What I Would Do Differently

7 Costly Mistakes To Avoid In The Journey of Life

By Pastor Sam Adeyemi 

Pastor Sam Adeyemi (DayStar Christian Centre)

There is a popular saying that experience is the best teacher. This is true to some extent. But a wise man once remarked that though experience is the best teacher it is better if it is not your own experience. This is his message: There are certain mistakes you make in life that may put you in a shape where it is impossible to pick any lessons from them. In other words, the experience of another person is your best teacher! Pure wisdom!

There is a popular saying that experience is the best teacher. Which is true to some extent. But I like the remarks once made by a wise man that though experience is the best teacher it is better if it is not your own experience. This is the message he was trying to pass across. There are certain mistakes you make in life that may put you in shape where it is impossible to pick any lessons from them. Can you for instance deliberately get yourself involved in an accident to learn what it takes to be involved in one! A visit to the Orthopedic Hospital might just give you all the life lessons you need. Instead of learning from your own crashed business or marriage, won’t it be preferable to learn those experiences from those who have been affected by broken homes and business bankruptcy?

It is in this light that I am asking you to drop what you are doing now, lock yourself up where there would be no distractions and spend about 40 minutes to read this special report. Do it as if your life depends on it because, it actually does!

I have made countless mistakes in my ministry, in my marriage, in my consulting business, in my relationships, in my health and in my life generally. There were some it seemed I could not get over. But thank God I did. What I am about to share in this report could change the course of your life permanently if you would take every nugget I drop with the seriousness it deserves. This is the first time I am sharing some of them with this level of openness and frankness and I am doing it for a reason. I don’t ever wish that you make any of those mistakes. I want to shorten your journey to the top.

I encourage you to read this report slowly and with concentration to be able to squeeze the juice out of it for your benefits. I will be sharing with you seven lessons life has taught me. I want to share with you some of the mistakes that I have made and the lessons that I learnt from them. Some people want to succeed but they do not want to fail, they run away from failure. However, your library on success will not be complete without something on failure because really, success grows best out of the ashes of failure.

If you have the willingness to learn, learn the lessons from your failure. Forget the details and try again the next time more intelligently. Your potential for success increases each time you fail. Therefore if you will truly succeed, you must not be afraid to fail. I will share with you some of the lessons that life has taught me.

LESSON #1

Worry Won’t Solve Any Problem

“When you worry, you are paying interest on an overdraft you never took! Does it make any sense?”

While I was working as a site engineer on a project, I remember the day my director criticized me for something that went wrong on the site. What he said that day hurt me and I went up to the roof of the building which we were constructing and I began to think over my life. I wondered what I was even doing on that site in the first place. My conclusion was that I had made a costly mistake by accepting to work there.

My dad is a building contractor. He had registered a business when I was in my second year in the high school and made me a director. In fact that was why I went to study civil engineering so I could work in his business and eventually take it over.

Unfortunately, by the time I was done with school there was no business anymore. The business had crashed. That was why I had to go searching for a job. It took me 20 months after graduation and the mandatory Youth Service in my country Nigeria before I got this job. And now I was on the job and my director criticized me. I was moody, I felt sorry for myself and I began to blame my dad. If not that his business did not work out, what business did I have searching for a job somewhere. Tears welled up in my eyes as I felt bad for myself and I went to sit at the site office.

Then I heard the still small voice in my heart and I knew it was God’s voice. He said, “Write down all the things that are working positively in your life right now.” I took my pen and I wrote, I am 23 years old. I am a site engineer on a multi-million naira project. I am associate pastor in the fastest growing church in the city. My parents are alive, and my siblings are alive. I am healthy. As I went on and on, it dawned on me that God was trying to get a message across to me. My mind was focused on what was not working in my life and God wanted me to realize there were many things that were working positively in my life.

Then I heard that voice in my heart; “There is no amount of worrying that you will do today that will make me do today, what I have decided to do tomorrow.” Oh my God, that was a blast. In other words, my worrying was not going to solve any problem. It was not going to force God to do what he was going to do eventually. He had destined to promote me, to bless me; my life was planned by God. Things were going to work out but I was allowing the present experience to colour everything.

