A few years ago I met a wonderful man named Nick Vujicic at one of the John Maxwell Team events where we train and certify coaches and speakers. Paul Martinelli, the president of the John Maxwell Team, had brought Nick in to speak.
Nick is inspiring. He’s got a fantastic attitude, a great sense of humor, and a warm and loving spirit. Though he’s only in his early thirties, he has already written and published five books, acted in two movies, performed in a music video, appeared on Oprah, and spoken to hundreds of millions of people around the world, often filling stadiums.
Not impressed? Would you be if you knew that Nick has no arms or legs?
Nick was born without limbs, and he had a very difficult time growing up. He was bullied. He felt lonely. And he even contemplated suicide when he was eight years old. But he persevered. He drew on his faith, the love of his parents, and his desire to make a difference. He would not allow himself to be defined by his limitations. He made the most of everything he had. In his book Life Without Limits, Nick writes:
Helen Keller, who lost both her sight and hearing in childhood but became a renowned activist and author, said that there is no such thing as a secure life. “It does not exist in nature.… Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Risk, then, is not just part of life. It is life. The place between your comfort zone and your dream is where life takes place. It’s the high-anxiety zone, but it’s also where you discover who you are. Karl Wallenda, patriarch of the legendary high-wire-walking family, nailed it when he said: “Being on the tightrope is living; everything else is waiting.”1
Nick believed his purpose was to speak to audiences, to become a motivational speaker, yet he had no experience, no resources, and no invitations. He decided to begin calling schools and offering to speak about bullying, dreaming big, and never giving up. He received fifty-two rejections. But on his fifty-third try, a school finally said yes and offered to pay him $50. He was ecstatic. Then he realized that it would take a two-and-a-half-hour drive just to get to the school. Undaunted, Nick offered the money to his brother Aaron to drive him there. As it turned out, Nick spoke to only ten students for five minutes. Five hours of driving for five minutes of speaking. He felt foolish.
But then the next week the phone started ringing. School after school asked him to come and share his story. And those requests grew. They’re still growing. Today, more than a decade later, Nick receives 35,000 speaking requests a year.
Nick advises people to dream big and be a little foolish. He says, “If we went by the world’s definition of who I’m supposed to be because I look weird… ‘Well, surely, this guy can’t have a productive life, surely, he doesn’t have a sense of humor. Surely, he can’t love life.’ We stereotype people in this world. And so… if the world thinks you’re not good enough, it’s a lie, you know. Get a second opinion.”2
I want to be the person to give you that second opinion: You have great value. You have great potential. Not only are you good enough, but you have the ability to get even better and to achieve greater significance in your life. I echo the words of Nick, who says, “If God can use a man without arms and legs to be His hands and feet, then He will certainly use any willing heart.”
Catherine B. Ahles, public relations professor and vice president for college relations at Macomb Community College, observes, “We spend most of our twenties discovering all of the hundreds of things we can be. But as we mature into our thirties, we begin to discover all of the things we will never be. The challenge for us as we reach our forties and beyond is to put it all together—to know our capabilities and recognize our limitations—and become the best we can be.” I believe her advice is valuable, but I also think that we are not limited by our season of life. You can begin to put some things together before your twenties. And if you’re past your fifties, you can still increase your capacity. As I mentioned in the last chapter, that starts with developing self-awareness. More specifically, you need to become aware of the caps of your life, and recognize which caps you can’t remove and which ones you can.
I believe you can live a life with no limits, that you can go further than you believe and can do more than you’ve ever dreamed. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t possess limitations. We all do. Some caps cannot be removed. When Nick was a child, he prayed to God that he would grow arms and legs. Obviously, it didn’t happen. He had to acknowledge that limitation and learn to live with it. But he didn’t let it limit him.
Think about some of the caps in your life that you need to acknowledge and accept:
You had no control over your birth, nor can you go back in time and change it. You just have to live with some things:
• Your Place of Birth: You may love the place you were born, or you may hate it. That doesn’t matter. It is what it is.
• The Year of Your Birth: I hear people say they were born in the wrong time. They wish they were born in the Middle Ages or in the Old West. They may feel out of place, but they’re not. Have you heard the saying “You can only be where you are”? Well, you also can only be when you are. You were born exactly when you were supposed to be. And for my part, I’m glad to have been born when I was. I’m not sure how I would have survived if I had been born during America’s pioneer days.
• Your Birth Family: You don’t get to choose your parents, birth order, siblings, or upbringing. Good or bad, you have to live with it and make the best of it.
