Unstoppable

by Nick Vujicic

  I reverted to that fragile and insecure boy I’d once been. I could not stop the negative thoughts. Have I wandered away from God’s plan for me? Who was I to offer advice, inspiration, and spiritual guidance to people around the world? If I wasn’t a speaker and evangelist, what could I be? What value did I have? I kept flashing back to my worst childhood insecurities. The financial problems, which were really just short-term cash flow issues, reawakened my old fears of being a burden upon my parents and siblings.

  As you can imagine, my parents had serious concerns when I first moved to the United States on my own at the age of twenty-four. I was determined to prove my independence and to follow my dream of being an international evangelist and speaker. Since then I’d come a long way in accomplishing my dreams and proving my independence. In fact, my parents had decided to move to the United States so that my father, who is an accountant and wonderful with bookkeeping, could join my business.

  The most difficult thing I had to do after learning of the financial problems at Attitude Is Altitude was to call my father and tell him that he was about to join a company that had fallen into debt. He had made the decision to move to the United States without knowing what he was getting into. I was so embarrassed. I felt I’d let him down and disappointed him.

  I’ve always been more of a dreamer and far more impulsive than my father, who is very practical and analytical. He and my mother had warned me before I moved to the United States that I needed to manage my money carefully. I’d messed up just as they were coming to join my business. I also was afraid people would think that my parents were coming to save me, their son with no arms and no legs—and no money!

  To make matters even worse, I had hired one of my cousins to work at Attitude Is Altitude so he could learn about starting a business. I was afraid he’d think that he’d apprenticed himself to a loser.

  Those nagging thoughts were very difficult to deal with. My old fears of failure and of being a burden assailed me like an angry swarm of insects. I’d been working so hard, and with the release of my first book, I was finally beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. And then the light went out.

  THE DARK SIDE

  Depression set in. I didn’t want to leave my bed. Even though I felt like I was in no shape to be offering anyone motivation or inspiration, I had to fulfill several speaking obligations. I’ll never forget those appearances because I only got through them with God’s grace and mercy. I cried for two hours in despair right before speaking at one motivational seminar. A friend was with me during that crying spell and then attended the speech. He said it was the best talk I’d ever given! I didn’t believe him until I saw a recording of it later. I wasn’t operating under my own power; God was hard at work that night.

  I made it through that appearance, but the next day my despair once again overwhelmed me. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. Anxieties whipsawed me day and night. It was crazy, mate. Strange things happened to me. When I was a kid, I had a nervous habit of biting my lip. I started doing that again! What was that about? I’d toss and turn all night and then wake up with a sore and swollen lip and my chest and stomach in knots.

  Strangest of all, four or five days passed before I could even think about praying. I’m a habitual prayer. My inability to pray scared me. When days went by without a single prayer passing my lips, I worried for my soul as well as my sanity.

  My mental paralysis left me unable to make even the most minor decisions. Normally, I fly through the day making dozens of important decisions regarding my schedule, projects, and other business. During this troubled time I couldn’t decide whether to get out of bed or whether I should try to eat.

  My lethargy was humbling, to say the least. It was as though I’d become another person. One day, a group of employees and contractors for Attitude Is Altitude gathered at my house, and I found myself trying to explain the transformation.

  “The Nick you’ve known, the big dreamer and overachiever, is gone,” I told them tearfully. “He’s done. I’m so sorry I let you down.” Those closest to me—my parents, my brother and sister, my friends, and my advisors—did their best to console me at first, and then, as I continued to wallow in despair, they rallied around, trying to snap me out of it. They held, hugged, and reassured me. My ministry staff members were ever gracious, giving me space but sharing jokes, smiles, and hugs to encourage me. They even quoted me to myself. “Nick, you always say that as long as you can look up, you can get up. Watch your DVDs and videos, remind yourself of what you already know!” they suggested. “There is a lesson in this. You will get through this, and you will be stronger than ever. God has a reason!”

