“If You Are Going Through Hell, Keep Going”

This is a well-known quote often attributed to Winston Churchill. I have found it’s a good reference when I’m going through a touch stretch in my life.
I’ve been in this business for nearly 30 years. Trust me, I’ve had a lot of experience feeling like I’m “going through hell.” It’s always unpleasant, no matter how many times I have been through it before. The cold, hard truth is that, for most of us, we must first experience failure before we find success. Sometimes we will fail more than once before we find success. It’s how you react to this failure that determines how successful you become.
I learn much more about myself in failure than in good times. When my uncle Jack McShea hired me to work as a commercial real estate broker he said he knew I would be successful despite my lack of prior experience in the field because of the great job I had done as the head football coach at Catholic University. I thanked him for the compliment but asked him what he meant, since I had a losing record at CU. He said that despite a daunting schedule the team continued to play hard and improve each week, even if we went several games in a row without a win. He figured that my experience coaching through those difficult times would come in handy in the commercial real estate field.
It took me a number of years, but I eventually learned that he was absolutely right. This industry has big highs and big lows, and my experience fighting through the low periods as a coach was very useful in helping me fight my way through some of the low times as a broker.
Examples of great failures preceding success are many. I think back to my start in college coaching as an assistant for Hall of Fame coach Jerry Claiborne and how we went 0-10-1 in his first season at the University of Kentucky. Our players and coaches never worked harder in our lives than we did that year. It didn’t seem to pay off at the time, but the next year we were 6-4-1, which at the time was one of the biggest year-to-year turnarounds in college football history.
In politics there is the story of the many failures endured by Abraham Lincoln before his eventual election as President of the United States. There are myriad examples in business of entrepreneurs, inventors and whole companies that failed numerous times before they finally achieved success and recognition.
The key points to remember when you are “going through hell” are that you are not alone and that sooner or later it will end and better times will come eventually. But you have to keep going. It’s much easier to look back on these kinds of times in my life now that I am in a better place. When I was going through them they felt like they would never end and I thought I would be stuck in them forever.
I might have been, if I hadn’t kept going.

Have a great weekend,
Ro