• Your Birth Characteristics: You cannot change your genetic makeup, your race, your bone structure, or your height. You want to dunk basketballs, but you’re only five feet seven? Pick another sport or develop the skills of slam-dunk champion Spud Webb. You need to learn to adapt.
When you’re feeling discouraged, think of Nick. He’s only three feet three inches tall. He has only a small foot with two toes, but he swims, goes fishing, paints, and types forty-five words a minute.
We don’t have any control over how our life begins, but there are also many things that happen to us in our lives that we cannot control. We suffer accidents or illnesses. We lose people we love. We discover that we don’t have the talent or ability to fulfill a dream. I call these “life caps.”
My father was marked by the death of his mother when he was six years old. I think he was constantly aware of what he had missed. It showed in the way he treated our mom and how he wanted us to treat her. For example, growing up, we were expected to do the dishes. If we grumbled, Dad would say, “I would have loved to do dishes for my mom.”
Losing your mother hurts. I lost mine when I was in my sixties, and I still miss her. We all have life-cap stories, some big, some small. We have our nicks and dents.
Mark Twain reportedly said that the two greatest days in people’s lives are the day they are born, and the day they find out why. Part of the process of fulfilling your purpose is becoming aware of the things you can’t change that limit you, so that you can direct your attention toward the things you can maximize to increase your capacity.
Nick Vujicic says, “The biggest temptation I believe is to feel comfortable, to feel like you’ve worked through all of that here on Earth, and are satisfied with this life.”3 I think that’s the problem for too many people who aren’t as successful, productive, and fulfilled as they would like to be. They mistakenly think they’ve worked through their issues, they’ve reached their capacity, and there are no new mountains they can climb. They settle. And they get comfortable.
Let me tell you: You’re not even close to your capacity. You haven’t come close to reaching your limits. Neither have I. I’m about to turn seventy years old, I’ve dedicated the last forty-five years to personal growth, and I’m still amazed by the gains I am able to make. I’m not done getting better, and if you’re willing to believe you have more capacity and work at making the most of it, you’ll be amazed by the gains you can make, too. To get started, you need to remove the two main types of caps people have on their lives.
The first type of limitation comes from the caps that others put on us. The best story I know of this is recorded in the Old Testament. God told Samuel the prophet that he was to go to Jesse in Bethlehem and there he would anoint one of Jesse’s sons as the next king of Israel.
When Samuel arrived, he asked Jesse to show him his boys, because one of them was going to be king. I bet Jesse and his wife got excited. I bet they speculated about which one it would be. Maybe they thought the way Samuel did: When Jesse lined up his boys, Samuel saw the oldest, Eliab, and thought, He looks like a king. But Eliab wasn’t the one God wanted. Neither was the next son. Or the next. Samuel looked at seven sons, and said, “None of them is the one. Is this everybody?”
In fact, there was one more: David. Jesse hadn’t considered him king material and hadn’t even called him in from the fields. Jesse had thought of every one of his boys except David. Jesse didn’t believe David had it in him. They had to send somebody out to the pasture where the sheep were to get David and wait for him to get there. The boy showed up, dirty, smelly, and out of breath, looking less like a king than anyone else in the family. Who knows, David might have even known Samuel was coming that day, and had been told he wasn’t welcome at the party. Yet lo and behold, he was the one God wanted. Nobody there saw David’s potential, but God did.
David had much greater capacity than others gave him credit for. Time after time people discounted him. Not only did his brothers think he wasn’t king material, but they also thought he wasn’t soldier material. On the day that Jesse sent David to the battle lines with food and supplies for his brothers, Goliath was taunting the army of Israel, asking them to send a champion to fight him.
David was angered by Goliath’s disrespect for God, but the moment David started asking questions about what would be done for the person who took on Goliath, David’s oldest brother mocked and criticized him. It was like they were saying, “Why are you here? This is for men.” David was undeterred.
When King Saul heard that finally someone was willing to fight the giant, he sent for David. But when Saul took one look at David, he thought David wasn’t champion material. He tried to talk David out of facing Goliath. When David was still intent on doing battle, Saul tried to put his armor on the boy. But six-foot-five armor for a 240-pound man doesn’t work on a five-foot-six, 140-pound shepherd. David took off the armor and faced Goliath in his regular clothes with nothing but a sling and stones. Goliath took one look at him and thought he wasn’t hero material, either. But that didn’t matter to David. He took the giant down.
David did go on to become king. He brought together all the Hebrew tribes into the nation of Israel, conquered his enemies, and established his throne, which he passed to his son Solomon, said to be the wisest king who ever lived.
