The Gift of Failure: Lessons in Turning Setbacks into Success with Ari Rastegar

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like The Hustle Daily. Today, we'll be breaking down the gift of failure, lessons in turning setbacks into success. To drop these value bombs, I have brought Ari Rastegar into EO Fire Studios. Founder and CEO, Ari, the quote unquote Oracle of Austin, is a real estate developer known for major Sunbelt projects and his Wall Street Journal bestseller, The Gift of Failure. In today's foundation, we'll talk about embracing failure.

0:36We'll talk about how every setback can be a stepping stone if we let it. We'll talk about persistence and oh so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Ari and our sponsors. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must listen.

1:11Listen to success story wherever you get your podcasts. I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot in the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? If you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize. Ari, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:48I'll tell you one big thing is I hear from these so-called entrepreneurs and advisors and professors that you shouldn't use your credit cards when you're starting your business. Well, I built this entire business on my credit cards. And from$3 ,500 to a portfolio that, you know, I think has a B in the front of it. I am a huge believer in using whatever resources you can. And if you don't believe in yourself enough to max out your credit cards, you don't have the grit, the resilience, the persistence, or the heart to get through any of the tough times that it takes to be a successful entrepreneur.

2:33Fire Nation, you can tell that we're talking to a unicorn right now as we get into the topic of the gift of failure, lessons in turning setbacks into success. And Ari, you believe that embracing failure is the key to unlocking our greatest potential and long-term success. Tell us more. It's not necessarily the embracing failure as much as it's taking an account of reality. Because anytime you learn something, whether you're a toddler, you know, learning to walk, you get up, you fall down, you get up, you fall down. And we've somehow demonized this concept of failure and given it this negative connotation.

3:18So what we're trying to do is just demystify the baggage and saying this is part of the process. So not giving it any good or bad qualification. It's just that's just how it works. And the analogy holds true in in anything in life and business and in relationships. And the key factor is learning. That is that is the overarching message. And at one point in Western academia, we started to say that not having perfection in grades and school somehow was, quote, a bad thing. But in anything that you do in life, making some sort of, quote, unquote, mistake or mishap is how you move towards mastery.

4:03Well, let's keep diving down this path because you've been known to say that every setback can actually be a stepping stone if we learn to shift our mindset because there can be an opportunity within. Tell us more about that. The operative word is can be, right? So a failure on itself is just that, it's failure. But within each failure, there is an opportunity to get back to that operative word, learn or lesson. But in order to do that, you have to have honest introspection. You have to look at something. It went wrong. You got a speeding ticket, something just simple and benign. Well, getting a speeding ticket, there's not some inherent lesson there until you go down and you stop and you pause and you reframe and look at all of the different implications and assess the potential risk reward, because that's what investing ultimately is.

4:58It's managing risk in some way, shape or form and say, all right, well, if I was going over the speed limit here, that could result in some financial trouble or can result in some sort of accident. Well, I would have gotten to the place I was going, you know, a minute earlier. But does that merit the potential downside of what could have happened? And essentially, you're making these qualifications, you know, in in real time. But the operative lesson is, can you take a moment to pause? And in my own life, learning that patience is not inaction or learning that rest is not laziness. This is a moment where you pause and you assess the situation.

5:39You look back and you weigh all the different pros and cons. And hopefully you come out of it with some sort of seed or some sort of jewel that has something in it that can help you further along down the road. What's a recent setback that you've had where you applied this? One of the big things that we do at Rastegar Property Company, you know, we're developers in 38 cities, 13 states, seven asset classes in two countries. We own industrial centers, master plan communities, boutique office buildings, apartment complexes. And part of the big thing that we have done, one of my old partners used to say, if you ever say something good about yourself, you have to say, if I do say so myself.

6:21So if there's something that we've done incredibly well, it's around rezoning. And what does that mean? That means if you look at a piece of property and the code says you can build 100 apartments, fine. Well, by looking at that site and looking at the changing landscape of a city, of a neighborhood, you might come to look at that and say, wow, I know when they made that 30 years ago, apartments would be great. But for now, this area really needs a data center. So in order to make that change, you have to go speak to city council. You have to meet with other building owners and residents and businesses and begin to show them and explain to them why there is a higher and better use potential for this site.

7:07And you can use that to create exponential value. If meaning you could only build one house on a piece of land and you go back to the city and you could now build a thousand houses and your purchase price is the same. you could see how that can create an enormous amount of wealth for your investors. Well, we've done that on dozens and dozens of sites. And when we went to this particular, you know, particular site I'm thinking about, we're like, hey, let's get the zoning done. We changed it. We went through this, you know, huge, huge process. And then COVID happened. And then interest rates hiked.

7:42And then all these other, you know, changes that, you know, a bunch more money. We have to drink our own blood along the way. But as we sought the patience and said, this is what it is and leaned into it, we started to see the landscape change, the political administration change, larger businesses move to these other areas. And it turned out through the patience of watching the cookie crumble, so to speak, the time to build the project became exponentially better and looking backwards and seeing what happened with interest rates, etc. It actually could have created a slew of problems where in this instance, the patients worked in our favor dramatically and being able to lean into that patients and really, you know, as I tell my team, TTP, trust the process.