Let me confess to you that I am an introvert and I have discovered the tendency for moodiness. It began when I was young. I didn’t realize it. In those days, there were not many places where you could watch television in my country. Where I lived with my parents, nobody could receive any television signals. For the first time, I visited an uncle on holiday when I was seven years old in a city where you could watch T.V. Oh, my God, I couldn’t wait for the T.V to start 4p.m every evening. Then this particular day, it was 4p.m and we waited for the T.V to come on. Nothing happened. It was all shadowy flakes on the T.V set. 30 minutes later we tried. One hour later, the TV refused to come on. I just sank into this mood. It was a negative mood. Everybody became concerned for me. They were asking me, “What is the problem, who hurt you, who offended you?” And then, “oh, is it because of the T.V that didn’t come on?” I was ashamed to admit that it was the T.V because I was not the only one in the house who was disappointed. That was when I became aware that I had the tendency to be moody, to sink into negative moods where I just had those dark clouds hanging over my emotions.

Overtime, however, I have realized that our emotions make us magnets; living magnets. Our emotions create magnetic fields around us. Magnets throw out radiation, they have magnetic field and they have the power to attract and the power to repel. I discovered that as a human being, the kind of radiation you send out will determine what you attract and what you will repel. If your attitude is negative, if your emotions are negative, you will repel miracles. You will attract problems and you will attract the wrong set of people to yourself.

So I discovered that I needed to exercise discipline over my emotions. That is where I began and decided I am not going to be depressed, I am not going to be sad. I fought those emotions, I fought them with prayers, I fought them with confessions, speaking over and over again to myself. I learnt to break free whenever a negative mood wanted to hang around me. My life changed. It changed radically. I began to attract the right set of people. I began to attract opportunities I had never attracted before. I began to attract resources I had never attracted before.

Let me say this to you, it is not because things are bad that you are sad, it is because you are sad that is why things are bad. Break free from sadness, sign into joy willingly, and I guarantee, your life will change for the better.

LESSON #2

Success Is Not A Day’s Job

“A tomato fruit can be ripened in two ways. You could spray a chemical on it and you would have a ripe tomato fruit overnight. You could also allow it to grow through the maturation process. Which one do you think would aste better? Drop that microwave success mentality. It won’t get you anywhere. Believe me!”

I remember during those twenty months when I was trying to get a job after graduation. I had begun to learn lessons on faith as a spiritual force for creating whatever you want and I decided to try it out. I read a magazine from the largest church in the world in South Korea and I saw that they would have a conference some months later. I said, “That’s what I am going to do with my faith. I believe that I am going to travel to South Korea to attend this conference.”

I went to a travel agent to ask for the cost of the ticket to Seoul, South Korea. At that time, twenty –three years ago, he said it was twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000). Today the equivalent will be about one hundred times that amount.

I had no clue, no idea where I would get such an amount of money from. And I was saying it, “I am going to South Korea.” I was rehearsing for it. I was persuading myself that I was going. As the date approached and got closer and closer, I could not even get five hundred naira, (N500) not to talk of twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000). Eventually the date for the conference came and passed. I did not get anything close to that amount of money, I did not go anywhere.

That got me frustrated a little bit. I said, “Hold on, are you sure these principles really work?” I wanted to go to Korea, but looking back now I smile at myself. Why? I did not even have a job. If I had twenty-one thousand naira (N21, 000) at that time, my priority should not have been to go to South Korea; to go and do what? They were not inviting me to speak. I did not even have a church to pastor. What was I going to do? I needed to get a job first.

The lesson that I learnt; success is not a day’s job it is a daily job. It is not a destination, it is a journey. Success comes through the law of process. You need to calm down and give yourself time. Make sure you are in alignment with principles. Do you know what happened eventually? One day I saw an advert again from the church in South Korea for the same conference. This was twelve years later and it occurred to me that I could now afford to go but it was no longer my priority.

What am I saying? Give yourself time. There is no amount of heat that can make a block of ice to melt instantly. I know sometimes when we have experienced failure, when we have experienced deprivation, we want things to happen all of a sudden, but it just doesn’t work like that. It takes time. Will I say that God did not answer my prayer that he should give me the capacity to go to South Korea? Oh no, he answered the prayer but the answer was a postdated cheque.

Do you have the capacity to manage what you are asking God to give you? That is important. God doesn’t want to give you a promotion that will destroy you. My encouragement today is that you hang on, hang in there and take one step at a time. You need to hang around long enough to see your breakthrough happen. If you set the target, you set the goal and you believe, and you work daily towards it, it is inevitable, it is coming to pass. Don’t be in too much of a hurry. If you eat this fruit before it is ripe, the taste in your mouth will be a sour one and you will put your teeth on edge. Give your goals and your dreams time to come into fulfillment. That is the lesson that life taught me.

LESSON #3

More Money Won’t Make You Rich Without Discipline

“I remember the words of the great evangelist, Billy Graham. He said, “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. But when character is lost, all is lost.” Don’t lose your character in the bid to make some small amount of money!”

