UP UNTIL THIS POINT, I’VE SHARED ABOUT MY STORY AND how I’ve been able to overcome a very specific bout with fear. But I haven’t told you all of my fears. In fact, I’ve kept one of my fears quiet, but I feel like I need to talk about it because it’s likely a fear you struggle with as well, and I want to shift the focus to you. I hope that sharing my story has provided inspiration—it’s part of my life’s purpose—but I want to give you practical suggestions you can take away as well. I want to help you experience the same kind of victory over fear that I have.
That’s why I want to start by talking about one of the greatest fears of our current age: uncertainty. The fear of the unknown and what we can’t control. It would be natural for me to talk more about my wire walking to make this point, but I want to make this as concrete as possible for you. You will likely never walk a literal wire, but you almost certainly know something about the other wire I constantly walk—financial pressure.
I find my value in God, not in man. But I make my living by doing things that amaze and astound people. I’ve done some incredible stunts in my life, but with each success, there’s a ratcheting pressure because I have to ask myself, What do I do next that will make people notice me? If I do the same things I’ve always done, people will stop paying attention. And if I do the same things others have done, that’s of no value because there’s no amazement for the audience. That means I have to look for the next big thing, the next amazing stunt, because that’s how I pay my bills.
It’s what my great-grandfather Karl Wallenda called “a fear of feathers.” As an entertainer, you never know when your next paycheck may come in, and my great-grandfather always summed up that tension this way: “One day you eat the chicken, and the next day you eat the feathers.”
I remember when my dad lost his trade job. I was a kid, and it was a scary time for our family. We weren’t sure where the next meal was going to come from—and I mean that literally. There were some days when, if a member of the church didn’t bring something over, we didn’t have food. I remember feeling scared during those times and feeling equally scared when we would go to the food bank.
Everyone probably has some memory like that, of a time when things seemed out of control.
Uncertain.
Unknown.
Have you ever felt that? Have you ever carried within you a fear about what the future holds? I think it’s common within the heart because we’re human—we’re limited to what we can see and touch and experience. We can’t see out beyond ourselves, which makes us nervous, which leads to fear, which leads to what the writer Henry David Thoreau called “lives of quiet desperation.” We end up not living our days to the fullest because we’re afraid of something we can’t place.
I’ve dealt with this fear all of my life. Long before the accident in Sarasota, before the Big Apple Circus, before any of the other walks I’ve done, I’ve dealt with this fear of uncertainty and learned to channel it, to let it drive me to do great things with my life. It’s a real concern for me to continue providing for my family at the level I’ve been able to. I’ve done well in my career. I’ve had some tremendous opportunities that have allowed me to sustain my family and set us up for success down the road. I believe that’s what I’m supposed to do as a husband and a father; I’m supposed to do what the Bible calls us to do: leave an inheritance for our children and grandchildren (Prov. 13:22). And that’s way more important to me than anybody saying, “Wow, Nik walked over Niagara Falls!”
But in order to make money, I have to continue to do stuff to remain relevant; otherwise the networks and the media will contract with someone else. I keep pushing myself past my limits because of that fear of feathers—I continue to innovate and reinvent myself because that’s what it takes to provide for my family.
Maybe you feel this way too—maybe you feel the weight of uncertainty, that fear of the unknown, but instead of using it to drive you to greater things, you’ve allowed it to drive you down in a life of quiet desperation. I’ve seen what that looks like; I’ve felt that kind of defeat before. And because I have, I know it’s not where you want to be. You have a burning desire for things to change, to be different. You want to move beyond the uncertainty and live a better life, but the fear of feathers has got you down.
Just as I had to overcome my fear of falling after the accident in Sarasota, I’ve learned how to channel this fear of feathers into a strong and healthy mindset that allows me to be successful in life. I want to share some of my observations with you and encourage you to defeat uncertainty. There are three key principles to learn if you want to channel the fear of the unknown into energy for your life.
While I’ve been writing this book, we’ve been going through the run-up to a presidential election. A lot of the people running for president have made it their platform to make a lot of things free—health care, college, even a basic income! These campaign promises have resonated especially with younger people, but they’ve also found a following among people of the working class, those who find themselves living paycheck to paycheck and are vulnerable any time the economy takes a turn. These promises of free stuff resonate because people crave that security—they want certainty for their lives instead of the uncertainty they’ve been living with.
But here’s the thing: that same uncertainty can propel you to great success. It doesn’t have to hold you back. It doesn’t have to consign you to a life of fear. If you’re sick and tired of life being uncertain, then you can fight like heck to change it. The development of the gig economy showed that if you are willing to hustle and leverage your skills and your time, you can find ways to increase your income. But you have to be willing to do the work. The law of gig economy is if you’re not moving, you’re not making. You have to fight for what you want.