8:35And as you trust the process, magical things happen. Let's talk about persistence, because I think that's one thing that a lot of people lack is really being able to be persistent on something that they believe in one day. For some reason, and they lose faith in that thing the next day, the next week, the next month, and they lose their momentum, their traction, and of course, they fail. So how can we learn the critical role of persistence? Nothing in this world of value happens without persistence, period. I mean, persistence is the mother of all success. and persistence to really keep going when things are dismal and you're tired and hurt and bruised.

9:21As Mike Tyson used to say, everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. And this is one of those times where, or as Ronnie Coleman, Mr. Olympia used to say, everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift heavy weights. And I think that really speaks to your level of conviction around what you're doing, because persistence is truly only possible if you have a deep heart centered belief in the thing that you're doing, because the logic of the mind will only get you to a certain place. The heart has no limit. So when you're not heart centered around the thing you're going to do, I'll give you a great example.

10:08you know, a single mother and how she raises her child, you know, against all odds, working two jobs. It's the love of her child that allows her to persist through exhaustion and all these other obstacles that that plague single mothers around the world and God be with all of them, because the level of persistence it takes to do that comes from heart. And if you take that into the business world or into athletics or to anything that requires mastery somewhere deep in that where every future LeBron James is a young kid with a dream. And that part is the true fuel that allows persistence to actually operate.

10:48Fire Nation, I hope you're really understanding the process from somebody who's been there, who's done that, who's had to persist for multiple reasons, as do all entrepreneurs. There's not a single story of an entrepreneur who succeeded at a massive level without persisting at something that was very meaningful for a meaningful amount of time. And we have a lot more to talk about around this topic. When do we get back from thanking our sponsors? If you're a marketer, then you know what it's like to feel like you're moving in a hundred different directions at any given time, like you're spread too thin.

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13:10I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot on the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships? After interviewing over 4 ,500 successful entrepreneurs, I have found that every one of them have optimized their life to a high level. In over 12 years of running a multi seven figure a year business myself while staying healthy and raising a wonderful family, I figured out how to optimize my life to an amazing level. It didn't happen automatically. There was a lot of struggles, but through mentorship from others and a lot of intentional work, I got there.

13:45And if you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize, where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. Then over a three-month time frame, we will create a fully optimized life that will set you up for a lifetime of optimized health, wealth, and relationships based off your goals and your dreams. An optimized life does not happen automatically. It only happens through intentional work and guidance from someone who has reached that level that you are striving for.

14:18My goal is to turn you into a fully optimized human based off of your life goals. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize. We'll jump on a call. We'll discuss the specifics of the program. And if we both feel to fit, we'll talk about next steps. eofire.com slash optimize. Ari, we're back and you have some amazing experiences from your journey of how failure taught you valuable lessons in building a billion dollar real estate portfolio. So talk about that journey with us now. I think the other important thing that is not spoken about enough is the importance of agility.

14:59So we speak a lot about strength and persistence, I think, has this aura around it of some sort of power or some sort of force, which is great, you need it. But if you want to drive from California to Texas and all of a sudden you have all the drive, all the persistence, all the desire in the world. But instead of going south, you drive north. You're never going to get to Texas. So persistence, the force and the energy and the inertia is very important. But you need to be able to pivot on a dime as landscapes change. And I've always thought that athletics superiority in athletics is much easier than business because in athletics, you at least know the rules.

15:50And there's very there's very strict rules about what you can and can't do in business. The landscape is constantly changing. The hours are different and there's no off season in business. So you have to be able to change your perspective. And, you know, some of my dearest friends in the world are of the Jewish faith. and there's a Yiddish saying that I love so, so much, says man plans, God laughs. And in this particular instance, the plans and the things that you set out in this world that's changing with such a velocity, you set plans in your Q4 planning for the next year and then all of a sudden all these unplanned things start to pop up in front of you.

16:33You have to have the courage and the ability and the intellectual agility to rally the troops and move and change. I'll give you an example. We bought an office building in Westlake Hills outside of Austin, which is like the Beverly Hills of Austin. It's the richest zip code in Austin. We bought a spectacular office building, older property. We're going to renovate and change. It's on a few acres. and then this office apocalypse started to hit over the last four years where with the advent of remote work and COVID the landscape around office changed so dramatically that we have over 1.5 trillion dollars of bad office loans plaguing the United States economy fine well you could have looked at that and said all right not every deal works no problem cut your losses well we You went back to the drawing board and figured out, look, let's rezone this property as condominiums.

17:27This area is in desperate need of housing. Apple's one of Apple's largest offices in the U.S. is across the street. What if we looked at this through a different lens and repurposed it and going through that process, working with the team, breaking through our own limiting beliefs of what we thought it could be? You know, going through the maybe the shame or the loss or the thought of what we said, going back to our partners and saying, look. This is what happened. It was out of our control, but this is in our control. Let's look at through a different lens. And now looking through the numbers, it'll be exponentially more profitable than what we could have done in the first place, but it required courage, required agility, and required honest introspection into what went wrong.