Several years ago, when I was a student in school, something happened. A friend asked to use my bank account to keep his money. The Federal Government at that time had decided to change the currency for the whole country. Everybody was required to take their cash and to dump it in their bank accounts. Then the bank would give us new notes.

My friend didn’t have a bank account so he gave me his money to keep in my account and that became one of the greatest temptations that I had experienced until that time. The money was in my account and I began to loan my friend’s money without asking him. It was with the intention that I would return the money somewhere along the line. But I was borrowing money that I had no capacity to pay back. Eventually it became a big issue, a big source of embarrassment to me.

Anyway, I have learnt my lesson. You don’t spend money that is not yours. You don’t spend money that you don’t have. You may feel good temporarily when you are spending the money. However, it will catch up with you and the embarrassment will be enormous.

I have learnt that temptation is for you to have something within your reach and not have the permission to take it. When I read the temptation of Adam and Eve, I see exactly that that was what happened. They had some things that were within their reach but which God didn’t give them the permission to take. That is the real temptation; that is a test of character.

It took me a long time to forgive myself because my weakness and my indiscipline showed up through this experience that I had with my friend’s money. And it became very difficult for me to pay him. It put my parents under pressure because eventually when they got to know, even they could not afford to give me the money for some time. Of course, they understood with me a little bit because they had not been able to send me pocket money. However, that was no excuse whatsoever for me to spend somebody else’s money without the person’s permission.

There are many excuses that we give ourselves especially when it comes to the issue of money. We have those excuses that seem to be genuine for breaking the rules. The truth is, if you don’t have character, you don’t have anything.

I remember the words of the great evangelist, Billy Graham. He said, “When wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. But when character is lost, all is lost.” Don’t lose your character in the bid to make some small amount of money. Now having discipline with respect to money, being able to see money without spending it has put me in good stead. That is why I have now come to realize that if I cannot look at my own money without spending it, if I can’t hold myself back, I can never become rich, whatever the amount of money I may get. It is not even about other people now. I have learnt through knowledge that if I spend everything, I will become broke or poor.

We never rise beyond the level of our knowledge, which is why you must keep reading. Wisdom is knowing what the consequence of an action will be before you take that action. When you know the consequence, it helps you to know which action to take. So today I am able to develop discipline in my finances simply because I know the consequences of spending everything. I have discovered the essence of discipline in the management of money.

  LESSON #4

Location Won’t Change Who You Are

“Archbishop Benson Idahosa once said that a lizard in Nigeria will not become a crocodile in America. He was trying to address a mindset that many of us in the third world have. We say that if only we could go to the western nations, if only we could go to the countries that look so beautiful in the movies and in the magazines, then our lives would change. That is a big lie!”

Archbishop Benson Idahosa once said that a lizard in Nigeria will not become a crocodile in America. He was trying to address a mindset that many of us in the third world have. We say that if only we could go to the western nations, if only we could go to the countries that look so beautiful in the movies and in the magazines, then our lives would change. There are many who assume that if they could just land at the airport, they would just change instantly. Their fortunes would change if they arrived in a developed country.

There are many who have acted on that idea and who have been shocked. Why? They got to those places of which they had seen beautiful pictures. May be relations of theirs or even their friends had taken beautiful pictures and sent those pictures to them. When they got to those places they realized you also had to work there before you could make money. You have to give out value before value can come back to you. The principles that govern finances in the country where you are, govern finances in the place where you want to go. Money does not grow on trees there, neither do you pick gold on the streets, the same principles apply.

They realized that without the capacity to solve problems for people, the money won’t come. Without the capacity to offer products and services, the money won’t come. Therefore location won’t change who you are.

Now the lesson; if you really, really want to change your life, change your thinking. You can change your thinking right where you are. There is no where on earth where there is no opportunity as long as there are people around us who have needs in their lives. When we develop the capacity to meet their needs, then we realize that we have the capacity to create wealth and to succeed.

I encourage you; don’t be like the man in the story told by Russell Cornwell in “Acres of Diamonds.” The man sold his farm because somebody told him that in some distant land, there was abundance of diamonds. He sold his farm and went to that distant land. He went up and down the whole country and out of frustration jumped off a bridge and drowned in the river. While he was being frustrated, the person who bought his farm saw this shiny stone by the stream that went through the farm. He took it and discovered it was a diamond. The whole farm was sitting on acres of diamonds.

Right where you are, you are sitting on acres of diamonds. There are phenomenal opportunities around you. I wanted to run away from my country but when my mindset changed and I began to look for opportunities to add value to people’s lives, to identify their needs, I became an asset, no longer a liability to the community. I did not realize that people needed what I had so much. And the more I have committed myself to adding value to people’s lives, all the dreams that I had, cars that I wanted to drive, the places I wanted to go, they have come to pass.

