Lessons from the Acres of Diamonds

 “Acres of Diamonds” is a lecture by Russell H. Conwell, which he delivered no fewer than 6,000 times1. The theme of the lecture was that opportunity lurks in everyone’s backyard. Everyone, Conwell believed, can and ought to get rich and then use that money for the good of others. The lecture has been published as a book and is available on Project Gutenberg for free.

Gulliver’s Travels—A Book That Influenced Me by Philip Emeagwali

The first novel I read was "Gulliver's Travels." Jonathan Swift wrote it in 1726 as a satire and parody of humanity. In the novel, Gulliver was shipwrecked in Lilliput, a land of tiny and small-minded people. I read it in 1963, sitting on the veranda of our house on Gbenoba Road in Agbor, Nigeria. My father had hailed it as a “classic” and persuaded me to read it.

The novel made an impression on me because it enabled me to travel in my mind to a fictional place created by a writer that had lived two-and-a-half centuries earlier. At the time, the farthest I had ever travelled was to Onitsha, my ancestral hometown, about an hour away. And Lagos, our nation’s capital, seemed as distant as the North Pole.

The Power of Ideas

By Sam Adeyemi

Many years ago, in a small town in the United States, a doctor climbed his horse and rode to a chemist’s shop. He went in through the back door. He carried in his hand an old fashioned kettle and a wooden paddle. He brought these items to the shop clerk with a sheet of paper on which was written the formula for a drink. Both of them began to bargain and eventually the clerk gave the doctor five hundred dollars for the items that he had come to sell. What the doctor sold to the clerk was worth a fortune to the young clerk but not to the doctor who gave away the items for just five hundred dollars.

To the surprise of the clerk, the content of the kettle which has since become a household name in the world, began to pour forth gold. The content of the kettle has been heard of in more places on the earth than any gospel.