18:09And more importantly, being able to look to the future of what could go right. That's a great example because so many people hit Robux like that and they just throw their hands up. They say, the world is against me. I'll never make it. and then they just walk away. And they could be walking away from the situation that you just talked about, which is actually a better opportunity if they just sat down and said, what can we do? What different lens can we look through? What could be an opportunity to shift, to pivot, to adjust? We spend so much time thinking about, and I'm just as guilty of this as anybody, of what could go wrong?

18:42What's going to go wrong? What's going to go wrong? But why don't we spend any time thinking of what could go right? What could go right? And I find I started to train myself, you know, years and years ago, you know, and I learned this concept from Tony Robbins. I'm a huge proponent of personal development. I've been reading, you know, from the think and grow riches of the world to stuff Tony's done, you know, since I was a little kid. And anybody that hasn't attended, you know, Unleash the Power Within with Tony Robbins or these things, please, by all means, do your give yourself the gift of going and do it truly.

19:15and, you know, God bless him and all the work that he's done for 45 years. You know, he's a man amongst boys. And I remember him saying in one of these seminars, I was sitting there, you know, taking my notes and doing this, that, and the other. And by the way, I already had the business for the record. I was already, you know, starting to be successful. And he brought that point of like, what could go right? What could go right? What could go right? And I thought, huh, wow. Now, just simply making that one emotional shift of focusing on the optimism of today or the optimism of tomorrow, I believe, becomes a magnet of more potentials of things being able to go well.

19:54Because how many times in your life you have a little happy accident or a little serendipity or, you know, you get something, you get to Starbucks and they say, you know what, you know, well, this one's on the house or just something beautiful happens. that's just an unexpected blessing. They happen just as much as the bad things, but we need to keep our focus, especially as entrepreneurs, on the positive outcomes because the negative, trust me, take care of themselves and they'll come no matter what. So Ari, I want to end with a bang because you've been dropping value bombs, my friends. And I want to end with a formula that you created to bounce back from failure after failure.

20:32Share that formula now. The first thing is about framing and positioning because something happens. OK, and you have to really take a moment to rethink the situation. You had this whole plan. You had this thing really laid out. So my process, I'm big into transcendental meditation. And I've learned so much about this, the power of stillness for someone that's constantly going and going and going and going. So for my personal preference and whatever your beliefs are, for me, TM has been wildly, wildly impactful, as it has for many entrepreneurs, musicians, from the Beatles to you name it. So I find a place where I find stillness first, whether closing my eyes, taking a couple deep breaths, and start to rethink the situation and look at it through the practical evidence that's in front of me.

21:30One. Two, reframe the entire discussion around the stark realities that are in front of me. Then after rethinking, reframing and seeing what's in front of me, then we rebuild. Fire Nation, follow the formulas of success of those people who have been there, who have done that, who are currently having success. And they're now here sharing that with you. And Ari, of everything that we talked about here today. We talked about persistence. We talked about unlocking our greatest potential, embracing failure, so many great things. What would you say is the one thing that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our conversation today?

22:13Aside from all the things we spoke about, I think there's things that people can meditate on and understand from it. But what I want them to take from it is actually something we did not cover. And that is around health. OK, because everything we just said is all great if you're healthy and if you're not, these things become functional and possibilities. So I implore everybody that's out there seeking their form of greatness to remember, to care for themselves, knowing that their body and their mind is, in fact, their most important asset. and whatever that means for each of us, we're all on our own journey, but I implore everybody today to find more health in their body, in their minds, in their spirits.

23:03Ari, if Fire Nation wants to connect with you, wants to learn more from you, what is your call to action for our listeners today? The call to action is you can look up, you can Google Rastigar Property Company fairly easily and what I found is the entrepreneurs and the people that wanna find us, they'll know how to find us. Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, you've been hanging out with AR and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Type Ari, A-R-I, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up.

23:39And Ari, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute your brother and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, brother. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Ari for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation, what can 4 ,000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs teach you? How about how to achieve financial freedom and fulfillment? My first traditionally published book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, is a revolutionary 17-step roadmap that will lead you to the lifestyle you've been dreaming about. This book took me 10 years of accumulating the genius of the world's top entrepreneurs, and you can get it all in one place when you visit UncommonSuccessBook.com.

24:16I will catch you there or on the flip side. Success Story, hosted by Scott D. Clary, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Success Story features Q &A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, and conversations on sales, marketing, business, startups, and entrepreneurship. A recent episode discussing the billion-dollar health secret with the founder and CEO of Whoop is a must-listen. Listen to Success Story wherever you get your podcasts. I have a question for you, Fire Nation. Do you feel like your life is optimized or do you feel like you're leaving a lot in the table when it comes to health, wealth, and relationships?

24:54If you think you could use some personal guidance in optimizing your life, let me help. I've created a program called Optimize where I will personally work with you one-on-one to get to know you, your life, your goals, and your dreams. If you want to learn more about this program, visit eofire.com slash optimize.

25:18Thank you.