How The Pain Of Loosing One Billion Naira Changed My Life

As he greeted me. I quickly took notice that he was emaciated. It was as though he was just a bag of bones. So for fear that he might have contracted a venereal disease or even worse, I asked him what the matter was and why he had become so skinny all of a sudden.

He sighed and amidst lamentations recounted to me how he lost Ten million naira in a business deal gone wrong.

He wondered why I was smiling as he spoke and before he could give voice to his thoughts, I asked him, “Only ten million naira?”.

He was too surprised to respond, and before he could say anything else I told him to take a seat and let me share with him how I lost one billion naira.

As he sat in disbelief, I shared with him how I and a few friends came up with a billion naira to invest in stocks with the intent of doubling the amount in three months.

Unfortunately, before the due date the stock market crashed and we lost everything we invested even to the last kobo. At this point, the young man was sweating profusely as his eyes widened in disbelief. He swallowed hard as he managed to ask, “And sir, you are still standing?”

I almost laughed out loud and before I could respond he asked again, “How did you manage to survive such a loss, sir?” I then went ahead to share with him how I survived and went from pain to gain in the shortest time.

In order not to elongate this space, I have broken them down into 5 bullet points.

I had a positive life stand. For me, life has always been a win-win affair. No matter what I do in life I always believe that all things work together for my good. With this mindset, it is almost impossible to catch me sulking because of a ‘bad experience’. It is either I’m winning or I’m learning.

I embraced the bad experience. I acknowledged what had happened as an unfortunate event, but rather than try to ignore the pain, live in denial and let it weigh me down, I used it to turn on my creative bulb to find a solution and ensure it never happened again.

I embraced the value of the bad experience. It was one of my mentors Napoleon Hill who said, “Every adversity has in it the seed of a greater benefit.” But sometimes, we miss out on it because we fail to see value in our bad experience.

I made good changes after learning from my bad experiences. People either change for the better or change for the worse, but while it looks like the justifiable thing to do when hurt is to hurt others too, it doesn’t improve the situation but rather deepens the pain and worsens the situation. My pain of losing one billion naira pushed me to seek help and so I sought to work with mentors and coaches who taught me financial education and the value of personal development in building sustainable wealth I am forever grateful to them because what I learned from them have made the difference in my life, business and outcomes and today I am helping more and more people do the same.

I took responsibility for my life. Thankfully I realised early in life that growth and success will be almost out of reach for the person who does not take responsibility for his/her life. Our ability to respond to life’s events will ultimately produce the kind of outcomes we get. Life events are given. Things that will cause you pain are sure to happen once in a while but how you choose to respond to them will determine the kind of outcome you will get out of them. That is what it means to take responsibility for your life.

Let me stop here for now, till next time. I hope you got some value from this.