If Bill Gates Were Black...By John Hope Bryant

If Bill Gates were black, it would be less important that President Barack Obama is black. This is no slight to President Obama. It is an acknowledgment that while the route to success has changed, for too many in the black and minority community, their game plan has not.

For much of the past century, African Americans pursued social justice through government intervention, the ballot box, and ultimately elective office. While the number of black mayors and elected officials in this country is impressive, the number of black entrepreneurs is not. As a result, job creation in underserved communities, and among the black middle class, is stagnant.

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.

HOW TO BUILD YOUR MENTAL MUSCLES

While many people vow to get in shape physically, not many commit to exercising their mental muscles. What does exercising your mental muscles even mean? It means expanding your horizons, opening new doors, looking at different possibilities, stretching your mind…It will help you grow as a person. Give you a new outlook on life. And set you on a path to feeling a little more fulfilled. For isn’t that the ultimate goal of any resolution? A sense of accomplishment. Pride. Satisfaction.

Our conscious mind is made up of six mental muscles. Some people call these your higher faculties. It really doesn’t matter what you call them. What’s good to remember is that they are part of you, and you can develop each one to create more awareness in your life and improve your results.

YOU HAVE SIX MENTAL MUSCLES 

Perception

You can develop your ability to view your world differently. You can decide how circumstances will affect your life. You can develop better ways to perceive your reality. Don’t look at things from one point of view; look at them from many points of view. Look at some of the things you want to do today and think of how many points of views you can look at them. Doing this daily exercise will help you improve this mental muscle.