Unstoppable by Nick Vujicic Read Free Book Online Page A

occurring: My business was experiencing a temporary cash-flow problem during an economic recession. We were fifty thousand dollars in the red, which was not good. But it certainly was not an overwhelming deficit, given the prospects for growth in the globaldemand for our products and services. I majored in accounting and financial planning in college, and economics was part of the curriculum. I knew about supply and demand and cash flow, but what I knew was clouded by what I felt.
    You may have experienced a similar sensation of being so overwhelmed, even though your actual situation was not nearly as devastating as it seemed. Our vision can become impaired by our feelings, and in the midst of despair, it can be very difficult to look at things realistically.
M AINTAINING P ERSPECTIVE
    One of the lessons I learned is that you have to keep things in perspective, even when you are in the middle of a personal crisis. Fear breeds fear and worry builds upon worry. You can’t stop the feelings of grief, remorse, guilt, anger, and fear that wash over you during difficult times, but you can recognize them as pure emotional responses, and then manage them so that they don’t dictate your actions.
    Maintaining perspective requires maturity, and maturity comes with experience. I had never been through a situation like this, and because I was physically drained by all my traveling, I had a difficult time handling this crisis in a mature manner.
    My father and other older-and-wiser friends and family members tried to help me by telling me they’d been through similar or worse experiences and had bounced back. As I mentioned, my uncle Batta is in the real-estate development and property management business in California. You can imagine the ups and downs he has seen. An operating deficit of fifty thousand dollars is small change in his business, and he tried to tell me that it was not a crippling debt for mine either.
    Still, as much as I would like to learn from other people’s advice and mistakes, for the longest time I seemed to need to make my own blunders before I gained any true wisdom. I’ve now resolved to be a better student. If you and I can learn just one lesson from every person we know, how much wiser would we be? How much time, effort, and money would we save?
    When our loved ones and friends give advice, why can’t we listen, absorb the lesson, and make the necessary adjustments? You only increase your stress by thinking you have to fix things
right now
! True, some crises demand immediate action, but that action can include a step-by-step, one-day-at-a-time approach to problem solving. A member of my advisory board once made this point when he said, “Nick, do you know the best way to eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time.”
H UMILITY D ELIVERED
    For years my father, the accountant, had been telling me to be careful with my finances, to save more than I spend, and to always have a budget in mind whenever I started a new project.
    I tuned him out.
I’m a risk taker; he’s more conservative. We just have two different personalities. This is not the time to save; this is the time to invest and plant
. Humility is an interesting virtue because if you don’t have it, sooner or later it’s given to you. Imagine how humbling it was for me to have to accept my father’s offer of a fifty-thousand-dollar personal loan to bail out my business! That hurt, but it was a self-inflicted pain. Proverbs 16:18 tells us, “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” I’m pretty sure if you open your Bible to that chapter and verse, you will now see a photograph of me!
    In reflecting upon my meltdown, I realized that my humility had beenlacking in several areas of my life. Why is humility important to someone going through a crisis? First of all, you may feel embarrassed if your situation is due to a mistake or a failure. In other words, you’ve been humbled. Getting mad, crying, or giving up