Has this ever happened to you before? Really? I don’t mean the situation where you know your salary will come next week and you run out this week, and have to borrow till you pay back when your salary comes through.

Nor do I mean a period when you lack cash and have friends bail you out once, after which things return to normal. What I’m talking about here is a situation where you run out of money, have no one to ask for it, and have run out of options of what you can do – or sell – to get money!

Selling Personal Assets Can Be Difficult…and Quite Painful

Incidentally, even trying to sell your personal assets is not easy. For those of you who own expensive assets like cars, VCD players, etc and who imagine you can get good prices for them if/when you need cash, let me give you a challenge.

Except you find someone at your income level/status who appreciates the value of the item you wish to sell (the item being still relatively new/in good condition might help to “up” the perceived value a bit), you will be amazed at the kinds of prices people you approach will offer. Try going out to find a buyer for any personal assetof reasonable value you have, and test my claim. You’ll see that I’m right.

I know this because I have been there too many times to count! I once patrolled the Ikeja computer village for close to 2 months (in 2003), almost daily, trying to find a buyer for a new CD writer I “unintelligently” bought – for N35,000 – few months after launching my new business.

You may not believe me, but I got offers as low as N5,000! (I should add that I often had to do this with my car’s fuel gauge “hovering” threateningly over the red, empty mark. In fact on 2 occasions, I ran out of fuel on the 3rd Mainland Bridge, while trying to squeeze in one extra client visit!).

Even when I got really desperate to sell at any price, buyer after buyer still withdrew, giving various reasons – some sensible, most ridiculous. This, even though I had the original receipt that proved the item was purchased from that same market!

Robert Kiyosaki wrote in one of his books that once a brand new car is driven out of the seller’s lot, it drops in 2nd –hand value by one-third of it’s original price. I agree one hundred per cent with him. And may I add that in Nigeria, I think the drop in value is even worse, and this applies to virtually ANY product you purchase!

What You Can Do

The chapter in James Cook’s book (Start-up Entrepreneur) titled ‘Winning Ways To Keep You Going” really kept me going at these times. His core message was: Lack of money can be a great test of your endurance. But if you refuse to give up – and keep believing that “all will be well” – things eventually improve.

Adding the lessons from that chapter to the wisdom on handling adversity in Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich”, I was able to successfully weather the storms of that time, and came out stronger.

Many who met with me during the periods of “suffering” I refer to never even suspected that I was in such dire straits. The audience that listened to me at Corona Schools Trust Council could never have suspected I did not have ANY money on me when I came to deliver my 1 hour talk that day in May 2002, after which I was engaged to speak to staff in all their branches!

I even recall mentioning during my talk about how “you cannot tell when some people don’t have money on them, because they continue to act as confidently as they would, when they do have money!” They all laughed when I said that. What they did not know, was that I was doing exactly that right there and then, while speaking to them!

Someone once said “To become successful, pretend you already are!” Thanks to James Cook and Napoleon Hill for writing their books. They helped me understand that such suffering was the necessary ingredient to make me into the successful entrepreneur I wanted to become.

I’ll end by making this important clarification: I’ve not said here that “suffering” of the kind described above (or any kind at all) is an unavoidable requirement for success.

Instead, I’m suggesting that if you happen to be confronted with a similar situation, the ideas proposed above for making the most of it, could prove useful to you 😉