  It was so surreal to have someone quote my own words to me to try to lift my spirits. Yet they were right. I just needed to be reminded of the same things I tell others all the time. I was the poster child for someone whose faith was missing in action. My guilt and shame over the cash problems of my business left me questioning my value, my purpose, and my path. I didn’t doubt God’s perfection. I just couldn’t access my belief system because of the despair.

  Another who tried to help me was a Dallas friend, Dr. Raymund King, who is both an attorney and a physician. He had arranged for me to speak at a medical seminar, and I didn’t want to disappoint him. But when I arrived, he could see I was emotionally and physically drained.

  “You have to take care of yourself first,” he said. “Without your health you will lose all you’ve worked for.” Gently, he took me aside and counseled me about keeping my priorities straight, and then he prayed a simple prayer with me and hugged me. It had been a struggle just to get there, but Dr. King’s caring words really hit home. It may have been the best motivational speech I’ve ever received. His words stayed with me because he obviously was concerned for me.

  His little talk reminded me of one my father gave me when I was just six years old. I had a tendency to be a little reckless and over the top when it came to throwing myself around. I’d banged myself up clowning around with a classmate who offered me a bite of a banana while I was sitting in my wheelchair. I lurched forward to chomp on it like a monkey, and in the process I tipped forward in my chair, crashed to the ground, and banged my head so badly I blacked out momentarily.

  My father’s concern was touching, and I’ll always remember his words: “Son, you can always get another banana, but we can’t get another Nicky, so you need to be more careful.”

  Like my father, Dr. King urged me to examine my actions and their impact on my life. I had been driving myself because I thought the success of all my endeavors depended on me when, in fact, I should have trusted in God and relied more on His strength and His will and His timing.

  That lack of humility and faith led to my meltdown and the loss of joy in my life for a brief season. I began to see my speaking engagements as a duty rather than as my purpose. Because I was afraid I would not be able to provide what mourning students needed, I even turned down a request to speak at a high school where there had been a student suicide. I cried after refusing that opportunity because speaking is my passion and helping others is the source of my joy.

  LESSONS REVEALED

  I wish I could tell you that one morning I woke up with a clear head and a renewed spirit, jumped out of bed, and announced, “I’m baaaaack!” Sorry, it didn’t happen that way for me, and if you go through a similar rough period, you may not pop right out of it either. Just know that better days are ahead, and this too shall pass.

  My comeback played out in small steps, day by day, over a couple of months. I hope your recovery comes more quickly, but there are benefits to a gradual revival. As the fog of despair slowly lifted, I was grateful for every ray of light that came through. Even more, once my head began to clear of the self-defeating thoughts, I appreciated the time I was given to reflect and contemplate my plunge into the abyss.

  It should go without saying that putting your faith into action is not a passive exercise. You have to actively and wi
llfully take the necessary steps to locate and move along the path God designed for you. When you fall off the path, as I did in this instance, at some point you have to ask yourself what happened, why it happened, and what you need to do to resume your journey of faith and purpose.

  The worst times that test your faith can be the best times for renewing it and putting it into action. A wise soccer coach once told me that he values losing as much as he values winning, because losing reveals weaknesses and failings that have probably been there all the time and need to be addressed if the team is to experience long-term success. Losses also motivate his players to work on the skills they need to master in order to win.

  When your life is going well, the natural tendency is not to pause and assess it. Most of us only take the time to examine our lives, our careers, and our relationships when we aren’t getting our desired results. In every setback, failure, and defeat, there are valuable lessons to be learned and even blessings to be unlocked.

  In the early days of my despair over my company’s debt, I wasn’t much in the mood for seeking out the lessons. But they found me over time, and the blessings revealed themselves too. I don’t like to reflect on that period, but I force myself to revisit it because new layers unfold and more lessons emerge on every visit. I encourage you to look for the learning points in each of your own challenges. You may be tempted to put hard times behind you and out of your mind. No one likes feeling vulnerable. It’s certainly no fun recalling how I wallowed in my misery, held pity parties, and grossly overreacted to what proved to be a temporary setback.

