The Audacity of God's Grace: 10 Strategies To Living Your Best Life Now (4 page)

Therefore, I began immediately to study my new environment and what it meant to set up a small business. I studied success by investigating it with an open mind, and invested into financial education by reading several books on entrepreneurship and empowerment; attending seminars on success that helped develop and shape my mind. I have been a minister and an educator by profession. I have always loved Jesus, but I have always believed deeply in financial success. I had no formal business training or educational background in finance and/or business management. A few folks that I knew and shared my dreams of wanting to start a business as a new immigrant discouraged me steadily and some questioned my reasons for wanting to set up a business when my health was not strong enough, and my wife and I still made about a hundred thousand US dollars annually. What more do I want out of life? I struggled with the thought. Was going into business at this point the right path to undertake? The United States was heading into a defining recession. Jobs were lost steadily. Real estate crisis loomed in the nation and California was one of the hardest hit as the state was broke. Am I not becoming greedy and ungrateful to God? I thought repeatedly. This is where many people make the “microscopic” mistake that turns out to become the macro-mistake that ruins their dreams and self-sabotage their financial freedom.

Don’t Look For Free Advice

If you want to be successful, the key is this: don’t look for free advice. Free advice is cheap advice.

“Looking for free advice will sabotage your earning power and potentials.”

Invest in getting meaningful advice with people who have become successful. This is why the books you read, the people you mingle with, or the programs you invest your time in matters in the issues of your success. Someone once said that: “It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, which skills you have, where you are born, or which family you came from. All that counts if you want to be successful in life is the people you surround yourself with.” This is true. I know how much I have personally invested in paying consultants to grow my businesses or develop myself. Success has a price tag. This is why you never should go about, looking for free advice to grow your net worth or business. You will never grow them! Becoming successful means that you must be willing to spend a good amount of your scares resources and sacrifice some of your personal pleasure. If you are thinking of success, be willing to pay for consultations, purchase books on empowerment and attend seminars or webinars on financial success and learn from successful people and other strategies on how to do better than you are doing now. The problem is that most people do not “waste their time royally” by investing in, and studying empowerment literatures. Remember: Success does not come easy! Your chance for winning a super lotto is almost non-existent if that is what you are looking for.

People Who Succeeded Had to Learn Secrets

You have a whole cloud of witnesses in terms of seminars, coaching and mentorship workshops and books on entrepreneurship. Amazon.com marketplace is a great resource for books that help you self-develop and to tap into wealth creation, and grow your intellectual-mind liberating net worth and knowledge capital on success. There are so many folks who want to do better in their finances as well as their children and yet, they have never read for an example, a page or chapter from Author Robert T. Kiyosaki “Rich Dad, Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids about Money—That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!.” Studying to earn a degree, to pass a board exam, to get a licensure or certificate is good. What can equal formal education? However, studying textbooks for principles and fundamentals of public health or anatomy and physiology 101, use of English, Principles of Marketing or Accounting, and American History etc. to pass a course in college and get an “A” grade will only make many people smart enough to survive economic hardship as they may escape poverty by getting a job afterwards if they are lucky. Acquiring skills, receiving formal education, or having a diploma are necessary as they certainly will be valuable to you and society. But there is more. Everyone who succeeded and won BIG in life had to go beyond formal education by receiving a diploma in mind-liberation education. For me, this is the beginning point to financial freedom that the rich has learnt to teach their children over generations!

Becoming Successful & Wealthy Takes More than Formal Education

For many people who did not share in the fortune of having families who passed wealth along to them, becoming successful and wealthy will take far more than just formal education. Going to school and earning an advanced degree is great. However, there is more wealth you can create with your million dollar ideas [thought management] than more wealth you can earn with those diplomas hanging on your wall if you pursue a 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. career pathway after college or graduate school and retire that way.

Your financial freedom will not come by earning degrees upon degrees alone. It will happen to you the moment you realize the super you in you and make use of your talents, skills thought credentials and thought potentials and then, the degrees you earn from formal education. Thought management is what many people need to earn more because in thought management, knowledge well harnessed is the power to do! But it must begin with getting a diploma in mind-empowerment education first, because you are a very powerful and intelligent person. Years back, one secondary (high) school I attended had its motto as:
Knowledge is Power.
While this motto sounded great, I perceive it has two real time problems that our school
Principal
never told us about. The first problem is that majority of us were taught that gaining or “accruing” more academic knowledge through higher education—knowledge is the only major pathway—the power to gain wealth. Sadly and secondly, the other problem with this motto which is still popular in many educational settings today is its failure to state that:
Knowledge is power only when put to excellent or exceptional use
. Many people who want success believe it is wise to use formal education as their manufacturing plant, a warehouse where knowledge that translates into wealth and riches are stored. This is only but half-truth.

Interestingly enough, the true life story of people like the former Chairman of Citizens International Bank, the late Dike Udensi Ifegwu—a Nigerian multibillionaire, who only had a 7
th
grade formal education proved that formal education—an MBA or advanced degrees is not necessarily a pre-requisite to becoming extremely wealthy and successful. At just 24 years old in 1975, the late Dike Udensi had gone into real estate and had built and completed a two storey building—apartments of six flats. Later he will have other real estate’s investments in places like Lome Togo, UK, and the USA.

