Ayo Arowolo: How to get the best from every book you read (1)

I am starting a series this week that should bless you if you pay good attention to and make a commitment to implement every nugget you are able to extract from it. I got the secret from a billionaire mentor who has acquired stupendous wealth in this country.

I was in my billionaire house by 7.00p.m that Sunday. There was an instruction that I should wait for him at the beach side. I was there for approximately 15 minutes the time during which his wife and his lawyer joined me, and we had interesting chats together. The lawyer later left to join him in his study. About 10 minutes after that, his executive assistant beckoned that I should come, that “oga” had asked that I come to the study area.

I sat in front of the study, a whole building, waiting for him while he was still having a discussion with his lawyer. The place I was is also close to the beach side. A man was busy fumigating the entire compound with his machine. As I continued with my observation, something told me that I was in the right environment at the right time. I could hear the conversation between my mentor and his lawyer, and I think it was deliberately meant to be so as it was in an area my mentor knew I could do one or two things for him.

I was ushered into his study after about 20 minutes in the balcony. It was a surprising experience. My first wealth coach used to say this: “God was very deliberate and purposeful in everything He created. He gave us two ears, two eyes, two hands, two legs and a mouth because he wants us to listen more, observe more, work more, walk more and talk less. When you observe more, God and the nature He has created minister more to you and give you more instructions that you can apply in life.”

I have taken that as a Golden Rule as I take more time to observe things before I moved. What I had been doing with my mentor was to take my time to observe things about him ever before we start to take things formally. Let me share some of the things I observed about my mentor with you.

First, my mentor is obsessed with books (I hope that is the right description). I used to brag about the fact that I have so many books. That was first challenged when I visited my first wealth coach in his Ikoyi house and I saw the breadth and dimensions of the book collections in his study. It occurred to me I had to brace up. Now, I am seeing something that is beyond description in my billionaire mentor’s house. What I observed is that a whole building has been converted to his study with books and journals of various subjects neatly arranged in big shelves created purposely for them. My mentor  allowed me some time to move around the area.

And now take this one. My mentor showed me a bank guarantee for N40 million which he has just secured to order for 4,000 books from abroad! He had also just recently ordered another set of journals and books worth one-hundred and fifty thousands Pound Sterling. During our conversation, he said before the books arrived, all the books in his shelves would be given away —some to a media house he had just acquired, some to his friends (he has promised to give me some ) and some to his other companies.

That to me was a big surprise. Why would he be disposing of books instead of just adding more collections to them? His response changed my perspectives about knowledge acquisition. “This should not be a surprise to you. This is the way I look at knowledge acquisition. What do you think will happen if a doctor is using expired drugs to treat an ailment? One of two things would happen: it is either he kills his patient or he complicates his ailment. The same thing is applicable to someone reading outdated books and journals. I have observed that the reason our universities are not making progress, the reason our country is gyrating on the same spot is that we don’t have access to current thinking in the relevant area of knowledge. We want to solve current challenges with outdated knowledge. Someone once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.”

My mentor said: “To me, the first sign that you are on the billionaire track is the volume and the currency of the books in your study. It is taken for granted that you cannot achieve any lasting wealth that is not backed by robust intellectual capacity. That is why I would never respect anybody who acquires wealth without a commensurate intellectual capacity. It is a matter of time. That money would vanish. You can go and put it to test yourself. How many people have had songs recorded in their names in the past that you still see around with their wealth today? If you make money from government and you lack intellectual capacity to sustain the wealth, the money would vanish the moment you are out of government”.

“Every true billionaire is an addicted knowledge searcher. Jesus read. Mohammed read. Bill Gates is a reader. Still in his ’80s, Warren Buffet, the world’s richest investor, is a committed reader. If you are a millionaire and you want to climb the billionaire ladder, the first place to start is to beef up your study. Get books on all areas and read them. What I do is to stuff my system with all manner of books and from different areas. I read all the time. The way it works is that when you meditate from time to time, your brain and mind would come alive and produce wealth-creating ideas faster than someone who has no stuff inside. For instance, I am not afraid of challenges because I know that the solution is somewhere in a book. If you want to succeed in your life and in your business, the first step is to beef up your intellectual capacity”.

“When I go out to speak on wealth issues, I usually tell people who say they are jobless to go back to school. If you have obtained a First degree and there is no job, go back for your Master’s and if you have finished the Master’s and still no job, go back for your Ph.D (Doctor of Philosophy). The trick is this: Your Ph.D may not fetch you a job immediately, but it would dramatically improve your ability to reason. And this is a good foundation from where to start wealth acquisition.”

I must say everything he said was from a different perspective than what I was used to.  I was challenged all the same. I asked my mentor to give me the list of 10 books that have made the most impact on him. He rolled out the names off-hand. I have just one of the books in my library. He told me to read a particular one which he said changed his own perspective about wealth so much that he had to travel to the US to locate the author and give him $150,000. I was speechless.

Let us stop here this week. From next week, I will be sharing with you the secrets of profiting from every material you read which I learnt from my millionaire and billionaire friends and which I have applied with dramatic results. I will also give to you a document on how to make the best out of every book you read. And it is FREE. So don’t miss this column for anything.

I can’t wait to catch up with you.

Prosperously yours.

TAKEAWAY

• Take a decision to be a lifetime knowledge searcher and an addicted book reader
• Decide from this month to set a certain per cent of your monthly income aside strictly for buying books and attending seminars
• Read at least one book and a month and implement any insight gained from the book read. Success is guaranteed!