Readers Lead, Leaders Read.
“When our six children were young, suppertime was constantly being interrupted by neighborhood children ringing the bell, wanting one child or another to come out and play. Finally, we had had enough. We hung a sign on the front door that read: “We are eating dinner. Come back later”. That night we sat down to what we thought would be a pleasant, uninterrupted meal. But no sooner had we begun dinner than the doorbell rang.
At the front door stood the five-year-old from across the street. He looked up at us and said, “I just want to know what the sign says”
Leaders are readers and readers turn leaders. Reading is to the mind, what exercise is to the body. Management guru Peter Drucker once said, your career success and salary over a lifetime will be more directly related to your writing and speaking skills than to any technical expertise you have. Let me add that the quality of both your writing and speaking skills will be directly proportional to your reading habit. The more and wide you read, the more and sharp your writing and speaking abilities get honed.
‘Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never gains its original dimensions’, said Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ideas don’t come from thin air. They germinate from the knowledge that you garner, among other things, by reading, which is a major source of learning. The need of the human mind is to grow and develop, and reading is feeding the mind. Creative muscles get their nutrition when you read.
A U.S team traveled to Japan in the 1980s to study the production system of Toyota and the innovative Japanese just-in-time concept. When the team asked the system’s creator Taiichi Ohno about what inspired his thinking, he laughed and said: “I learned it all from Henry Ford’s book”. He was referring to ‘Today and Tomorrow’, written by Ford in 1926 and published by Doubleday. And the Americans went all the way to Japan to learn about their own fellow citizen’s idea published some sixty years back, and more than three decades after his death!
It is said that outside of the Bible, Emerson, and Shakespeare, very little has been written or expressed that’s original (that said, let me add that there are few parallels to the original oriental wisdom pervading the ancient Indian scriptures like the Vedas, Upanishads, and the epics, which are a cornucopia of eternal knowledge of the universe and the existence). If you’re a regular reader of self-help books, you would know that there are hundreds of different ways of saying the same old thing. Cross-pollination of ideas can produce hybrid seeds that would spurt, grow, and bear fruits and flowers of varied hues and colors that would appeal to people of different tastes.
The point I want to stress here is that we need to spend time daily to explore the means of widening the horizon of our knowledge, by reading books, listening to podcasts, watching educational videos, etc. When we do it regularly, slowly but surely, we’ll internalize the mindset and attitude of the winners.
Knowledge is not power
The old saying isn’t correct. Knowledge is only potential power. Only when it’s applied will it become kinetic. Do you think that nobody in America had read the ideas Ford described in Today and Tomorrow for over six decades until the Japanese drew their attention to them? Thousands and thousands of people would have read the book. Just read, that’s all. The ideas therein were not registered in the minds of anybody. And that made all the difference.
What is in it for me, then? Read for a purpose. Practice what you learn. Constantly reinforce the learning and build up your repertoire so that the learning leads to earning.
Stay informed, stay equipped, and stay ahead.
Dr. K R S Nair
