Hilton Etakoh’s book highlights how to harness individual potentials

You Are Too Gifted To Be Poor (Toesh Global Services Ltd, Lagos; 2016) is an enlightening book that seeks to help readers realise their God-given purpose, talent, and passion. The book takes readers through self-developmental journey by teaching them how to harness their gifts in order to gain and secure long term wealth.  Topics such as ‘Roads to Discovery,’ ‘Mind Shift: A New Perspective,’ ‘Now or Never’ and ‘Creating your own Legacy’ are treated in the book.

The author, Hilton Etakoh, is a professional speaker and success coach and he is also the creator of ‘The Ultimate Series,’ a powerful collection of over 100 highly inspirational essays and articles on personal development, leadership and success and ‘Talentpreneurship,’ a concept based on building businesses around gifts/talents.’

The first part of the book addresses problems around lack of utilisation of potentials, the power of a man’s gift, and how to discover gifts and talents. It highlights the power that has been engrafted into every human being and ready to be activated. The author uses stories, quotes and parables like the parable of the talent in the bible to illustrate how people submerge their gifts by never investing or using them. He says a lot people do jobs they do not have passion for. This causes them failures in such jobs.

In helping readers to understand how to discover their gifts, the author adopts two helpful tactics. The first being SWOT – strength, weakness, opportunity and threats – and the second he calls the ‘Tony Robbins Strength Profile Test’. Readers are encouraged to take these tests as they help in their phases of discovery.

In Mind Shift: A New Perspective, the book takes a different twist. The author points out prominent behaviours ‘poor people’ exhibit, saying it is the reasons why poverty exists and he shows why these God-given gifts are not all there is to being successful. A lot of people, who live in vast poverty in society today, he states, find a lot of excuses to backup their poor economic situations.

As he asserts, “If you take advantage of the small platforms available to you now to share your gifts, the universe would reward you with bigger platforms and opportunities far beyond your imaginations. The main reason poverty exists is due to lack of wisdom; a lot of people don’t have the initiative to start where they are. Having gifts and discovering what the gifts are is not all there is to being successful. Important principles like: good character, focus, preparation, practice need to be adhered to in order to achieve success that lasts.”

The author further encourages readers to pursue their passions and achieve their goals through persistence and hard work, noting, “You can differentiate big thinkers from small thinkers from the way they speak. Small minds often express self-pity, disappointment, discouragement, pessimism, skepticism, excuses, and so on; they blame other people for their problems.”

The practicality of the book is what makes You Are Too Gifted To Be Poor a must-read. Etakoh successfully sustains the reader’s attention throughout. The easy flowing narrative is another strength of the book, as Etakoh in treating issues most people struggle. Inspirational books like this are books youths should be encouraged to read. You Are Too Gifted To Be Poor is, indeed, a wealth of knowledge that will benefit every reader.