of it. If it's unreliability, start doing what you said you would do, when you said you would do it. If it's blame, ask what part of the outcome belongs to you and what role did you play. If it is waiting, take one imperfect action today. If it's busyness that holds you back, identify the one activity you are using to avoid the work that matters. If it's the hard conversations you know you need to have, just have one clean conversation this week. If it is consuming more than creating, simply create something before you consume more. If it's your ego that demands comfort, ask someone you trust what you are not seeing. That is how this changes. It doesn’t change through motivation because motivation is cheap. Motivation is a sugar high. These things only chang through action. One behavior repeated long enough to become identity. That's the definition of consistency.

The reason inconsistency is such a reliable path to failure is because almost everything good in life compounds. Trust compounds, skills compound, health. Relationships, authority, money, reputation, and confidence compounds. But compounding requires investment first and then repetition. That's why failure needs you to stay random, because if you ever become consistent at anything, if you ever became reliable, if you ever started taking responsibility, if you ever started creating instead of consuming, if you ever started having the hard conversations, if you ever started raising your standards, there is a real risk you might become successful. And we cannot have that.

So, if your goal is failure, you now have the playbook. Be inconsistent. Be unreliable. Blame everyone. Wait forever. Stay busy. Avoid the truth. Consume constantly and protect your ego. Do that, and you will probably get exactly what you are building. But if that sounds a little too familiar, and maybe a little too uncomfortable, then good. That means there is still time. Invert the list and then do the opposite.

I know it's not the secret they sell you on the internet. But it works with unfailing accuracy. It's worked for thousands of years and will continue to work for thousands more. Most people don’t need a better secret; they need better behavior. Most people don't need a better tactic or strategy; they just need to take some small step or action consistently over a longer period of time.

I see it daily in some of the people I have conversations with about coaching. They think there is some magic answer, strategy, tactic, or client out there that, once they're exposed to it, will change their business and lives forever. They pretend to not know the real answer, which is that it's almost always something they are doing daily that keeps them stuck and something they are not doing daily that's keeping them from higher levels of success, whatever that definition is for them.

As always, friends, thank you for listening. If this episode hit a nerve, it probably found something useful. Don't just nod along and move on like 99% of the people will do. Be the 1%. Pick one rule from the failure playbook that you've been following a little too faithfully, invert it, and do something different this week. Because your future is not built by what you believe, it is built by what you repeat consistently over a long period of time.

Until next time, I'm out…