This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat, founder of wanderlustworker.com – the premier online destination for all things inspirational and transformational.
I want to thank you for tuning in today, and if you’ve been listening and following along on this podcast – kind of know I’ve been talking a little bit about the travels. I’m still in Zagreb, Croatia. We rented this like incredible little villa with an indoor private pool. But the indoor pool is kind of located in a house behind the house. It’s kind of interesting. But it’s super cool. It’s got this Turkish sauna and heated floors, and it’s a heated pool – and the villa itself is amazing. The garden is just stunning. It’s like an explosion of colors. All sorts of roses and floral, and it’s just incredible. It literally looks like something out of like a utopian novel or something like that.
So I am still traveling through Europe, and I am still doing the podcasting. Today though – I was thinking about something yesterday, and it kind of dawned on me– I know I talked a little bit about it before, but how do you overcome setbacks, right? I know that a lot of us kind of fail or – if nothing kind of goes our way at a given period in our lives, it’s debilitating. Especially with your business, and how do you actually recover from the setbacks?
Now that’s definitely something that is the hallmark of successful people. Successful people can fail, or they can experience severe setbacks, but they keep pushing, right? They don’t fully, fully, fully give up, right? I think that if you fully give up it’s kind of – that’s the end of the road. Becasue that’s done – it’s finished, like your dreams and your goals are finished. But if you keep your eye on that like proverbial prize – then pushing forward is a little bit easier.
But I wanted to kind of relay a story, and tell you guys how I kind of dealt a little bit about – how I dealt with that a little bit in my life. I know that I’ve talked about in 2011, where I had a pretty serious business failure. Pretty much everything collapsed around me in my life. It wasn’t just the business. It was my marriage, my friendships, my finances – everything. So I was basically broke, living in my mom’s spare bedroom 2011 to ’12 ish. I literally had no money. Like I kid you not, I had zero. In fact I was probably negative – negative in my accounts, and severely negative with money I owed people.
So that’s kind of the result of what happens when you stop paying attention, and you make a lot of money – and then you just forget about business. I laugh about it now, but it was seriously the most difficult period of my life. It’s kind of interesting, because I’ve always been a software geek – and it’s funny because– It’s funny how I’ve been led back down this path of software.
If you’ve been listening along, you know that. I’ve launched a company called Kribbz, and it’s a collaboration with Kent Clothier and Howard Panes – and some of the brightest like real estate and entrepreneurial minds on the planet, like no joke. Kent Clothier owns a company called Real Estate Worldwide. He’s flipping roughly 1000 homes a year, and his family’s company – Memphis Invest manages 5000 homes. Howard Panes is basically the pioneer of the electronic cigarette. Wealthy like beyond measure. It’s incredible, so being around these people.
But it’s funny because in 2011 ish, ’12 ish – I had nothing. So I felt like I was finished. Like there was nothing left inside of me. Sincerely, I did not want to go on in that period in my life. Probably for several weeks – I know I cried a lot, and I probably went through one of the most tortured – I don’t know – internal thought processes you could ever go through. Because you kind of know when you fail at something, you have all this like negative thinking and negative thoughts in your mind. Like you’re nothing, like you’re worthless, your life is meaningless. That’s pretty much about how I felt.
Between the crying and kind of not knowing what I wanted to do with myself, something like was silently brewing inside of me. There was a glimmer of hope. I don’t know kind of where that came from, but it was inside of me. I prayed so much during that time. I don’t know about you guys, but I am extremely religious. I believe wholeheartedly in God. I also believe in the law of karma. I prayed so much to God that he would give me the answer, and that he would send me like in the right direction. I had no idea what I wanted to do.
I don’t know where I heard it first, about writing the e-books. I can’t really specifically remember the exact point in time – or where I read it, or where I heard it? I think I just wanted to create passive income. I probably saw a book somewhere and read it and saw that it was on Amazon, and saw that I could write a book way better than that. So that’s what I did. I wrote a book called, “The SEO Black Book.”
Like three days before that was published, my grandfather died. He was in the room like a few – like two rooms away from where I was, basically – and he died. It’s funny, because my grandmother said that she was sitting inside, and she saw him run out the window and like shoot up into the sky – or something like that. I remember she was just so upset during that time, like I felt so terrible.
So my grandmother was probably one of the most giving, kindhearted individuals like ever to live. I know that he’s with God, and I know that it’s better for him now. Because he suffered through memory loss, and it was an extreme decay of his personality. He couldn’t remember who we were. Sometimes he would remember certain things, but I know that he just– I know that he was suffering. He kept talking about – he was going to go home to his brother. It’s funny, he kept saying this over and over again. Like he was going to go home to his brother.
It’s funny like, maybe he was just predicting it – that he was going to go home? I miss him a lot. He did so much for me, and I know that I’ll do the same for my children and my grandkids. I just hope that I can make him proud. I digress a little bit, but all of these things were happening around me. I was singularly focused still. When I published that book, I realized that – wow, this works.
“The SEO Black Book,” started making a lot of money, and I was just like – every month it continued to rise. I was blown away. Then I decided to make it into an audio book. I can’t remember when I made it into an audio book, but I just started publishing books. Then I published a book called, “How Not to Give Up.” Because I felt like I almost gave up, and I kind of wanted to relay like what if– What it was like to not give up. Because I had experienced a lot of success before. I knew my potential. Even though in that moment in time, I felt pretty worthless – I knew that by writing these kinds of books, that I can motivate myself. Crazy as that sounds.
