The Benefits of Adventures is a curious book—at least for those systematic readers who habitually start a book on the first page and follow it steadily to the end instead of skipping and jumping back and forth. It is curious in that it purports to be a celebration of the achievements of some travelers whose adventures and discoveries are well known. So, what else is new?
Christopher Columbus supposedly discovered America (at least to his fellow-Europeans who didn’t know it existed)—but so what?
Mungo Park traced part of the course of the middle Niger River—we already know that.
Marco Polo traveled to China and brought commercial products and cultural news back to his native Italy. OK.
Mansa Musa made a sumptuous pilgrimage, possibly unsurpassed in Islamic history, from Mali to Mecca.
Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first human to travel through space in the recorded history of our world.
American astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin led the flight that first landed humans on the moon.
And African-American Matthew Henson was the first person recorded to have set foot on the North Pole. All well and good.
These 7 men plus 13 others occupy the introductory chapter of the book.
Since we come to books with a mind filled with all sorts of previous knowledge, a knowledgeable reader might wonder what there is to admire or celebrate in Christopher Columbus, a notorious slave trader whose initial reaction to the Native Americans he stumbled upon in his search for a westward sea passage to China and India, was, as Mr Emenike noted, that “from here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold. . . .”
Slaves? Sold? In the name of the Holy Trinity? Imagine that!
We are dealing here with the historical fact of the Christian Church’s active participation in slavery and oppression that gave such a bad name to Christianity and left such a bitter taste in the mouths of many African and other non-Western adherents of that faith. (It should be pointed out that Christianity’s main rival on the global scene has a historical record just as bad!)
Emenike makes no further comment on the matter—because his concern is not conventional history or geo-politics at all but something else altogether. Emenike’s concern is with the psychology, or rather, the science and mathematics of success. And success is, shall we say, “value-free.” What you are attempting to do may be right or wrong, good or evil. In either case, there is a weak and inadequate way to do it, resulting in failure, and a scientific and efficient way guaranteed to succeed. Emenike notes this double-edged fact when he quotes the chief of success philosophers, Napoleon Hill himself, who says: “Verily, there is nothing, right or wrong, which BELIEF, plus BURNING DESIRE, cannot make real. . . .” (p. 77).
Happily, Emenike’s concern, and the secrets of success he will divulge, are exclusively with good, not with evil.
And so we follow the author on to the next chapter, where he lays it all out. This is serious business, it turns out; it is not for nothing that he will spend over 300 pages talking about it.
So then, what is The Benefits of Adventures all about? The book is an illustration, using the careers of those 20 exemplary adventurers, of the success principles to which Emenike devoted his first book Entrepreneurial Spirits, published a year earlier.
Those 20 adventurers, and others like them today, are imbued with the following core characteristics:
1. Each of them has a clearly defined mission, vision or goal
2. They are risk-takers, staking their entire fortune and even their life on the success of their mission
3. Each is endowed with a curious and enquiring mind. They are not content to sit at home or within the circle of the known environment. They are willing to venture outside their “comfort zone.” Whether they know it or not, they are subscribers to the Igbo adage that travel brings more wisdom than grey hair does; and that you don’t see Odumegwu, the great and awesome Masquerade, by sitting in your house.
4. These adventurers are not contented with the status quo. They want to change things, to experiment, to modernize, to play with new ideas, new values, new ways of doing things.
5. They are innovators, inventors, dynamic rather than conservative.
6. Emenike insists that they also have a “profit motive.” They want fun—but, more importantly, they seek financial benefit from their adventures.
7. In addition, those European adventurers to the Americas and to Asia wanted conquest and occupation of new territories.
These characteristics of adventurers are among the 17 success principles listed and explained in Napoleon Hill’s famous book Think and Grow Rich. Emenike has set himself up as a major propagator of Napoleon Hill’s ideas and as a mentor to all the poor and needy not only of his native village of Nanka in Anambra state but of the entire Nigeria and indeed the world at large—anyone who can read, and who is determined and disciplined enough to follow instructions through to the end.
Emenike quotes copiously not only from Napoleon Hill but also from a chorus of other philosophers of success including Ben Sweetland, Russell Conwell, Don Green, Orison Marden, Channing Haddock, J. P. Vaswani and M. R. Kopmeyer.
The most important thing, they all say, is to know exactly what you want in life. You must have the WILL (determination) to succeed. Do not destroy yourself with negative thinking. You must learn what is needed and do what it takes to succeed in achieving your life’s desire or ambition.
If you fail, they all say, it is because you didn’t do the right things. It is not due to bad luck, the devil, or juju. You’re a fool to go to fortune tellers, pastors or palm readers to tell you why you’re failing.
What are these 17 principles of success? Repetition is a recognized mechnanism for teaching and learning. Let’s therefore follow the author and repeat a few of those principles:
1. Decide exactly what you want.
2. Write down your goals in a notebook, together with steps for achieving them.
3. Review them every morning and every night. As you do so, write down any additional thoughts as they come. Write down a timeline for achieving each segment of your goals, and follow that timetable. As the saying goes, a goal is a dream with a plan and a timetable for achieving it. Without a plan and timeline, it remains merely a dream.
4. Learn from reading about the lives and careers of those who succeeded before you. Make them your heroes and models. Try and copy and duplicate their success.
5. You must take the right actions to realize your goals.
6. Always visualize your goals, i.e. have a mental picture of your goals, what those goals (and your life) will look like when you achieve them.
7. Pray to God to help you realize your goals, always keeping in mind that prayer alone is insufficient. Prayer must be accompanied by action.
As far as I can see, Emenike’s books are intended for serious readers—especially those who are hungry for success, including young people who want to make something of themselves. To get all 17 principles in detail together with instructions for applying them in a practical way, such readers must find and read Mr Emenike’s first book Entrepreneurial Spirits (published in 2014, but I hope copies are still available). In particular, they should read his follow-up pamphlet with the powerful title How to Alter Your Destiny to the Direction You Want. This pamphlet discusses in detail 7 of the 17 principles.
The last two-thirds of The Benefits of Adventures is devoted to analyzing the circumstances of the 20 exemplary adventurers and showing how their methods and procedures could be deployed in our contemporary political and social environments to assist us in achieving success especially in business.
Chapter 3 is particularly outstanding. Here the author walks us through a sample business set-up—a pharmaceutical manufacturing company much like his own—showing step by step how to organize and set up a company, how to navigate the financial, legal, and regulatory environments, what things to look out for, etc. This book, much like the other two, is a “how-to” handbook. Each of these books is a gold mine available to all those smart enough to pick them up.
Mr Emenike is a believer in books, which is not surprising, considering that his success and fortune are rooted in his embracement of the written word. Mr Emenike has other philanthropies; however, judging from his current output of three books in two years, my guess is that he also wishes to “give back” to his society and the world through the written word. Lucky for us, indeed!
I would therefore urge him, as I did at the previous book launch, to seriously consider sponsoring and/or leading a campaign to revive book reading which has so severely declined everywhere in Nigeria, even in the schools. He has the resources, and he can attract other philanthropists of like mind to join him in that adventure. It is possible to fill this nation with libraries, and the libraries brim-full with books!
Onwuchekwa Jemie
