Part 1 of this essay concluded on a note of growing up seeing my dad reading for spiritual growth and for pleasure. The discussion continues… What are you reading now? This question came up during the week in one of the platforms the article was posted. How about the Millennials’ argument that books as we know them now are fading away? I’m still waiting breathlessly for those empirical evidences I was promised. Whenever some teenage friends raise this poser every now and then, I keep assuring them as confidently as possible that the format in which you get your books matters less, just read! Yes, read good books for that matter. Please know this for sure, book as we know it now will go through various phases and forms, reinvent itself and will remain. In the meantime, go get your books in any form and format whatsoever, e-books, Kindle, Google, good old paperback or hard cover, etc.
Also during the week, a part of my constituency in the Human Resources, Learning and Talent Development space, the NITAD Lagos platform had a robust discussion on the first part. One of us had fired off the discussion by appreciating the piece and looking forward to the concluding part and hoping it would do the magic of helping to read and not being bored. This was followed by a thumb up from the State Chairman, Benson Aruna who encouraged the first respondent above to make up his/her mind to be a reader and just read for a start! He immediately went ahead to set a target of one book a week. Personally, I think that’s a tall order for a beginner, except for some small books and book summaries. Then came the raising of the bar by Tokunbo Smith who posited that just reading is not enough but learning and gaining something from your reading, and utilising such gains to better your life and the lives of those around you. He concluded by saying that “destroying a nation does not require the use of atomic bombs or the use of long range missiles, it only requires the lowering of the quality of education…(and may I add, lack of books) and training in organisations.” Reading to add value to self and others. Need I say more? Thank you everyone for reading and discussing.
Essentially, this title is dedicated to reading, keeping at it, enjoying it (and not enduring it), and making progress with it. As Nike, the sportswear giant would say, just do it! Read, do your jottings with the accompanying underlining and book painting (as long as the book is yours) as you read on. Rome wasn’t built in a day, so also is developing your reading habit and stockpiling of quality literature. It is heart-warming and quite encouraging to say here that our on-line/e-library has grown in leaps and bounds over the years, stocked with subscribed book summaries and video clips from Soundview Executive Book Summaries and lots of Kindle books from Amazon. I owe this development to two friends and professional colleagues who introduced me to the Soundview summaries years ago. At first, they would loan me their copies to read. That was in the days of hard copies by post and special deliveries. I later subscribed directly to the CD and the electronic format. I sincerely appreciate Dr. Toyin Bankole and Dr. Kayode Ogungbuyi, KABO, a past president of NITAD. They were at the time Divisional HR Heads in BAGCO and Cadbury respectively, and I just left my second bank job as a senior manager, HR to start a career in HR consulting. Thank you guys.
The question of what are you reading now was kind of personal, directed at me. This column is not about me. If however there be any consolation or encouragement, let me respond as modestly as possible. I just finished the Comedian Trevor Noah’s book: “Born A Crime” which our daughter bought for me when she visited California for her cousin’s wedding last year. By the way, my reading habit may not be your usual kind. There are times I read three to four books simultaneously. I’m currently reading Adharanand Finn’s “Running with the Kenyans: Discovering the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth”. At this time also, I’m going through the 2015 edition of HBR’s “10 Must Reads On Emotional Intelligence”. A book we bought in commemoration and graduation celebration of our daughter’s First Class Honours degree in Pharmacy.
There is also a Kindle book, “A Little History of Science” I’m reading. In the “Little Histories” series you can read the beginning and the development of almost anything under the sun. We bought the Kindle edition because it was a recommended text for one of the subjects in our son’s undergraduate course in Computer Science. In solidarity, I ordered for the book to read along with him as a strategy to cheer him on. It turned out to be a massive education for me. For instance, I got to know that “India gave us our numbers and a love of mathematics. From China came paper and gunpowder, and that indispensable gadget for navigation: the compass… It is from India, via the Middle East, that we have the numbers we call ‘Arabic’: the familiar 1, 2, 3 and so forth. The idea of ‘zero’ first came from India, too.” In addition to this, a few days ago my wife ‘exhumed’ Jim Collins’ “How the Mighty Fall”, a small quick-read published during the depression of 2008/9 which I once read through in a long flight from Toronto to Lagos and I’m queuing up to read again once my wife drops it. I remember him warning against hubris in that book.
