Know the economic and political structures of the world: read widely

Itai Chapunza
Genesis 12 verse 10
NOW there was a famine in the land, and Abraham went down to Egypt to live there for a while because the famine was severe. As he was about to enter Egypt, he said to his wife Sarai, “I know what a beautiful woman you are. When the Egyptians see you, they will say, ‘This is his wife.’ Then they will kill me but will let you live. Say you are my sister, so that I will be treated well for your sake and my life will be spared because of you.”

Abraham had a good knowledge of the way the Egyptians behaved. He knew that they would kill him if they discovered that the beautiful lady was his wife so that Pharaoh could have her. So out of knowledge he made a choice that seemed harsh but would benefit both of them in the near future. This choice to say Sarah was his sister, not his wife Abraham made because he may have taken time to learn about the Egyptians. It is also likely that Abraham was a very wide reader and may have been a very keen man to learn new things. We can assume this by the way he settled in Egypt that showed he had previously come across knowledge and understanding of how the Egyptians lived. This attribute did not only save his life in Egypt but was also a door to establish his business there with no resistance. This trait of acquiring knowledge was practised by many great leaders in history through reading and travelling and they achieved great things.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and military theorist. A major figure of the Cuban Revolution, his stylised visage has become a ubiquitous counter-cultural symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular culture.

What most of his followers may not have realised about Guevara is that he was a great reader. He searched for knowledge of things by reading and travelling his country and the world. With this love for books and collection of information he did not only acquire knowledge of the area in which he lived and the systems that functioned within it. He also was able to obtain a doctorate in medicine. He was a medical doctor by profession and he wrote various books that illustrate his insight of how things functioned. He was a man with a very rounded perspective of the world.

Ernesto “Che” Guevara performed a lot of duties and had an upper hand on a lot of issues because he was a man that always sought information. Following the Cuban Revolution, Guevara performed a number of key roles in the new government.

These included reviewing the appeals and firing squads for those convicted of war crimes during the revolutionary tribunals, instituting agrarian land reform as minister of industries, helping spearhead a successful nationwide literacy campaign, serving as both national bank president and instructional director for Cuba’s armed forces, and travelling the globe as a diplomat on behalf of Cuban socialism. Such positions also allowed him to play a central role in training the militia forces who repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and bringing the Soviet nuclear-armed ballistic missiles to Cuba which precipitated the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

Additionally, he was a prolific writer and diarist, composing a seminal manual on guerrilla warfare, along with a best-selling memoir about his youthful continental motorcycle journey. His experiences and studying of Marxism-Leninism led him to posit that the Third World’s underdevelopment and dependence was an intrinsic result of imperialism, neo-colonialism, and monopoly capitalism, with the only remedy being proletarian internationalism and world revolution. Guevara left Cuba in 1965 to foment revolution abroad, first unsuccessfully in Congo-Kinshasa and later in Bolivia, where he was captured by CIA-assisted Bolivian forces and summarily executed.

It is very important to always have a book you are reading, more like work in progress. This is because all the things you choose in your life are directly influenced by what you know. So the more you know the better informed your decisions can be.

We are actually a sum total of what we know.

With the way the world has evolved it is very easy to gather knowledge and it is very easy to advance the education you have. You can be involved in distance learning and you can read thousands of books online. You also do not have to buy the paper to know the news every morning. Its important to spend your time and money on books and reading information. You can actually develop a library with thousands of books by simply storing the data in a cloud account. This makes it available to you no matter which nation you travel to and the quantity stored is limitless. Thus no matter how many times you change your phone or laptop or whatever reading device, the books still remain. I have been told many times that great leaders are great readers. This has proven to be very true because if you trace back in history, all the outstanding men have been book worms.

Another activity with the same effect is travelling to new places. Somehow this has a way of unlocking new ideas and showing you things you previously had no idea could be done. Conversation with many business leaders will almost always wind up at an idea coming while travelling somewhere. So its important to travel to other nations. This is because when you travel you interact with other cultures and you will be surprised at what you will learn that may either help you immediately or in the future. Before I went to Zambia a lot of ideas had never hit me.

One of the simplest examples of ideas that hit me is the realisation of the superiority of the American dollar. This only came after travelling there and experiencing how people react to one using dollars. Because I could generate a lot of it back home in Zimbabwe this meant I was able to easily establish business in almost any nation of my choosing whose currency was weaker even by the smallest of margins. Another thing that was in me before I began to travel often was flying in a jet seeming like a very far fetched concept. Especially in respect to cost. But travelling a lot showed me that flying was actually very reachable. I was now actually thinking it is possible to develop your own jet company. Many more ideas hit me.

Its important to read very widely and travel very far. It unlocks ideas, answers, new concepts — the list is endless. It is like a secret that is told to all but very few believe.