The Art of the Reset

The Graph Goes Down

If you zoom out on any successful chart, it looks like a smooth line up and to the right. If you zoom in, it looks like a heart attack.

I have had moments where I felt invincible. I closed the big deal. The team was humming. The cash was flowing.

And I have had moments where I stared at the ceiling at 3 AM, wondering if I had ruined everything.

Failure 1: The Wrong Partner

Early in my career, I partnered with a friend. We had great chemistry. We had fun. But we had different definitions of “hard work.” I resented his long lunches. He resented my intensity. The business imploded not because the product was bad, but because the alignment was broken. Lesson: Partnership is not about friendship. It is about shared values and complementary pain tolerance.

Failure 2: The Complexity Trap

I once spent six months building a “perfect” CRM system for a real estate team. It had every feature imaginable. Automation, AI scoring, intricate tagging. I rolled it out. Nobody used it. It was too complex. The agents just wanted to call people. My system slowed them down. Lesson: A simple tool that gets used is infinitely better than a perfect tool that gets ignored. User experience > Engineering vanity.

The Zero Point

The hardest part of failure is not the money lost. It is the ego death. You have to admit: “I was wrong.”

But every time I hit zero, I found I could rebuild faster.

• The first time took me 2 years to build a team.
• The second time took me 6 months.
• The third time took me 3 weeks.

Why? Because I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was starting from experience.

The Inflection Point

The biggest inflection point came when I stopped trying to be the “Star Player” and started being the “Coach.”

I realized I could only sell so many houses myself. I could only write so many lines of code myself. But if I could build a system that enabled 100 people to sell houses? That was leverage.

Failure taught me that my personal output was the bottleneck. To scale, I had to fire myself from the day-to-day and become the architect of the machine.