Twenty years is a considerable time period in any profession. You endure a number of highs and lows, a host of learning experiences (aka mistakes), and not to mention the rollercoaster of emotions that come with it. What I neglected during most of my career was reflection. It is certainly easy to ignore this, give you develop tunnel vision towards achieving your career aspirations. In hindsight, what may have been more fruitful would have been to step back, at pivotal career moments, and reflect on whether my current pathway aligned with my personal interests and motivations.
This blog post serves as my reflection piece. While I certainly don’t have any regrets in how my career turned out, writing this post has been cathartic. For example, when it comes to mistakes, I have a tendency of being overly critical. This thought process was somewhat hardwired into my consciousness; developed over decades of living in an environment where excellence and results were lauded, and failures and shortcomings were decried.
However, with the benefit of age and hindsight, I recognise that this thought process is nothing but counterproductive and damaging to your self worth. Further, in totality of my experiences, the positive externalities stemming from my past mistakes far outweighed the negative ones.
As I’ve already walked the path ahead of some of you, I wanted to highlight some common mistakes I made along the way, if only to serve as hazard posts for you.
1. I allowed the Failures of my past To Haunt Me
This was a large personal weight on my shoulders, but I also feel it is something I am not alone in experiencing. Many of us may be unintentionally dancing with the ghosts of our past. This comes at the detriment of our present and future happiness.
My failures back in India certainly cast a long shadow on my new real estate career, where I felt obliged to work harder than most to remedy past mistakes. I found I was second-guessing almost every action. If I had possessed the composure and foresight at the time, I would have appreciated the pointlessness of this mindset. Firstly, my new team was not aware of my past career, let alone were in a position to judge me for it. Secondly, I lost sight of what drew me to real estate, in that it was a fresh start for my career.
I feel a positive approach to dealing with past mistakes is to extract the lessons from them. Albeit as painful as it may be in reliving the ordeal, it is critical to evaluate how those lessons may benefit your current and future decisions, as well as work towards moving forward in a positive way.
2. I wasn’t brave enough to take personal risks
This was an unfortunate by-product of the first mistake outlined above. In my early years, I possessed a risk-seeking disposition; that was even after the lows of my early business failures. On my arrival to Australia, I inadvertently regressed to a risk-averse mentality. This may have been due to a number of factors ranging from the new environment and culture that I was placed in, the pressure I felt in caring for my family, and the irrational assumption that history may repeat itself.
For example, it was only when I was 5 years in the industry that I purchased my first investment property. In hindsight, this was irrationality consuming my decision process, as I was in a financially secure position to make such an investment much earlier in my real estate career (at least 3 years earlier!). While I maintain that I have no regrets (although these words here may deceive my intentions), I objectively missed out on a number of prime investment years made available by Western Australia’s booming real estate market.
I would caution those reading this and who are considering real estate investment, to ensure that you are first and foremost financially and emotionally prepared to make such a commitment. In my case, I was financially prepared, but perhaps not emotionally.
3. I shied away from innovating
I mentioned in an earlier blog post that real estate offers the freedom to create your own process for achieving results. In the early days, I certainly didn’t follow this advice. I felt my lack of industry knowledge, experience and connections created an inhibitor for me to innovate. In retrospect, these factors really had no correlation with innovation.
My core skills and talents were in sales; at the end of the day, the home was just another product to sell. It took some time for me to shake these internally constructed inhibitors to realise I had not lost what I did best.
For those of you who are new to the industry, or lack professional sales experiences, my advice is to certainly learn from your mentors and supervisors, but maintain a healthy appetite for “out-of-the-box” thinking. Remember that you have significant latitude in this profession that if someone tells you there is the only way of doing something, approach that advice with a fair degree of skepticism.
You are solely responsible for your output and results. Following a textbook approach to no avail is no excuse for your inability to deliver, particularly if you’re given the opportunity to think for yourself and bring forth ideas.