I’m not just talking about fighting by taking on more and more work. I’m talking about fighting in other ways too. You have to fight against the consumer mentality that says you can spend more than you earn. You have to fight against the advertisers who want you to believe you have to have the latest phone or the fastest car or even the newest shampoo if you want to be successful. There are plenty of forces fighting against you, forces that our culture has declared normal and healthy. The truth is, they’re not. They work against your dreams even as they promise to help you achieve them.
I understand this fight because I live it every day. I don’t make my income like many people do, working nine to five in an office with a consistent paycheck that hits on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month. My family has to live differently in order to make what I earn work for us. As a result, we live within our means. By the grace of God, I have literally no debt whatsoever on anything. I pay cash for everything I own. I wake up every day and ask myself, What’s next? because I understand that if I don’t, the gravity of uncertainty will pull me down and seek to keep me that way.
You have to fight a similar fight, even if your circumstances aren’t the same as mine. Maybe you do have a job with a steady paycheck, but it’s not the job you really want, and you feel like it’s killing you inside to just maintain the daily grind. You’d love to change jobs, love to try something new, but the fear of uncertainty keeps you chained to your desk. Your fight is to remember that your life is measured by more than just a paycheck. Yes, earning a living is necessary—we’ll talk about the importance of work in the next principle—but being alive to your purpose in life is just as necessary. And no one is going to fight for that on your behalf; you must fight for it yourself, and you must fight for it every day.
Fighting requires sacrifice. It requires doing things differently. It’s a mental muscle we develop by giving up things that are comfortable for things that are better. If we don’t fight for what we want, we will watch it slip through our fingers like sand. The muscle will slowly deteriorate until there’s no fight left in us. So resist that temptation! Find a way, every day, to fight for what you want in some way. Try something new. Say no to something that doesn’t matter. Set your priorities and stick to them, even when uncertainty tells you it’s too dangerous. It’s a high-wire act all its own, and it’s one you can walk if you’ll try.
Once you’ve made the decision to fight for what you want, you have to put in the work to get what you desire. I don’t know about your dreams, but mine didn’t come with instructions. There was no simple set of steps for me to take to get to where I wanted to go. I had to figure things out on my own and put in a lot of work. It hasn’t always been pleasant, and there were times when I would have preferred things to be easier. But the pathway to our dreams requires effort on our part.
I have mentioned briefly the challenges that came with my desire to walk over Niagara Falls, but the story of what it took fits perfectly here. When the idea came up, politicians on both sides of the border said, essentially, “You’ll get permission over my dead body.” The laws prohibiting what I was hoping to do had stood on the books for nearly a century. But I went to work on changing the laws—at least for my event—and after working the issue all the way through the legislature in New York, I had to make my way over to Canada to get a waiver there too. The media, the elected officials, and the nonelected ones all stood in the way—until they didn’t. When I tell you that getting permission was harder than walking the wire, believe me! But I was willing to do the work, and it became one of the most meaningful walks of my career.
That’s true for any dream. I’ve shared how I’ve spent my life working to get better at what I do professionally. I spend dozens of hours a week up on a wire, practicing for whatever opportunity is next. I practice in rain, wind, heat, cold—whatever it takes to prepare my mind and my body for what I might experience during my next performance. I work hard at my craft, and it’s paid off for me over the years.
But wire walking isn’t all I do. I work just as hard in other areas of my life, and truthfully, I work harder because those are newer areas. I have to work at being a business owner. I’m responsible for a lot of people, so being smart in my business decisions is essential. That means I’ve had to learn payroll, taxes, employment law, budgeting, and other essentials. Sure, I have people to help me, but because the business is my responsibility and the gateway to what I want out of life, I still have to put in work in order to get better.
The same goes for my television specials. I have to work hard at being a producer, since I’m intricately involved in every aspect of each broadcast. I’ve had to learn TV lingo, navigate contracts, work with camera angles, and think about the safety concerns of my network partners. I’ve done five specials now, so I know more than I used to, but it still requires me to work hard to stay on top of that part of my life.
