Be careful what you call disability

By Tope Popoola

An organisation that sold Bibles put out an advert for sales representatives. Many people with intimidating academic credentials in sales and marketing applied for the job. The brief? They were to sell Bibles and earn a mouthwatering commission on each copy sold. After one week of canvassing, the professional salesmen were only able to sell a handful. The one who recorded the highest number of sales had barely sold 20 copies.

A few days thereafter, a stutterer with no qualifications at all passed by the office, saw the advert and decided to apply for one of the positions available. The top Managers of the company who interviewed him did not give him much of a chance. In fact, they only interviewed him because they did not want to be accused of bias and prejudice.

Not wanting to offend him and having nothing to lose (he would only be paid commission on Bibles sold). They gave him five Bibles to sell. Within an hour, he was back with the money for the Bibles and requested for more. By the end of that day, he had sold almost 50 Bibles, more than double the record of the best salesman for the first week! In one week, he had single-handedly sold over 300 bibles. In one month, he had sold more Bibles than the entire sales team had done in the preceding six months.

By now, everyone was curious to know the magic behind this feat. At one of the weekly sales review meetings, the presiding Manager looked at him and pointedly said, “On behalf of the Management, I want to congratulate you on this unprecedented achievement. To be honest with you, if it wasn’t for the fact that you brought the correct amount of money back each time you took Bibles out, I would have accused you of dumping our Bibles somewhere. Would you be kind enough to share with the rest of the sales team the secret behind your huge success?

Struggling ever so hard to put his words together, the stutterer replied, “Secreeeeet? Nnnnnnooo seccrreet aaaaaat aall. I just wwwwwalk to peoples’ dddddoor, knock and whenever anyone came totototo ansssswer the door, I asked them, ‘Wwwwwwould you llllllllllllllike to buy a Bbbbbible or would you like mmmmme to rrrrreeeeeead it to you?”

Lesson? There is ability in disability. Inside every weakness is a hidden strength awaiting discovery. Is there any area of your life where you feel so inadequate? Think again, there may be something you are overlooking. There are two young men who have made a fortune as motivational speakers.

John Foppe (www.visionaryvelocity.com) was born without arms but he grew up training himself to use his feet to do everything that those with arms would do. Not only that, he is a Consultant to Fortune 500 organizations and Life Coach to many corporate executives. The other, Nick Vujicik (www.lifewithoutlimbs.org) was born without any of the limbs. What he has as semblance of a leg is the length of a duck’s tail. His credo,

“No hands, no legs, no worries”! Today, both of them travel round the world speaking to huge audiences about how a man can turn adversity to advantage. There is no reason to give up on yourself. If you think that you are so incapacitated that you cannot do a whole lot of things that other people do, just think about that one thing that you can do that others cannot. Here in Nigeria, a young man named Akinrolabu as an undergraduate, had a health condition that left him paralyzed and confined to a wheelchair for life.

While in the hospital, he learnt to paint with his mouth. Before his demise recently, he acquired fame and fortune through this rare ability. Nigeria’s two midget actors, Aki and Pawpaw, earn some of the highest fees in Nollywood. Rolake Odetoyinbo-Nwagwu was unknown until she overcame the stigma of being HIV-positive. Since she started her crusade, she has met and positively affected more people than when she was “normal”.

Stop the pity party and come out of your shell. There is a ‘can do’ in you. It doesn’t matter what you had been made to believe to the contrary. That one ‘can do’ is God’s answer to all the ‘can’t do’s’ that you have allowed the world to programme into you.The truly disabled person is the one who cripples himself with excuses. Simply put, your best excuse is your greatest disability. Conquer it and you will find out that you can take on any mountain.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!