But dealing with setbacks like that. Whether it’s in your personal life or your business life, sometimes like things don’t go according to plan. It’s not going to work out the way you always want it to work out. So what do you do about it, right? That’s been one of the primary sole focuses of wanderlustworker.com. Is because, I wanted to like inspire people and show them that there is another way. Like it’s okay to fail.
Failure is so taboo in our society. Seriously, I hate it. It’s like everybody looks at you so, so poorly. So like, they look down on you when you fail, right? Then we feel like total and complete garbage. But you know what? Like failure is the best dang thing that ever happened to me in my life. If you are experiencing failure or you’ve experienced like sincere failure and you’ve recovered from it – then you know what I’m talking about.
Because when you push through that failure, something inside of you changes. You change. You’re not that same person that you were, you’re just not. Like you walk through that pain, instead of running from it – and there is a transformation that occurs, like no tomorrow. Like I feel wise beyond my years because of it. The whole thing that I– The whole time that I was – I felt really, really bad about myself – like after this severe failure. That whole time, all I could– All I did was envision another life. I literally just sat down and just tricked my mind. Like I just sat down and just like – I played these visuals in my mind.
I know that money is not everything, but I played these visuals of like me getting in a private jet. Me just like doing like the fanciest things. It’s just like a trick to the mind, right? Because – don’t take this the wrong way, but nothing is real. So matter should exist the way that it exists, right? Just if you understand quantum theory, if you’ve read anything about it– Quantum superposition theory is basically like two things can be in different places at the same time, and they only change when they’re observed.
Like if that isn’t the most mind-bending thing, like I really don’t know what is. The whole multiverse theory, which kind of piggybacks off of a lot of the quantum theory that’s been laid down, is just mind-blowing. So nothing is real. Literally the life that you are experiencing is not real. It comes from your mind. I know that it sounds really, really weird to say. Maybe you think that this is like some pseudo science. But law of attraction is real. Thoughts are things. You’ve heard people say this before, right?
So I have, I basically focused my mind. I envisioned something bigger and better. I prayed a lot, and I had faith in God. What I would say to myself was like, “Do I trust God?” Yes. And so if I trust God, and I pray to God – I know that God will answer my prayers. So that’s that, right? So I just focused. I focused, I focused, I worked hard. I envisioned and I prayed a lot.
So overcoming setbacks is difficult, right? But you can do it. Anyone can do it. But the whole thing to keep in your mind is that it’s part of the journey, right? A lot of us are focused on destination. I’ve talked about this in the past. But not enough of us revel in the journey. It’s really the journey that makes you into who you are. This life is so temporary, like it really is just so temporary. It is here one minute, and then it’s going to be gone the next. Poof, like in a cloud of smoke, it’s finished.
If you’ve had somebody close to you pass away recently, then my heart goes out to you. But you realize that life is so temporary. Instead of sitting around living in fear, and being upset, being resentful, being riddled with guilt. We have to like, we have to take action and envision something better and brighter. Understand that it’s part of the process, it’s part of the journey. It’s part of what will make you who you are. If the things that happened to me never happened to me, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I wouldn’t have the people that I have in my life today. It’s just extraordinary right now.
Similarly, I’ve talked about recently how – not that long ago, probably – I don’t know? 20 months or so ago, I walked away from a business. With a business partner that literally was doing the most shady stuff that you could possibly imagine. We had a big dispute, and I tried to rectify it. I – it was basically my company that I built. I created the software, I created the systems and everything. At the end of it, I got almost nothing out of that, right? He took the business, he took the clients – he took everything.
So I prayed a lot during that time too. All I did was a started – I went out there and I started giving. I know I talked about this in a past episode. But I just started giving. I found people who were playing at the highest level, and I started giving to them. I just shifted my mindset, right? I just changed everything in my mind. I went from just worrying about me, to worrying about how I can help other people – and the craziest things started to happen, and the most incredible people started coming into my life that would not be in my life today. I would not have founded Kribbz. I know Kribbz is going to go on to be a massive company. It’s a real estate blockchain. It’s the coolest platform like I could ever imagine.
So you can deal with setbacks. Setbacks are okay, but don’t give up. In business, it doesn’t matter what you’re doing. If you’re just starting out or if you’re scaling and growing and you’re suffering through the hardships. Or you’re dealing with growing pains or whatever it is. Push through it, right? Find the right people and push through it. Because you will get through it, as long as you keep the right mindset, right? Envision how you plan things to be. Write it down meticulously. Like not only what I envision. I would like literally sit down and write it out, like in super detail.
I mean, when we’re talking about things – and I know that everything– That not everything is about things, and I apologize if I’m associating that. But I would talk about things, and like I would describe it in detail. I would talk about the people, and I would describe them in detail – who I wanted in my life, the things I wanted in my life. Like where I would live, what I would have, where I would be travelling to. So I would just suggest to you to do something similar. If you’ve suffered setbacks, and you’re dealing with setbacks – change your mindset and surround yourself with the right people. Like I cannot, I cannot say that enough times.
I hope that you’ve got some value out of this one. I really appreciate you paying attention and listening – and if you’re still listening, I really appreciate that you’ve come this far. But just know that I’m committed to this podcast. So many people have been asking me for it for a very long time. Now that I have some momentum with it, I’m just going to run with it.
So I hope that it had a lot of value to you, to your day today – and until next time, don’t forget to subscribe on iTunes, comment, like share – all that stuff. If you have any direct comments you want me to hear, just go to my website wanderlustworker.com. Click on the “contact” tab, and you’ll find my email address right there. So until next time, thank you so much and I’ll talk to you guys soon.