Winning Despite Failure – Thanks Jim Kukral for the Timely Perspective

Published August 5, 2010

Yesterday, I found myself sitting in bankruptcy court, definitely, a first for me. Long story short, business has been good, but my personal finances went into a tail spin when Wells Fargo foreclosed on my home in the middle of an Obama plan refinance. BoA didn’t help the situation eith CIMG0584 er by jacking my interest rates up to 30% even though I hadn’t ever missed any payments at the time.

So after months of work reorganizing my personal finances, things came to a head when my wife and I went to court and asked for a discharge of debt, aka we went bankrupt filing chapter 7.

Not happy about it, but as I was thumbing through the book, Internet Marketing from the Real Experts by Shawn Collins and Missy Ward of Affiliate Summit fame, I came upon the 3 minute lesson from Jim Kukral, whom I’ve had the good fortune to have known for a few years now.

The chapter was his famous ‘Are you a Loser or a Failure?’ topic.

Now, I have been lucky enough to here Jim speak more than a half dozen times. In fact, one winter, I heard him give his presentation ‘Are you a loser or a Failure’ three or four times in a week. It’s a good presentation, but by about the 2^nd or 3^rd time, well, I had heard that one before. Lesson learned, internalized, filed away, and appreciated.

Context is Everything

Then yesterday while I’m sitting in bankruptcy court with dozens of other people in the same situation, I came across this familiar topic again.

Well, even though I could just about give this speech myself from memory, it sank in on a new level.

The general point of the topic is that Losers give up and quit and people that are failures, learn from their mistakes and try again.

That pretty much sums me up. The downward spiral of my personal finances can be traced back to my corporate accounting days when I made $100k per year. Salary was great, but to support that salary and stay on the fast track, I had to relocate every couple years. That led me to rack up a lot of debt, which I could maintain when I was making $100k, but then the Chinese Mafia got involved (literally).

One day I found my division at Motorola transferred and sold to the Chinese Mafia. That’s not the type of thing they tell you during the HR employee transition meeting unfortunately. They just give you the name of the most visible corporate shell owned by the mafia, aka your new bosses.

So to keep my long story short, once I found out who I was working for, I turned those assholes in to the Feds as fast as I could, lost my corporate accounting job, but saved my life and the lives of my family. Who needs a $100k per year salary when you are dead or ‘disappeared’?

For the next 5 years, I worked to build my own business, and looking back, I have done pretty damned good. I just didn’t grow it to the point where I was profiting $100k a year, this that and another thing, and before you know it, I’m seeking bankruptcy protection and REALLY starting over.

But not starting over completely. Because I’ve got 5 years of lessons learned, a growing business built on my reputation and results (but not physical assets hence the chptr 7).

I wasn’t feeling down or negative yesterday, the low point of this whole mess was last March when I learned that I had been foreclosed on CIMG0586 without any written notification. That blindsided action was depressing a bit, but there’s only so much you can do in that situation.

But it was definitely a boost to internalize Jim’s message again yesterday, especially in the middle of a week, when I’m working like crazy on projects for my clients. The future looks very good, business is looking good, I’m not only working from a clean slate financially, but I’m working from a clean slate with a lot of great experience.