Just last week, right after my session at HOT ON TWO, when I was featured with Ernie Chen at TV2 sharing on 3 Wealth Creation Strategies for Investors, the host of the program asked me a question. It was a frequently asked question (FAQ) which was given by most the participants of my seminars and workshops as well, “You look young. How old are you really?”

As usual, after answering, I’ll receive the same state-of-shock look on the face. These are the common remarks that most people will make:
“You gotta be pulling my leg!”
“You must be kidding me!”
“Come on, Tell me the truth!”

Well, the truth is, “Yes! I’m young indeed!”

The next question they will ask is, “How did you get all these knowledge and experiences on wealth intelligence?”

Failure Is The Mother of All Success. Are You Sure?

Since young, we have always been taught that ‘failure is the mother of all success’ and I had been living with that same belief ever since. I still recall the time when I was a financial planner who was advising my clients on different ways to strategize their finances. It was a time when I was meeting lots of different types of clients and I once worked with a client who was around the age of 40+ and he never believed in investments. He was a hardworking middle aged professional who tried investing when he was much younger. When I asked him why he stop investing, he said that he had tried many times in the past but the best he could achieve was to lose most of his money. He then said that he didn’t have the luck and capability that successful investors have. When I probed further on the strategies he used, he responded by saying, “I’ve tried everything for 5 years, now you young punk, don’t tell me what to do!”

Well, I later found out that he kept investing with insurance agents and unit trust agents who were helping him to invest into investment-linked policies and mutual funds. He kept going about his investments the same way thinking he had really tried investing in everything.

Guess what? To me, this fella only had ‘THREE MONTHS’ of investment experience but it was 5 YEARS OLD!’

Think about it, have there been times when you fell into the same category as well? If your goals are small, I’m sure with your perseverance, you will definitely achieve your goals. But if your goals are much bigger, do you think perseverance alone works? Let’s face the reality, with perseverance without achieving the goals that you have set forth, pretty soon, you will start to get frustrated and disillusioned, you eventually resign yourself to believe that you do not have what it takes and stop taking action.

There is No Failures, Only Feedbacks!

My first investment was in the stock market and the first company I’ve bought is Kannaltec, a maritime surveying and inspection agency. The reason I bought this stock at $0.50 was because this stock was recommended in Personal Money and several newpapers as a ‘Recommended Buy’ and I put my hard earned part-time income in while I was a student. Guess what? By the third month, it went up to $.072 and I made around 20% of paper gain on the stock. That was when I started dreaming myself as a Malaysian Warren Buffett in the making. (Haha!) However, when I eventually had to sell this stock away, I sold it at $0.25 and made a loss of 50%. (Good decision that I’ve took the bold move to cut my losses to move my money into gold that time because Kannaltec is now at $0.04).

I took it as a feedback that hot tips on newspapers and financial magazines was ineffective and I started learning more about stocks by reading the strategies of Warren Buffett and attending classes on value investing. In fact, it was also during the financial crisis when oil was cheap and gold was still at $650, I started diversifying into commodities and alternative investments like gold or real estate development. Today, with the Focus Diversification strategy, I have a good mixture of investment portfolio investing in Equities where I buy into high valued stocks, Commodities (Commodities related funds, Precious Metals like Gold), and Real Estate (REITs, Real Estate Development Participation Projects).

You see, pure perseverance is all about working on a single failed strategy for a very long time and hoping to succeed. If you don’t, that’s when you will start to perceive it as failure. But Albert Einstein said it himself, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
I believe that failure is never the mother of all success. It’s really about how we receive these feedbacks and change our strategy again and again until we succeed. Many successful individuals who fail in accomplishing their dreams do not think of these experiences or feedbacks as a failure. Instead, they perceive these experiences as a feedback that the strategy used was ineffective or that they did not take enough action. They then use that feedback to immediately change their strategy to take action again until they succeed.

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