Let me remind you of this lesson, changing your location may not necessarily change who you are.

LESSON #5

Success Always Comes With A Balance

“Zig Ziglar said, I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can't truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles. How true!”

Some people who have been deprived like I was when I was young want to get money by all means. The important thing to them is breaking through financially. However, I have discovered it is one of the tricks life plays on us. When we are deprived of something, we tend to over value the importance of that thing in our lives to the point where we can throw our lives out of balance.

If you make all the money in the world but in the process you break your health, how will you enjoy the money when your health is broken? Success must therefore come with a balance. This is my own story.

When I began to speak, I would get invitations all over the place every day. I would go out speaking and most of these invitations were in the evening. Our children were very young; three year old, and one year old. By the time I would be back from my outing, they would be asleep. Next morning, I would have to go to work. I could not spend time with the children, not to talk of my lovely wife. My heart missed out on something. At first, I tried to avoid the feeling and that inner voice. I justified what I was doing. The money I was getting from where I was going was what we used to sustain the family. I had to work, I was a man. So I justified it.

But there was a big gap in my heart. I remembered my own childhood. How my parents would be there in the evenings and told us stories. We would share together and eat together. I asked myself a question, “What memories would these children have when they grow up?” My heart missed out seriously on something. Then it got to a point where I made up my mind. I realized that the children will not be young forever. I realized that at that point in time they were the ones seeking for my attention but not long from then, they would leave the house. They would have new friends and I might be the one who would begin to pursue them and try to get their attention.

I made a hard choice to turn down most of those invitations so I could spend time with my family. I decided to prioritize my family. I decided to put my life in a balance. I discovered that whenever I set my goals at the beginning of the year, the only written goals that I set were for my job. I did not have any written goal for the family; I did not even have for my health.

So I began to set my goals on all areas. I would set goals first for my spiritual life; my prayer life, how I would read the bible and my worship of God. Then I set goals for the family--the birthdays we will celebrate, the wedding anniversary with my wife. I decided to take a week off with my wife every year. We would go some place where nobody knows us and spend the time together, giving her full attention. I decided we were going to have family vacations once every year, three or four weeks, a time for family bonding.

It was not because I had a lot of money to spend. I did not have enough money. I remember still very clearly our first trip out of Africa, only my wife and myself. We had no idea where to get the money for the ticket from.

We had no idea where to get spending money from but the money came. I discovered, if you don’t have values, you won’t have value. True success comes with a balance. So I set goals for my spiritual life, for my family, for my career, for my finances and for my health. True success comes with a balance.

LESSON #6

Accept People The Way They Are

“Mike Murdock once said that when two people are doing the same thing or acting the same way, one of them is irrelevant! God does not have a duplicating machine. He fashioned everyone of us differently. ”

I will tell you how I came about this. When I was growing up I had issues with my brother. I am just one year ten months older than he is. When we became teenagers he developed a physical build that is bigger than mine. I did not quite realize it at that time but we are different. I am quiet. I am introverted. He is friendly, sociable, and extroverted.

In a sense I began to resent him. I did not like his style; I did not like his approach. I felt like he was too flimsy. I felt that he was cracking jokes with too many people; I felt that people would not respect him. I thought that my way was the best way as a thinker and a planner. One day I asked him a question. I said, “Look, you don’t seem too serious about life. Don’t you think that a young man needs to be serious about his life?”

Well, I thank God that I read a book, “Transformed Temperaments” by Tim LaHaye. He wrote that people have different temperaments. You have introverts, you have super introverts. You have extroverts, you have super extroverts. He showed the strengths of each temperament and also the weaknesses of each temperament.

It was a revelation to me because for once I could see the strength of my brother’s temperament. I could then see that where I was weak was where he was strong. My respect for him swelled, I was humbled. So my way was not the only way.

I have learnt therefore that people are designed with different personality traits, with different temperaments. Your way of seeing things is not the only way of seeing things. Therefore we should not compete with other people; rather we should complete them and let them complete us. Because where we are weak is where they are strong, where they are weak is where we are strong.

I have learnt also that team work really, really helps. We get better when we work together with others.

I want to encourage you to accept your spouse because in marriage, usually, opposites attract. Interestingly, it is when you see what you don’t have in someone else that attraction really happens very quickly. If we are not careful, when we get to live together in the same house, the very things that attracted us begin to irritate us because we get them in quantities higher than we did when we were not living together.