That’s a dramatic story of a great leader who had many caps put on him by other people. But we all have caps put on us—both great and small—by others. I remember one put on me in fifth grade. I wanted to play the trumpet, so my parents rented a trumpet for me. I was excited as I went to a music teacher for my first lesson. But she took one look at my mouth and said, “Your mouth isn’t shaped right to play the trumpet. You’ll never be able to do it.” She told my parents that I should play the clarinet. But I didn’t want to play clarinet. I wanted to play trumpet. Guess what? My parents traded in the trumpet and got me a clarinet. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I had just been given a chance to play the trumpet. I think I would have loved it.
Today, I am unwilling to surrender my potential to someone else. I’m unwilling to allow others to put caps on me and define my potential. I fought too hard to get where I am to let others control where I am going.
People have put caps on you. You’re not even aware of some of them. But you don’t have to let their lack of belief define you. Be open to the possibilities that are in you! Later in this chapter, I’ll discuss how you can remove these caps.
Perhaps the caps that limit us most are the ones we put on ourselves. Author, speaker, and coach Michele Rosenthal writes about an incident that happened to her in elementary school, which prompted her to put a cap on herself that she continues to deal with today:
In fourth grade I was placed in an advanced math group with four other students.… Being part of this special group felt good; when it came to math I was calm, confident, and competent.
One day the teacher announced a math quiz: twelve addition problems (simple equations containing four numbers each) to be done in six minutes. “These are very easy,” the teacher explained. “If you can’t get all twelve correct, then you’re just plain stupid.” Stupid? Not me. I set out to answer all twelve problems correctly. This was our first timed math test, and I quickly discovered I didn’t know how to judge how long to spend solving each problem. I tried to add as fast as possible but never felt I could trust the resulting sums. I began to panic. My brain froze. The numbers swam. I couldn’t think. By the time the teacher told us to put down our pencils, I had placed numbers in each answer box but I knew they were all wrong.
The next day our tests were handed back. At the top of mine, written in enormous red numbers: “–12”—complete and total failure. I walked home carrying my test, crying all the way.
When I look back I can tell you that was the day I formed and accepted the belief, “I can’t do math.” It’s a belief that continues today.4
We all put caps on ourselves. But we don’t have to leave them in place. We don’t have to be limited by them forever. I think back to some of the caps I put on myself:
When I started in my career, I was a people pleaser. I wanted to be everybody’s favorite, and I didn’t like rocking the boat. That’s not a good mind-set if you want to be a leader. I had to learn how to remove that cap. I had to be willing to do what was right or what was best for the organization, even if it made people unhappy or I received criticism. It took me a few years to work through this, but I did it. Every time I wanted to do the easy thing that would please others, I tried to think of the vision I had for the organization and the people, and it helped me to make better decisions.
Too many people simply accept whatever environment they’re born into. They think it’s normal, and they start to believe they don’t have any other choices in life. When that happens, they’ve created a self-imposed cap on their life. For example, I grew up in a small town in a very conservative environment, where leadership wasn’t valued or taught. The expectation was that if you worked hard and were a good person, that was enough. It wasn’t for me. I wanted to make a difference, and when I began to learn about leadership, I realized that I needed to move from that environment if I wanted to keep growing, learning, and expanding my potential. When I was in my early thirties, that was what I did. I removed that cap from my life. If I hadn’t, it would have remained on me, and that would have been my own choice once I’d realized I could do something about it.
I started planning to go into ministry starting when I was seventeen years old. When I was a senior in college and was getting ready to become a pastor, I sat down and wrote out my career goals in a church administration class. I remember writing that I wanted to someday lead a church of five hundred people. To me that was a bold goal, because a church of five hundred was the largest I’d ever seen or heard of.
About two years out of college, I came across a book by Elmer Towns called The Ten Largest Sunday Schools and What Makes Them Grow. I remember reading the first chapter and thinking, Wait. This church has more than five hundred people in it. I didn’t even know such a thing existed! The same was true of the next church, and the next. All ten churches in the book had more than five hundred people in them. The book started to change the way I thought. I suddenly had models of growth beyond anything I’d ever seen.
That was the day this cap on my life became loosened. It prompted me to try to interview the leaders of the ten churches Elmer Towns wrote about. That further loosened the cap, until finally, it came off and my thinking and expectations changed for myself, my leadership, and my desired impact.
I think that’s the way many self-imposed caps come off for most of us. They don’t just blow off in one moment. We expose ourselves to new ideas and successful people, and the caps begin to loosen. And when they get loose enough, then they come off.
