Leaders must read
By Victor Angula |
In the world of today, the best advice I would give to a leader is: you must read.
While in the gone generations great but illiterate leaders used to emerge and take charge of the destinies of their people, in today’s world a leader who does not read is a leader that is highly handicapped.
Of course, reading doesn’t make one a leader. But reading provides great advantages to a leader. Just as reading provides advantages in life.
Especially political leaders, they need to read. And to read a lot. I see lots of political leaders, especially at local level, whose potential is limited or whose potential is arrested by their lack of reading.
I don’t know what is the magic in reading, but all I know is that a leader who reads a lot will do a lot more than one who doesn’t read.
Indeed there is a person who can’t read; and there is one who can read but doesn’t read. And the two are pretty much the same. If you can read but you don’t read, then there is no difference in you with the one who doesn’t know how to read.
Now, reading is useful in these ways: reading good books, informative newspapers, critical works, and well-researched topics makes you to have the ability to analyse important issues of public concern, and to develop ideas and articulate those ideas in how to solve them.
And that, basically, is the work of politics. In politics there is no need to be educated; but you don’t have to be ignorant and dull or narrow-minded either. You must be brilliant in the mind as you’re passionate in the heart about public service.
Reading also makes you to listen carefully and critically to other points of view, to weigh and evaluate arguments and evidence, and to bring your best judgement to issues that have no easy or automatic answer.
Reading makes you to develop the confidence to speak your mind, to stick to your conviction, and to know that you know what you’re talking about.
On the other hand, a person who doesn’t read comes across as lacking in confidence around tables where serious issues are being discussed. And he or she never comes up with ideas of his or her own.
He or she cannot challenge anyone’s ideas or plans because he has no idea at all what is being talked about or being planned.
There are people who are educated or qualified in a particular field, but who don’t read. The last time they read something meaningful was when they were at university.
Even if you are uneducated, as long as you know how to read, you must read. If you read you will do much better than people who are educated but don’t read.
In fact education is nothing else but the ability and willingness to read. Ability to read is the same as ability to lead. Nothing comes out of it if there is no willingness to lead just as if there is no willingness to read.
In the final analysis one can just say that leaders are readers, as readers tend to become better leaders.