If you are quiet, the other person, your spouse, speaks or talks. That attracted you in the first place because you had someone who could talk. What attracted you to the person was because you could keep quiet while the person did all the talking. But when you live together in the same house, maybe the talk may become too much and you can begin to resent it. We must learn to accept other people the way they are.

We never succeed in building relationships when we try to force people to become exactly like us. In any case, they become useless to us if they become exactly like us. One of us is enough. Accept other people the way they are.

LESSON #7

You Need Your Body to Achieve Your Goals

“Someone once remarked that he wouldn’t want to become the wealthiest man on the hospital bed or in the graveyard. You need sound health to achieve God’s purpose for your life. ”

I remember a few years ago when a member of the church where I pastor, a medical doctor, asked to speak with me. He said he was feeling uncomfortable the way I was looking and the way he felt I was running my life and my body. He asked, “When was the last time you had a full medical checkup?” I said, “Oh, it was when I was in school and it was a requirement for registration.” He said, “You need to check your health regularly. I want to check you up, it will be free. I want to run a test on you.” He did. Then he said, “I’ve seen something I’m not happy about. You don’t eat. You’re not eating enough. It is showing in your liver. Tell me, what’s your eating pattern like?” I said, “Well, I don’t like to eat breakfast. When we got married, my wife would prepare the breakfast but I would be in so much of a hurry I would not eat it. When she had done that for some weeks, she got tired and frustrated and she stopped the breakfast. I would tell myself that I would eat lunch but in the office I would get so busy running meetings, talking to people that I would forget to eat. Therefore, it was after I had closed work in the evenings that I ate, most days.”

The doctor screamed, “That’s how you live your life the average day? That’s terrible, that’s dangerous. Your body has nothing; no nutrient to use and you do such an intense job.” Then he asked, “Do you drink water in the course of the day?” I said, “No, I drink water only when I eat my meals.” He said, “Oh my God, you can’t afford to do that.” He said to me, “You need to drink at least eight glasses of water every day.” He said, “Actually, you need to drink those eight glasses before twelve noon in the afternoon, if you want to get the best results. In fact, when you wake up in the morning, that’s the first thing you are supposed to do. Take as much as possible.” Then he bought me loads of bottled water and said, “I’m buying these to encourage you, put it within your reach. Put it in the office where you can see it.” And then he encouraged me to take breakfast.

A short while after that my father-in-law who is a Professor of Chemistry, now retired, asked me about my meal patterns. He asked, “Do you use multivitamins?” I said, “Yes I do.” He said, “When do you take it?” I said, “Oh, I take it in the evening because the only meal that I take is dinner.” He said, “Why are you wasting your money? It’s supposed to give you energy to burn, give you the nutrients for your body to use in the course of the day. You should take it with your breakfast.” I said, “Oh, I ‘m always so much in a hurry I don’t have time for breakfast.” He said, “But that’s the most important meal of your day. Even if it’s two slices of bread, you need something for your body to burn. You need to take breakfast. It’s going to catch up with you if you don’t. And when you take the breakfast, take your multivitamins.” So I began to take breakfast seriously.

I began to have breakfast and I found out it tremendously improved my

health. I was literally running on overdrive, burning my reserves, working so hard during the day and eating only dinner. I began to check my health, at least once every year. And I have felt healthy for several years. Before, my immune system was so fragile, after pushing myself for a few months I would just breakdown and find myself on the bed. That has not been my experience again for years. When the doctors check me now, they ask, “How are you doing it? Blood pressure perfect, your heart beating right.” I think it is because I took good advice. Now when I wake up in the morning, after brushing, I take as much water as I can. It helps to flush my system and to clean out the toxins in my body. I eat breakfast when I am not on a fast. I run annual medical checkup and of course rest.

There is a need to take a break once in a while. That is why I take vacations a few times during the year. You know what I discovered? I discovered that during vacation when I am not exerting myself, I get some of the most innovative and creative ideas that I put into my work.

So this is one of the greatest lessons that life has taught me. You need your body to achieve your goals. However lofty your dreams may be, if you breakdown your health, you’ll have nothing else to do. The health will become your vision. The health will become your preoccupation; you won’t be able to achieve anything. Just a slight change of attitude, trying to eat a balanced diet and checking your health regularly, can go a long way in keeping you alive and long enough to see the fulfillment of all your dreams.

And I pray that your dreams, your wildest dreams will come to pass. I hope that these life lessons have been a blessing to you. I hope that my mistakes will help you to succeed faster than I succeeded.

Avoid the mistakes that I made. They say experience is the best teacher but someone added, as long as it is not your own experience.

I pray that you will succeed faster than I have.