I also have to work hard at being a good husband and father. I want to be the best husband I can be, and that means I must constantly work on some of the aspects of myself that cause tension with Erendira. I can be overwhelmingly obsessive about things, and maybe nowhere is that more true than with cleaning. I don’t just mop the floors; I remove every single piece of furniture, go over the floors with a brush, and then mop it up. That’s just the way I do it. That’s my thing. When I clean the kitchen, I wipe down every cabinet, clean every inch of counter space, make sure everything is neater than it was. And my wife hates it because it’s so over the top to her. To me, it’s being a good person, it’s living out my faith and representing God by doing everything I can to the very best of my ability. It’s just who I am—I’m the kind of guy who keeps his grass cut, his trees trimmed, and his house clean. But I have to balance that with Erendira’s wants and needs. I have to work at making sure I’m not just living for myself—no matter how noble I believe my intentions to be—but that I’m living to support and care for her in the ways she needs. The same goes for our kids; I can’t be obsessed professional dad all the time, thinking about work or the next project. I have to make time for them and be the person they need me to be, and that takes work on my part.
Nothing worthwhile comes without a price. We have to work for the things we truly desire, and we must do that work daily. When you commit to work for the things you really want, you begin to simultaneously quiet the voice of uncertainty and stir it to scream louder. Because the minute you start working toward your dreams, uncertainty is going to bring up one final trick to keep you stuck. It’s going to start screaming at you that you are going to fail, and failure is the one thing your dreams can’t afford. It’s a lie, of course, because failure is inevitable on your road to success—which is the final principle I want to share with you.
Let me start with this: you can’t succeed if you never fail. Failure is what results from trying something you’ve never done or haven’t gotten good at. Anyone, no matter how naturally talented or skilled they may be, has to fail in order to succeed. Look no further than a baby learning to walk—toddlers will take several steps and then fall, but inevitably they will get back up and try again until they finally learn to walk. No toddler with the ability to learn to walk has ever given up and settled for crawling as a primary means of getting around. I mean, have you ever seen an adult crawling as a general practice? Of course not! Even as little ones, we understand that failure isn’t failure unless you don’t get back up.
But that’s the problem—so many people don’t get back up. We’ve been taught for a long time that failure is not an option. So when you’re thinking about trying something new, or when you’re actually trying something new, you suddenly feel a burden to be perfect. After all, if failure isn’t an option, that means the only option is success, which means you have to do everything right in order to achieve your goal. And if you fail—or maybe I should say when you fail—it’s not celebrated as a part of your education but instead is held up as a personal deficiency in your character.
I believe that failure is necessary to achieve greatness. I don’t know of any truly successful or memorable people who didn’t have a string of failures to their credit. What makes them different isn’t that they avoided failure but that they learned from it. Failure can often be our best training tool as long as we react properly. And what is that proper response?
First, we have to embrace that we failed. We can’t make excuses for it; we can’t try to rationalize it away. We have to own the fact that what we were trying to do didn’t get done. No one ever succeeded by clinging to excuses, and no one ever moved past a failure by pretending it didn’t exist.
That’s why the second part of our response to failure is to examine the failure. We have to look for the things we did that led to the failure and learn lessons from it. Did you not plan properly? Did you not execute your plan? Did you partner with someone who couldn’t deliver as promised, or were you unclear about what you wanted from that partner? Go back over each aspect of the failure and look for the places where you can learn to be better next time.
And the third part of our response to failure is to make sure there is a next time! Remember, failure isn’t failure unless you choose not to get back up. You must decide that you will try again and do things differently now that you’re armed with new information. Maybe you’ve learned what to avoid; maybe you’ve learned something new you need to try. It does you no good unless you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try for success one more time.
To close this chapter, I want to share a story with you from my family’s life. It didn’t happen on a wire, but rather with one of my children, and it’s one of the clearest examples of confronting the fear of uncertainty that I know of.
Several years ago, I did a regional commercial in Detroit, Michigan, for McDonald’s. They were launching a new brand of coffee, and to help promote it, Lijana and I walked together between a couple of cranes. While we were there, the promoters invited us to visit the local children’s hospital and then the Ronald McDonald House, which offers lodging and other support services to parents whose children are hospitalized with illness.1 When I visited with Erendira and saw all the gold leaves on the wall representing the children who had passed while their parents were staying there, I was overcome with emotion. Right away I was like, “Man, when I get to that point where I can help, I want to do something for these families and for these kids.”
So fast-forward a bit, to just after my walk over Niagara Falls, which was my first big TV opportunity. My assistant, Joseph, got an email from a gentleman whose son was six at the time. The boy’s name was Coulter, and he had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. The doctors expected him to live about six months, and his father wrote to tell me how much Coulter really wanted to watch me walk. His dad struggled with the idea of letting Coulter watch me because what I do is so dangerous, but he ultimately decided to let him. In his email, he wrote about how I was so encouraging to his son that he had to write me about it. The family lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, so I determined to get on a plane and go meet this boy.
