The weaponry of reading

Ignorance is costly. When you see a nation sitting on gold yet walking shamelessly in poverty, you get to realize there’s nothing as expensive as ignorance. Ignorance is the absence of knowledge. It is what makes you thirst in the abundance of water.

You are where you are today because of how much you know and you’ll be where you desire to be tomorrow because how much you’ll take pain to know.

Information is a weapon. In war, how much you know about your enemy determines your chance of victory. Being armed is to be informed!

How much one knows reveals how armed they are. How well informed a people are will go a long way to define how well they live. Information is always an advantage. The devil deceived Adam and Eve in the Eden garden because of how well informed it was. It, however, couldn’t deceive Jesus after His fast because He was better informed. Life is a war of information. The most informed wins!

Indeed, the rich and poor [nations] are separated by information. The rich know something the poor are yet to. Good or bad management of resources is courtesy information. How much knowledge one has about a product will tell how well they can maximize its essence. The poor state of Africa, unfortunately, is due to how poorly informed our leaders are!

In our world today, information is not too hard to get. We are exposed each day to vital information all across the globe. All we have to do is just to read. In fact, sometimes, one’s breakthrough is only a click away.

Reading is so important to our development that it can’t be overlooked. As a nation, we need to be informed. As individuals, our personal development is a learning process which begins with reading. What we need to get to where we need to be is information. Otherwise speaking, reading is the transportation means to our dreams.

It is such a wonder when people who have not cultivated a culture of reading desire to do big things. Thing is, in life, the most important things are barely taught in class. You experience some and read about the rest. Reading is a pleasurable experience that dares us to achieve great things.

Reading is a habit. Cultivate it. It is a thirst everyone should have? a thirst for great knowledge? both young and old. When we imbibe this culture into our kids, they grow up to be great minds. They grow up with a large expanse of imagination. A reading chap and a non-reading one live in two different worlds!

When a person is exposed to great reading materials, it molds their mind. Truth is, when we expose a crop of people to amazing content for a long period of time, they are able to perceive things differently from those who have not. Reading molds the mind because it is diet. Every health-conscious person knows how important diet is to them.

Same with the mind. Reading is what feeds it.

Reading is the experience that gives one the opportunity to travel everywhere with and in their minds. Reading about a vivid description of say, London, gives one a feel of how the place looks like. If anyone would be denied of any privilege, at least, it should not be the travel experience of reading.

As a young boy, reading about the lives and achievements of so many great people did not only inspire me to work hard. It also gave me that rare opportunity to walk in their shoes for a while… in my mind.

When you get immersed in the stories of how some great lives once walked this earth’s surface, you are able to have a taste of these lives, too. Cowards die many times before their death and readers live many lives before their death! The lifeline to our existence in this information age is to read; reading widely. We can only grow as much as we know.

The depth of our information points to the height of our elevation in life. Life is ruled by people who know something others don’t know. Between a leader and a follower is an information chasm.

Steve Jobs was able to carve out his ingenuity because of the information he had. Every great person was armed with some kind of knowledge they took pain to acquire on their own. Invest in knowledge. Take pain to know. Acquiring knowledge is expensive but not acquiring it at all is even more expensive. What you know becomes a weapon. What you don’t know becomes a weakness. Spend time seeking after information. What makes a man is not the weight of his muscles but the depth of his mind. Mind power is always a master of manpower. Poverty is due to information. Riches is due to information, too. Each day, we choose our kind of information and this ends us either on the path of poverty or riches.

When it has all been said and done, the kind of information we are armed with will determine our choices and our choices will determine our actions. In the end, we become our actions and our actions become us.

On The Mirror’s 65th anniversary, we all should make a resolution to read more, especially as a family. We can set reading targets as a family and, sometimes, even go on a reading challenge. There are many activities that bring a family together and one of such is corporate reading.

The more we read, the stronger our bond becomes as a family. The more our minds are fed, the healthier we will be as a family. There is power in reading because it is a weapon. It is a weapon we must, as a family, use to conquer ignorance. Information is an advantage. Let’s take advantage of information. Thank you for reading this newspaper always and thank you for reading this column, too. You are the reason we are inspired to write and read more. Cheers!

The writer is a playwright and Chief Scribe of Scribe Communications, an Accra-based writing company (www.scribecommltd.com).