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Just give me a minute. There's one mistake worth making. It's when you make a mistake from a calculated risk. Not just a risk, but a calculated one. I had a business fail many, many years ago. It cost me right around $2 million. Now, it wasn't that, that was a lot of money. It's just it was all I had at the time. I was feeling pretty down, pretty defeated, pretty defensive. And I had a mentor of mine, the great Gene Kuhlman, come alongside me. And he said, brian, you've just been to a $2 million seminar. What are you going to do with the information? And I realized I needed to learn from this experience. Now, this was an expensive one. It took six hours to make a bad deal and six years to recover from it. But that 2 million dollar loss has made me a fortune because I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about research in a business. I learned a lot. And I learned a lot about making a mistake, taking a calculated risk. Top of the morning to you. I'm Brian Buffini. We have a great show lined up for you today. You know, we all make mistakes. Some are bigger than others. Some come with bigger risk than others. But it's all in what we learn and how we bounce back from failure. What if this setback is just information and not something that defines us? What is it teaching me as opposed to It's a verdict of who I am. Did I actually fail or was just my original plan failed? We're going to explore these thoughts and much more in today's edition of Brian's Blueprint. My old mentor, the great Zig Ziglar, he used to say, failure is an event, not a person. You know, I have the great privilege this year of speaking at Zig Ziglar's hundredth birthday party. And that man helped me enormously. We would listen to his programming throughout our home. Our kids grew up with how to Raise Positive Kids in a Negative World. And I listened to Zig and went to all of his events, read all his books, See youe at the Top. And we became friends till the end of his life. But the first time I really connected with Zig was this quote right here. You know, I've owned 47 businesses in my life and 46 of them made money. I had one that didn't. I had one that was a failure. And I will say this, it took me six hours to put the deal together that ultimately took me six years to dig out of the hole. What happened was it wasn't just the cost the money cost, the real cost of a failure is you can often tie your identity into success or experience. So, for example, with that situation, when Zig said failure was an event, not a person, at that time, I had come to believe that it was a person. I had had all these successes. In fact, I probably got carried away with my successes. I probably got a little prideful about my success. I started to take it for granted, started to think I couldn't make a mistake. Sometimes I had made decisions. One time I bought a piece of land and I developed 13 houses. I really didn't know what I was doing, but I developed the land, built the homes, and it happened to be at a time in the market where there was such demand. When I released the development for sale, people were sleeping in sleeping bags outside the gates to the property to be able to put in a bid. Every single one of these homes sold over what I was asking. Well, after a while, you start thinking it's you. You start thinking I'm the reason for the success. Then you stop being perhaps as disciplined in your research a little more. I would say I became numb to risk. And I kept winning. I kept winning, I kept winning. So I cavalierly walked into a business environment when it didn't go right right away, well, I can overpower this. I've always wanted everything. So I doubled down. I spent more money, more time, more effort. Eventually it turned out it was a bad business decision. It turned out it wasn't properly researched. It turned out I had not listened to feedback. Even my wife, she was like, brian, I don't really love this. And I just said, no, no, this is all going to work out. So what happened is I rushed into this deal. I didn't do the calculation. I had become a little, maybe a little full of my own self. And I paid a huge price. It wasn't all the money I lost. What I lost from having experienced a large failure was a loss of confidence. I started to doubt myself. I started to be overly cautious. You know, OG Bandino would say, you know, what happened to the cat who jumped on a hot stove? Well, he never jumped on a hot stove again. The problem, he never jumped on anything again. And that's what was starting to happen to me. Failure is an event, not a person. That quote, it had to rattle around in my brain a lot to ultimately I said, what is it I'm going to learn from this? You know, the great C.S. lewis said this. Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny. I can tell you today, we built and invented the coaching business. Thirty years ago, there were no coaching companies. Just not the case. And so we kind of developed the whole coaching business. We've done over 2 million coaching sessions as a company, Done it far longer and more in depth than any other business ever in the coaching space. That business that's changed the lives of millions of people worldwide ultimately came from the failure I had, the experience I had, and the lessons I learned from that and your motivation during those times, you really find out when you're down who you have. I had so many friends and associates and people who wanted to play golf with me. And I was very popular at my church and everywhere I went because everything I did turned to gold. Well, when I had this failure, it was amazing who suddenly wasn't returning my phone calls, the parties we were no longer invited to. People didn't want to be associated with failure. You find out who you have in your life at that time, and you find out what's important to you. So a gentleman that I've never really referred to in all my years of speaking his name was Tom Kelly. He was an enlisted guy in The Navy, spent 26 years, became a chief. He was a golfing buddy. We never really talked about much other than golf and sports. He was just a great dude, and we had a good time playing golf. After I had this experience where I had this failure, Tom Kelly came by my house one day. We just had a beer, sitting down, hanging out. He knew I'd been through a tough time, and he said, you know, it isn't how far you fall, it's how high you bounce. Now, the reason that was so powerful to me is Tom Kelly was not a motivational speaker. He was not reading the 7 Habits of Highly effective people. But he knew he had a friend in need, and that galvanized our friendship. But it was also a word I needed to hear at that time. Maya Angelou said, I can be changed by what happens to me, but I refuse to be reduced by it. And that's ultimately what happened to me, going through a failure of my own. If you've experienced a failure, the key is to get back on the horse. Now, this is important. You don't want to get back on the exact horse you just fell off. Okay, you need to get back on the horse, which means you're willing to take risk again. You're willing to go for something again. Better to have loved and lost than never loved at all. It can apply to every area of your life. What the human brain is looking for is A thing called homeostasis, which is, this is what's normal, this is, this is what I can accept. And when we go through a major change in life, sometimes change is imposed upon us. Sometimes we make the changes ourselves. The human being is always looking for that homeostasis. It's kind of like a homing pigeon returning home. And so that's what happens is people are always trying to get back to where they were. I would say when you go through a failure, a setback, a difficulty, a life altering circumstance, the goal is not to go back to what you know, but take what you know and take it into something new. In fact, that's what we're doing right here with the Brian Buffini Show. We're taking something we've done well for over a decade and now applying it to something new. A great quote says, do not judge me by my successes. Judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again. Nelson Mandela. 27 years on Robben island might teach somebody something. So here's my encouragement to all of you. Everyone in life is going to make mistakes. Everyone who ever dares to do anything of any significance is going to fail. Failure is an event, it's not a person. It's part of the feedback mechanism that gives you information about yourself on how you process things and how you need to process things differently going forward. Don't doubt your instincts, don't doubt your sense that you can achieve and belief in yourself. But get more information. Get not everything in consensus, but be willing to listen to people who will argue against your positions. When I went to start this coaching company, I had very, very important people in my life try to talk me out of it. But I took their information on board. I took their information on board and I analyzed what it is that their concern was and where were the valid concerns. And some of them were very valid and some of them I hadn't thought through. And it helped me prepare more, it helped me prepare better. And ultimately I had to come to the point that I believed in myself and go for it again. Failure is an event, not a person. You're the person you need to keep risking. You need to keep growing, you need to keep daring to win. Failure, all it is is feedback. And if you take it as such, man, you will step into your future destiny. You'll achieve what it is you're capable of. That's my blueprint for you today.