While in his twenties, the young Dike Udensi who never completed a high school (secondary school) education except receiving a 7
th
grade education (passing JSS 1—Junior Secondary School Class One) graduated from thought management—mind liberating education and commissioned his mind into business opportunities of large scale importation and distribution of various household goods and products and drew the attention of the then four major Nigerian banks: Union Bank, First Bank, United Bank of Africa (UBA) and Afribank. At a young age of 30 in 1981, of the 20 major factories that had its presence and establishments in the Aba metropolis of Eastern Nigeria, the late Udensi had three namely: Dubic Breweries (brewers of Dubic Beer—the first Nigerian indigenous company to solely establish a brewery that produced Dubic Beer), Dubic Industries, and Unijoy Paper Mills. At his 39
th
birthday in 1990, the late Udensi was already the majority shareholder in two Nigerian banks: Alpha Merchant bank and Citizens International Bank where he was already a chairman of the bank. History has showcased others like the late Dike Udensi in America who were higher achievers and successful multibillionaires who never completed a university education like those of Bill Gates of Microsoft Word, Steve Jobs of Apple Computers, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook among other numerous billionaires that do not have a first degree to their name, and yet they are self-made significant billionaires and people whose ideas has influenced and changed all of us today. They made their fortunes with the product of their mind-liberating education—ideas that flows from their thoughts and the power to do—determination even before investors started knocking on their doors.

Poverty Is In the Mind

As you will discover later in this book, poverty is in your mind! This is one of the strongest arguments raised in this book. With my experience, I have learned that it is our mindset, informed by our thoughts and actions or thinking patterns that defeat or promote our lives and determine our level of success. Many years ago when I first immigrated to the US, after repeated discouragement from folks whom I thought will energize me towards my destiny [i.e. serving God selflessly and reaping a harvest of financial freedom], I began to do more than pray. I decided to become stubborn for my own success. I started to question what my belief system for success was about. Get stuck by an income of about one hundred thousand [$100.000] for a whole year and clap for maximizing my potentials? Who am I? What is my life purpose and calling? How do I become a person of influence and significance for this generation? How do I help to reach the redemptive potentialities of my ministry and help finance this kingdom message? How do I become a force for positive social change in my community and for this generation? I knew within my mind that I could do better than I was doing even with my health crisis because tough times never last.

Be Confident in Dreaming Great Dreams

This was how I became confident in my own dreams and became an achiever. This is what I describe as self-motivated empowerment. What is the essence of faith if not for taking a risk of believing in accomplishing bigger things and having greater confidence in things not seen (leap of faith) and the substance of those things we hope for to accomplish or become (purpose driven vision) (Hebrew 11:1)?

“A person with faith has greater expectations because faith makes you to have sight and see what others don’t.”

It was in the middle of these struggles that I lost my mother whom I have not seen in five years. My world was in chaos! It was as if the enemy unleashed his police dog to attack me and trail me every step of the way, trying so hard to steal my purpose and joy. As I quietly planned to fly across the Atlantic Ocean over to West Africa against my doctors and my wife’s wishes who knew how precarious my health condition had become, just to say a final goodbye—the funeral service of a mother that I so strongly loved and that I missed terribly, just three days to embark on this trip, on March 9, 2008, I was rushed to the emergency room almost a dead man from where I will be hospitalized and remain for the next eight weeks. That was how I never get a chance to see my beloved mother at least one more time which hurts me for a number of years.

As a minister, I have been privileged to always pray for people, comfort and counsel them. In fact, in one of the churches I once served in the pastoral staff, my area of primary assignment was outreach/nurture and prayer ministries because I am a man that believes strongly in the power of prayer. I had always thought that I was a very strong man, and strong men of God of course do not cry—I falsely thought. However, about this time, I felt that life has been so unfair to me in a number of ways. Many of the nights I will cry to God while I pray and fall asleep. In one such night, I was almost at the point of death. I could hardly breathe; I was beginning to lose it all. And somehow that night, something so supernaturally out of the ordinary happened to me.

Pray To Be Overpowered

Out of nowhere that night, I was overpowered to receive such a supernatural increase and audacity in my spirit; an audacity of God’s flowing grace with currency indeed, which was so intensely egregious. It overtook me. It vibrated my veins and shook my life. I knew it had to be the arrival of the Lion of Judah in my life—the power of God’s unending grace gave me another chance for life. Before this supernatural visitation that night, I was beginning to be enveloped by darkness, as the enemy kept ringing it loudly in my ears that it was my time to die. But I fought back! I recalled that God has not given me the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind (2 Timothy 2:7 NKJV). I refused to give in to the lies of the enemy and blockage my mind not to think about negativity as the enemy makes it so intense to convince me to give up and believe the lie. I refused to agree in my mind to die that night. Before this time, I had lost my ability to perform most of my activities of daily living. But it was in the middle of this battle that night, that I regained power to do, and began to unleash words of power and confessed positively that premature death was not an option for my life.

There Is Power in Your Confessed & Spoken Words

This is why our words and the declarations we make for our lives are more powerful than we know it. As I struggled to breathe, I prayed and became louder and louder in my affirmation that I am going to live to raise those children, to be their mentor, to be the husband and lover that I have promised my wife to be; to rebuild the walls of our collapsing ministry that God has entrusted in my care, and to build those businesses that needed to empower people from diverse backgrounds, and alleviate, suffering or banish people and communities from poverty. The more I decreed and made those declarations, the more tears ran down my cheeks. As I released these supernatural words into my life taking authority from Jesus, and doing something I never ever have done in prayer, I saw that I became stronger and happier and stronger that night. Few days past, and my surgery was scheduled. Before this time, the surgery has been delayed for over one year and three months because it was a very complicated and high risk case to embark on. The surgeon-in-chief of the transplant department of Loma Linda University Medical Center then, who was personally in charge of my case and the medical community had decided to try every other option available without carrying out the surgery. As each of these options failed, the only option left was to carry out the surgery for either it kept me alive or kill me.