Sustaining an enduring reading lifestyle requires deliberate cultivation, and one needs encouragers all the way. It is an association of like minds. Iron sharpens iron, so the saying goes. You want to be a reader, make friends of readers. Do not break the chain, let’s pass on the baton to our children, hand-in-hand let’s take the Millennial and Gen 2020 in our circles of influence along. I have had encouragers, and I have also deliberately set out to encourage people. Some of my favourite tourist attractions are bookshops and university libraries. When I travel and/or go shopping, an essential port of call for me are bookshops and libraries. An icing on the cake is when there is a sign at the door which reads, “We are relocating” or “Closing” and “All books to go”. Then you see all books going for seven or ten dollars, and at times five pounds each! That’s a good time to get some three to four books for the price of one. I recently visited the Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript library. Awesome! You would love to sit down and read.
Another beautiful way to gauge your reading habit is to check the way you spend your day. One of the ways I have tested and found useful in improving my reading habit is making reading part of my daily chores. Some years ago, I developed a 24-hour personal accountability chart that helps me in accounting for my twenty four hours, and thus improving my personal effectiveness, workplace relationships and home-front usefulness. The good thing is we all have a twenty-four hour time wallet, no more no less. A joke I love to crack a lot is that whoever has more than twenty four hours or whosoever can’t effectively utilise his own twenty four hours should please ‘dash’, borrow, or loan me a part thereof because my own twenty-four-hour wallet is grossly not enough for me. In the 24-Hour Personal Accountability matrix, there are ‘fixed’ activities like work, sleep, commuting taking the chunk of your twenty four hours. However, from what is left, or what you may chip from your sleep/recreation time, there must be provision for library or reading time. For a start, it could just be an hour. In a nutshell, at the end of each day/week, while rendering account of how you spent your daily twenty four hours, if there are no minutes or hours allocated to reading or library as the case may be, you are just wasting away, and lagging behind.
As a developed habit, I do not go for my scheduled appointments without at least a book, a book summary or the device with my Kindle library. I get to my appointments early, and I read while waiting. Some airports have long and winding arrival queues. I also get to the airport early for my flights. I read to while away time. Meanwhile the debate between gold and books which I alluded to last week is still ongoing. Whenever, the slide is projected, you feel the excitement and the readiness for a heated debate immediately starting with some audible murmuring, and you see hand shooting up simultaneously with some funny minority laughter, the kind you hear the first time you are telling a group of ‘Area Boys’ to go work or else starve to death. Main opposition to this quote: “if you drop a book and gold, pick the book first and then the gold” are those who want quick money, they want it now, right now. They don’t believe in delayed gratification. They are those who think they are wise – they are thinking someone else would pick the gold while they are picking the book first. What they fail to see is that in the books are several of the gold, ways to make more of such gold, and things better than gold, for instance, wisdom.
Epilogue – The Lost Treasure of the ‘Postcard’: I’m writing about this because the situation has not changed. Sometime ago, our eldest child came home and needed to buy a postcard. To my utter amusement, amazement and dismay, we searched major outlets in Lagos and we could not get postcard. Even more shocking, the Generation Y/Millennials I spoke with looked so confused on what a postcard is. What a lost treasure! Growing up, postcards were used for so many things – for the joy of posting a letter to a friend, for wooing ‘your babe’, for show-casing our nation’s landmarks and heritage, etc. Before we blame the Government on this one also, the Post Offices are still working, may be the personnel only lack creativity and business acumen. We eventually met our child’s need by designing and printing postcards in the office. Since then I try buying my postcards from the same bookshops I buy books, pack them with my books for future use.
To be continued…
Acknowledgement/Sources of Resources for this article:
- Clip arts from the Internet for embelishment.
- A compendium of over 25 years of manuscripts of my thesis and lecture series in talent management and development (unpublished yet)
- William Bynum: A Little History of Science, Yale University Press, 2012. press@yale.edu
- BezaleelConsulting Group Library bezaleelconsultingrw.com