4. I obsessed too much on ‘perceived imperfections’
I want to make it clear, from the outset, that the following should not represent political rhetoric or serve as an open complaint on societal behaviour. As a middle-aged immigrant, you can change a lot about yourself if you want to, but one thing that remains, like a badge of honour, is your accent.
For a brief period of time, I was made to feel constantly aware of my accent by some colleagues (one even made the remark that I sounded like a character out of the Simpsons). They were quick to vocalise that I would not be able to make a sale, let alone rise to a managerial position because to put it in their words, no one would understand me. To skip a little further ahead in the story, not only did I sell over 1200 homes during my career, I rose to the position of General Manager well before my predecessors, all the while keeping my accent unchanged!
What affects me is not the commentary of others, but the fact that I let it create doubt in my mind. I knew the situation was bad when I began to seriously contemplate changing the pronunciation of my given name (which is Anglo-Saxon by origin) to have it better fit with the Australian dialect. I will say that Australia has progressed a long way in the 20 years that I’ve lived here, but at the time, I felt uneasy thinking that I may have lacked acceptance by this community if I was unable to conform to the prevalent accent. I wish to stress that this was solely my experience, and should not be generalised.
In an effort to preserve the connection between my accent and my ethnicity, I chose the path of letting other aspects of my personality shine through. I have been blessed with a jovial nature and have had good fortune in turning a phrase now and again; these attributes provided a universal language for me to build rapport with my peers. As I showcased the strength of my personality in more settings, professional and otherwise, the accent didn’t seem to matter that much anymore.
My cultural differences, mannerisms and behaviour have been and always will be strengths of mine, be it solely for the perspective that it offers me. Too often in our society are we desperate to measure our worth based on the evaluations of strangers, not to mention that these evaluations are often based on insufficient and biased information. My personal growth of being conscious and resilient to these external negativities only served to buttress my career path, and certainly stiff-arm the naysayers.
As a final thought on this point, we have family friends that have immigrated to Australia after us, that have made similar complaints about their accent being ill received. My typical response is to remind them that those interactions are an opportunity to present richer aspects of your personality and your offering.
5. I desperately tried to follow a career structure
This is one area where I feel I should have relied more heavily on the learning from my past career. Having just started in real estate, I was not devoid of mentor figures. To this day, after being retired from the profession for 4 years, I still keep in regular touch with them and I consider them close friends. However, the double-edged sword of mentorship, similar to a parental relationship, is that you are inadvertently (or intentionally) moulded in the image of your mentor.
From a career perspective, I was cited with having potential to rise quickly and assume managerial roles and responsibilities. I did not question whether progressing in this direction would be the most optimal pathway forward. Going back to the point of real estate providing you with latitude, I could have certainly continued my successes as a sales representative without ever having become a manager. While the General Manager position certainly came with its own benefits, it also came at the cost of sacrificing some of that latitude.
My son, who has spent several years working for a professional consulting firm, was also driven by the promises of quick advancement to seniority within his firm. From discussions with him, I couldn’t help but draw parallels to my own experiences. When he was presented with these advancement opportunities, I counselled him on whether he was in the right mental and emotional state to accept the opportunity, and if he had evaluated the short/long-term ramifications of this decision. He certainly inherited my competitive nature, but I would like to think that my past experiences and guidance helped him in making more measured career decisions that I made.
These mistakes, along with the countless others I made in my career, were necessary. I only wish I had been more receptive to them at the time, instead of chastising myself for making them. The simple fact is that you cannot have a rewarding and sustainable career without making mistakes, because it is from those mistakes that you gain insight, perspective and knowledge.
I would like to personally thank you for indulging me in this reflection. If you feel comfortable in sharing your personal mistakes and lessons that would be beneficial to other readers, I would welcome you to leave a comment below.
The content outlined above was written, edited and published by the Lost Realtor. The author has over 20 years or real estate sales and investing experience in the Australian property market. He has held senior positions in Australian building companies, including being the General Manager of the residential sales division of Collier Homes. His qualifications include a Bachelor of Commerce degree and a Graduate Diploma in Building and Construction Law.