If I look back and think about what I went through in removing the cap put on me by myself and others in the area of leadership, I see a process that went something like this:
• Exposure—In 1973, I read Elmer Towns’s Ten Largest Sunday Schools. All those churches had more than five hundred people, and I realized that leading a church larger than that was possible.
• Example—In 1974, I interviewed two of the ten pastors in that book. They said I could be successful. I started to believe it myself.
• Expression—In 1975 I read See You at the Top by Zig Ziglar. This made me realize I needed to become intentional to reach my potential.
• Experiment—I started a program at my church where I bought buses that would pick people up and bring them to services. I named each bus after a book of the Bible starting with Genesis. I made it to Ruth—that’s eight buses—before the gas shortage made it impractical. But I had broken through barriers.
• Experience—In 1975, my church had the fastest-growing Sunday School in the state of Ohio.
• Eureka—In 1976, I heard Lee Roberson, the founder of Tennessee Temple University, say, “Everything rises or falls on leadership,” at a conference in Chattanooga. I understood the importance of leadership in my life for the first time.
What caps do you need to loosen so that you can blow them off and start increasing your capacity? Are you limited by complacency? C. S. Lewis identified complacency as a human being’s mortal enemy. Do you not like who you are? Mark Twain said that you cannot be comfortable in your own skin without your own approval. What are the caps that are holding you back? You need to identify them and get to work loosening them. (If you need help with this, you can go to www.CapacityQuiz.com to take the free assessment.)
I want to be a cap remover in your life because I want you to become more successful and significant. I’d like to help you reach your potential and achieve your dream. Being a lid lifter and cap remover is the greatest role I could hope for in another person’s life. Helping you begins with my belief in you. You may be thinking, You don’t even know me! That’s true. I wish I could, but I don’t know the specifics of your story. But I know that as a human being, you have huge potential. Every person does, so that means you do. You specifically. You may be facing challenges. Others may not believe in you. You may have a tough past. That doesn’t take away what you can do or who you can become. As my friend Nick Vujicic says, “Don’t put your life on hold so that you can dwell on the unfairness of past hurts.”
Some people and organizations try to hype you up. I’m not trying to convince you to act confident without knowing what to do. You can’t be hyped to success. But you can be helped to success. You can be taught how to grow. You can be shown how to win inside victories that lead to outside victories. The idea of “if you believe it you can achieve it” doesn’t last. Contrast that with “if you achieve it you can believe it.” That does last, and it brings genuine confidence.
When I was just getting started, people believed in me. They believed in me more than I believed in myself and before I believed in myself. And they backed up their belief with opportunities they gave me. It has been said that it’s wonderful when the people believe in their leader. It’s even better when the leader believes in the people. But it’s best when the people believe in themselves.
People in my life believed in me, and that helped me believe in myself.
As I was growing up, every day my dad and mom told me how much they believed in me.
When I was in high school, Coach Neff believed in me. In every basketball game, when we got to the fourth quarter, he would say, “John, look at me. It’s your time. I’m counting on you.”
In my twenties, Leonard Fitts, my first overseer when I became a pastor, was the first person to say he saw leadership in me. And Bob Klein, another of the leaders, said, “I pray for you every day because I think you have the greatest potential in our organization.”
When I moved to California in my early thirties, Chuck Swindoll, the best-known pastor in church circles, introduced me to other pastors at a conference and told them I was marked to do great work for God. To this day, I don’t know how Chuck even knew who I was or why he believed in me.
The list goes on and on. They believed in me so thoroughly and encouraged me so much that I worked harder and started to believe in myself, too.
If you don’t have others who believe in you, then let me be the first. I believe in you. And I want the best for you. I want you to believe in yourself. I can loan you my belief, but that only works for a short time. To be successful, you must believe in yourself. You can be successful if others don’t believe in you, but you cannot be successful if you don’t believe in yourself. And to make a change, you must take action and do the right things that will allow you to possess self-belief.
I want to help you believe and give you a path forward to increasing your capacity so that you can make the most of whatever potential you have. The way your life has gone up to now? It doesn’t matter. Write a new story with your life. As Nick Vujicic says, “Life may not be going well for you now, but as long as you are here, as long as you press forward, anything is possible. Hold on to hope.”5
That’s great advice. Hold on to hope as you turn the page, and let’s get ready to get to work.
1. What are the life and birth caps that you cannot change? List them.
2. What caps have others put on you that you want to remove? What must you do to begin loosening those caps?
3. What caps have you put on yourself that are limiting your capacity? What must you do to begin loosening those caps?