My wife and I flew there and met Coulter, spending time with him at the hospital and getting to know his family and learning more about his diagnosis. At the time, I was preparing for the longest walk of my career, a 1,576-foot walk above the Milwaukee Mile Speedway at the Wisconsin State Fair.2 Three years later, in 2015, Coulter and his family came up to Wisconsin for the walk. I wore a shirt that said, “Go Coulter Go!” on the front and “Never give up!” on the back. Coulter wore a shirt that said, “Go Nic Go!” He walked underneath me on an open path while I walked the wire above. After the walk, I brought him up with me as I spoke to a crowd of about twenty thousand people. Coulter joined me in signing autographs, and his parents watched in amazement. They told me later that Coulter was basically lifeless until he got there, but once he arrived, he was running around with my kids and playing in the parking lot. The change in Coulter really affected his parents.
Fast-forward again: I was getting ready to speak at a church in Charlotte, North Carolina. Erendira and I had kept up with Coulter and stayed in touch as his medical journey continued to twist and turn, but on this day, we were more focused on my trip. Erendira was getting ready to take me to the Sarasota airport, and my son was sitting at the kitchen counter with a cold. He was taking his cough medicine and an antibiotic when he suddenly fell over, passed out, and stopped breathing. I immediately laid him down and started giving him CPR. My wife called 911. Thank God, my son started breathing before the ambulance got there—it was maybe sixty seconds at most that he wasn’t breathing, but for me it felt like two years.
After the ambulance arrived, we headed to the hospital. The doctors said, “Look, we’re going to run every test we can—an MRI, a CT scan, everything you can imagine, because we know you need to get on your trip. We’re going to clear him and figure out what this was.” They ran a bunch of tests within thirty minutes and said, “He’s clear. We believe it was a mix between the antibiotics and the cough medicine that he took, so you can go get on the plane. He’s fine.”
I got in the car, hurried to the airport, and boarded the plane. Not long after the doors closed and the plane was getting ready for takeoff, my phone rang. It was Erendira. I answered quietly (those flight attendants still don’t like it when your phone goes off!), and she said, “We’re in the back of an ambulance on our way to All Children’s Hospital.”
“What do you mean? The doctor said everything was fine.”
“No,” Erendira said. “They found a lump in his chest. And they want us at All Children’s immediately.”
This is when the fear of the unknown struck. I mean, I was helpless, stuck in an airplane, about to be miles away from my family—not that I could have done anything even if I had been sitting there in the ambulance. My mind raced the entire flight, and as soon as I landed in Charlotte, I called Erendira and said, “I’m going to rent a car. It’s a thirteen-hour drive, but I have got to get back home.”
She said, “Nope, you’re called to do God’s work, and you need to stay there. This is just a test.”
I began to cry. My son was sick, I was hundreds of miles away, and my wife was encouraging me to stick it out, referring to what we were up against as a “test.” Talk about faith! I can tell you honestly that it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. That decision to stay and speak took every ounce of faith and courage I had. My appearance at the church was interview-style, which is the way I usually do presentations, and it was extremely emotional. I think everybody in the congregation was crying. Before it was over, my tears weren’t about my son; they were just my emotions coming out. I was a wreck. Fear and uncertainty were dragging me down. But I fought through it, did the work I promised to do, and realized that being separated from my family in a moment of crisis was a new lesson in my journey.
I flew to Tampa as soon as I could after the event, and then I went straight to All Children’s in St. Petersburg. Once I got there, the doctor said, “We want to meet with you later on this evening.” Nothing worse than being told to hold on while your child is in a hospital bed. When the staff finally ushered us back to a private room, the doctor said, “We think that this is cancerous. We need to do a lot more research, and we have reason to be very concerned.”
I can’t describe what Erendira and I felt in that moment. We just had these thoughts of, It’s out of our control. And, as you’ve probably gathered, I like to be in control of everything. We hunkered down at the hospital, and after a week of tests and scans, doctors found that our son was suffering a severe case of walking pneumonia that looked like a mass on X-rays and scans. I praised God for the news, but I can tell you the panic that we went through over the course of those ten days drew me closer to other parents. It made me think more often of Coulter’s parents, or those parents at the Ronald McDonald House who find out that, for their kids, it is cancer. And for some of those parents, it means saying goodbye.
I know there is a reason for everything that happens, and it’s up to us whether we want to find the opportunity within that uncertainty and turn it into something good. I believe that what happened with my son—just like the accident in Sarasota—happened for a bigger purpose. That’s why I’m writing this book. In everything, even fear and uncertainty, we can find that reason—if we have courage enough to face that fear and learn to overcome it.