I loved Saturday and Sunday nights. The tiredness from farming activities during the day would all matter no more in the evenings. I would finish my household chores early so I could do what I so much loved to do, read.

Mr. Boafo was a retired cocoa Purchasing Clerk (Kookoo Krakye) and was the only one who could afford newspapers in the village. On weekends I would go to him for all the newspapers he’d bought within the week and by Monday morning, I had finished reading everything I could get from him. I just loved reading.

I read everything I could lay hands on and this gave me a perspective about life that wasn’t common for an ordinary village boy.

Later on in life when I heard the saying that ‘if you want to hide something from a black man, put it in a book’, my love for reading became even stronger. Immediately after I was baptized in 1998, I read the whole of the New Testament, from cover to cover.

To this day, my most cherished material possessions are my books. I read everything and I read every day. I do so because I want to get ahead. I read because I want to be successful like all the great people you and I so much admire. I read because I want to be able to express my views and I want to continue to inspire you through writing and speaking.

Leaders are readers, folks. Warren Buffet the American business magnate who is said to be the most successful investor in the world today, spends 80% of his time reading. The man who invented Microsoft, Bill Gates, reads for an hour every single night before he goes to bed. The founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg challenged himself to read a new book every week in 2015. Zimbabwe’s Strive Masiyiwa, the founder of EconetWireless reads for an hour every day. He has read the entire Bible cover to cover a few times.

Ghana’s own Dr. Kofi Amoah became a millionaire and earned his accolades ‘The Donald Trump of Los Angeles’ just after reading a $1000 worth of books for two weeks.

Reading enables us to learn about different cultures, beliefs, history and technologies. It enables us to make sound judgment and informed decisions. Reading does not only improve our communication skills, it also makes us knowledgeable and opens new doors.

Our society has become full of people who just hate to read. If Christians read their Bible, there won’t be as many false prophets as we have today. If our political leaders read, we probably would have less judgment debt, no error-ridden public event brochures and press statements, and probably the phrase ‘the printer’s devil’ wouldn’t gain as much prominence.

Instead of taking advantage offered by the internet, the biggest library in the world to learn,our youth of today spend their precious time liking pictures on Instagram, poking each other on Facebook and following people on Twitter. A large percentage of our youth these days have some form of a locally acquired foreign accent. They want to speak the English language better than the Queen of England but ask them to write or read what they speak and it becomes a problem.

For our country to grow and prosper there’s the need to build a greater culture of reading in our young generation.

Zig Ziglar once said, ‘successful people have big libraries and small TVs and poor people have big TVs and small libraries’. I read because I want to be rich, so if you ever think of giving me a gift, please let it be a book.

Challenge yourself to read some good books this year for as Uncle Ebow Whyte puts it, ‘what you become a year from now depends on the books you read and the people you hang out with’. You are indeed what you read.

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Steve is a Mechanical Engineer and currently works as the Maintenance Planning & Systems Superintendent at Perseus Mining Ghana Limited. He's passionate about shaping the minds of the next generation to make our country and the world better than we met it. He's a speaker and loves to write