  Yet one of the best ways to take the pain out of past experiences is to replace the hurt with gratitude. The Bible tells us that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

  My uncle Batta Vujicic, who has faced difficult challenges in his real estate business, has helped me many times by gently repeating his mantra of faith: “It’s all positive.” My young cousins put their own spin on it, saying, “Dude, it’s all good in the hood!”

  PERCEPTIONS VERSUS REALITY

  During my meltdown I experienced something that you may have noticed in your own trials. As stress opened up old wounds and insecurities, my perception of what was going on became much worse than the reality of the situation. One tip-off that your response is out of sync with your actual situation is the use of inflated and exaggerated descriptions such as:

  This is killing me.

  I will never recover from this!

  This is absolutely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.

  Why does God hate me?

  And there is the always popular: My life is destroyed—forever!

  I will not admit to actually saying any of those silly things during my recent tribulations, but some people who were in my vicinity might have thought they heard similar lamentations. (Or worse!)

  Once again, I am honored to provide you with a good example of a bad example in my own behavior. The wielding of such over-the-top language should have served as a warning that my despair was excessive.

  Here are my perceptions of what was going on: I’m a failure! I’m going to go bankrupt! My worst fears are realized! I’m not able to support myself! I’m a burden on my parents! I’m not worthy of love!

  Here is the reality of what was 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 global demand 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.

  MAINTAINING PERSPECTIVE

  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.”

  HUMILITY DELIVERED

  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 been lacking 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 won’t change that, and responding with negative emotions will probably only make you feel worse and drive people away from you.

  My suggestion is that you embrace your newfound humility. Some batters react angrily to striking out. They break their bats over their knees, throw their helmets at the water boy, and kick dents into the dugout wall. Other batters humbly accept that striking out is part of the game, and they remember not to swing at the same pitches next time. So being humbled isn’t such a bad thing if you learn from the experience. In fact, there are those who believe that the truest path to enlightenment is through humility.

  When I was younger, I developed a strong aversion to asking anyone for help. It’s a very humbling thing to have to ask those around you to help you eat or to lift you into a chair or to take you into the rest room. I didn’t like being humbled. There were certain benefits and rewards to becoming more independent by finding ways to do things for mys
elf. I’m not saying it’s all bad, but my willful self-reliance sometimes led me to manipulate and even bully people into helping me. Instead of just asking for help, I’d wrangle favors from people, like my poor brother, Aaron, whom I often treated like a caregiver instead of a brother. Sorry, Aaron!

  From time to time God would have to restore my humility. It had not dawned on me that sometimes I was very selfish, impatient, and proud. At times I felt like I deserved special treatment. But I have asked Aaron for forgiveness, and even though we don’t see each other a lot because of distance, he is my best friend, whom I admire and respect a great deal. I am so surprised that when he was big enough to do so, he didn’t just put me in a cabinet and lock me in. I deserved it sometimes.

  I came to see this dark period as another of those humbling reminders meant to put me back on course. I had been acting as though I had to carry the entire burden of all our operations on my shoulders. That was an arrogant and impossible approach, and it showed that my faith in God and those around me was not shining through.

  Moses, the great prophet and leader, was the most humble man on the face of the earth. He knew that you cannot be a leader if no one is willing to follow and work alongside you. An arrogant person does not ask for help and thus is helpless. An arrogant person claims to know everything and thus is clueless. A humble person attracts helpers and teachers.

  I once heard a father tell his son, a recent college graduate, that he should approach the first day of his job with a proper attitude: “Don’t try to show them what you know. Instead, show them how much you want to learn.”

  If you find yourself overwhelmed by a crisis in your life, you may have to humble yourself and ask for help, and that is a good thing. None of us can accomplish our dreams without the help of others. Is it more important for you to feel superior and self-sufficient than to accomplish your dreams within a community of supporters?