“It does not matter how little or how much you have; it is what you do with what you have been given that matters.” - Kris Vallotton, Poverty, Riches and Wealth: Moving From a Life of Lack into True Kingdom Abundance
When I first read this excerpt from this book, I thought of none other than Josh Jacobs. Other names that popped into my head later on were the likes of Victor Cruz and Manny Pacquiao.
Like the latter names, Jacobs grew up with a rough childhood and at one point was even homeless. "I've experienced things that could have turned differently for me," Jacobs says. "I have friends right now—people I was cool with and played sports with—serving murder and burglary charges. Where I'm from, it's easy to get in trouble.”
Josh Jacobs is the current starting Running Back for the Las Vegas Raiders, who drafted him out of Alabama in the first round of the 2019 NFL draft. Apparently, he did not let the hand that he was dealt define his path moving forward.
So what did he do with what he was given? This is a question I want us to let marinade as we dig a bit further. We’ll circle back to this.
First, picture a glass pickle jar filled with pickles and water. It’s a full jar, you can’t fit anymore in it. If you were to try and stuff more in there, they simply wont fit. The water will begin to pour over and the pickles will be so jammed in there that they’ll just get stuck. This pickle jar has reached its capacity.
And that’s how we can get in our own personal lives.
Our pickle jar is full. We have reached our capacity and there’s no way we can put anymore into it. We must figure out a way to grow our capacity in order to effectively and efficiently fit what we are being given. But how exactly can we grow our capacity? It’s not like glass can change its shape. The question that must be asked in order for us to see breakthrough is this:
What are the invisible glass walls that are limiting your capacity?
There are two things that need to be touched on here for us to fully understand how to do so.
Let’s begin with the things that can limit our capacity. An example that shows us what I’m talking about here are lottery winners. In fact, people who win a million or more in the lottery end up in worse financial state than they were before they won. People who win the lottery become richer on the outside than the capacity for wealth that they carry within. Ultimately, this creates a lack of sustainability. They just don’t know what to do with all of the extra that is spewing out of their glass jar. They will spend it on mindless jargon that they’ve “always wanted”; new cars, new house… and before they know it, they’re right back where they were, if not worse.
Emphatically, we continue to fall in the same trap with money. We may make more money with a new job, but we end up buying more things leaving us still living check to check. This is where Jocko’s idea of discipline equals freedom comes into play which I’ve spoken on in previous episodes. We may have a higher income, but then we increase our way of living and we still find ourselves trying to dig out of the same hole we were in before.
Let’s move onto the second thing we need to understand, and this is where we learn how exactly we grow our capacity. To put it simply, risk expands our capacity. “Risk expands our capacity for wealth. Without risk, we atrophy in apathy or we wither in fear. In fact, Jesus called the servants who increased their wealth faithful and called the one who refused to take risks lazy and wicked. It is important to understand that it is not financial profit that increases our personal capacity; instead, it is faithfulness to work hard and invest wisely,” says Kris Vallotton, referring to the story in Matthew 25:14-28.
That bears repeating: it is not financial profit that increases our capacity, but a faithfulness to work hard and invest wisely.
So, a few questions here: What are you faithful with? Are you faithful with your money? Faithful to your work? Faithful to spend time with your family? Conversely, are you faithful in things that can be a waste of time that disguise themselves as hobbies? Things like video games? Binge watching your favorite shows on the boob tube? How about this: do you catch yourself wasting time away on instagram/social media with endless scrolling?
Now I must add, I do play video games. I grew up with them, how could I not play them? And there are definitely shows that I like to keep up with. Additionally, I have caught my self in the continually spinning wheel of instagram scrolling. These things will happen and I understand that, and that’s okay. But it’s when these things consume you and your time that they become an issue.
Continuing, how do you invest? Do you invest monetarily? That’s awesome. I encourage it. How do you invest your time? With your kids/family? With your spouse? (I’m talking about some date nights and investing into your marriage with some mono y mono). With friends? The correlation here is obvious: we invest time and effort into things we are faithful in. Nevertheless, taking calculated risks with our investments expands our own capacity for whatever kind of wealth we are looking for whether it be monetary wealth, family/friend wealth, or other kinds of wealth.
Let’s wrap it up here with a quote from Thomas Aquinas: “If the highest aim of the captain were to preserve his ship, he would keep it in port forever”. In other words, if that captain were to want to make an impact, a difference, to make history, he must move that ship forward and take a risk, because wealth requires risk! Growing our capacity requires risk! Staying comfortably in the port where you can’t get your ship wet or take on a few storms is not going to get you where you want to be!
In conclusion, this is what I always like to ask my listeners and readers: what are you going to do about it? How are you going to break through those invisible glass walls of the pickle jar we call your capacity? Here’s a few ways we can begin to identify those invisible glass walls:
What is your biggest complaint that you have about yourself? Not enough time? Not enough income? Not enough smarts? How will you break through those barriers?
What calculated risk can you take that can grow your own personal capacity? We must identify how we can grow our own personal capacity, so we can reach and grab everything that is out there for us.
Taking risks and getting out of our comfort zone is the most effective way we can grow our own personal capacity, allowing us to take advantage of opportunities and be completely prepared for the blessings that God is ready to give us.