We are a multimedia platform whose aim is to position Africans for global economic opportunities.
๐๐CHRISTMAS JUST CAME EARLY!๐๐
UNBELIEVABLE BLACK FRIDAY SPECIALS for YOU!
Valid from 22 November until 30 November 2023.
Get yourself and loved ones copies! HURRYโฆ.
Call us or WhatsApp 71889334 to place your order!
We deliver anywhere in Botswana, FOR FREE!!
๐๐CHRISTMAS JUST CAME EARLY!๐๐
UNBELIEVABLE BLACK FRIDAY SPECIALS for YOU!
Valid from 22 November until 30 November 2023.
Get yourself and loved ones copies! HURRYโฆ
Call us or WhatsApp 71889334 to place your order!
We deliver anywhere in Botswana, FOR FREE!!
POETRY AT LAST!
At last, I read poetry! And itโs from the lady who works in the office next to mine, right there in our workplace - like literally! OK thatโs me there trying to be relevant. But seriously I work with this firebrand poet.
Yet thatโs not why I love her brand spanking book - SPEAKING IN CODE.
I love fine work. I love authors who care about their work. But mostly authors who care about their readershipโs time, money and trust.
And for once I read a local poetry book whose money and time investment are totally justified. Every single thebe of the P100.00 investment.
I am halfway through and I am loving this masterpiece of original thinking. Oh the well thought through backstories! YESS! his is some serious work of genius!
It is, indeed, โspeaking in code!โ You blew my socks away Phodiso. I love, love, love this YOUR SPEAKING IN CODE!
Trust me, when I grow up I want to write poetry like you do!
!
I have stood next to living legends! I donโt take it for granted.
!
โRemember, your time is a most valuable resource. Spend it wisely. Spend it doing good, productive work. Spend it serving others.โ
โIf you do not know where you are today, you cannot know where you would like to be in the future.โ
โA vast number of the worldโs highest achievers, in nearly every field, credit their success to โshowing up early.โ
We are out in Riverwalk Mall today๐๐
Pass by and interact with our marketing team in front of Pick'n'Pay, ask about our tuition services and buy revision books from our stall.
Remember to โ๏ธ 72671267 or 3114821 for any enquiries.
FOOD FOR THOUGHT!
WE ARE NOT TRYING TO DEFY CONVENTION, WE ARE SIMPLY EXECUTING AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME!
BREAKING NEWS! OTHERS HAVE ALREADY STARTED.
By Saidi Mdala
Meet these three young people from neighbouring SA! They all have three things in common.
They are:
1. Young native South Africans
2. Qualified and active medical practitioners
3. Skipped grades to start university in their mid-teens and completed by age 21!
Below are their brief stories:
(1) DR SANDILE KUBHEKA โ KZN, GRADUATED 2014
Three months into his Grade 6 at the Jobstown Primary School in Masondeza, Madadeni, he was promoted (NB: PROMOTED) to Grade 7.
He was 15 when he matriculated from Siyamukela High School.
He started studying towards a degree in Medicine and Surgery (MBChB) at the University of KwaZulu-Natalโs Nelson Mandela School of Medicine at 16, and graduated in 2014 AGED TWENTY (20)!
He has been a successful medical doctor for seven years now!
(2) DR THAKGALO THIBELA
At graduation, Dr Thakgalo Thibela was the youngest active female doctor in South Africa.
At 6 Thakgalo started primary school at Farel Primary School. She was the top student from grade 1 to grade 6. She never got to do grade 7 - the school made her skip that grade and promoted her straight to high school.
At Lehlasedi High School she was promoted to grade 10 because of her outstanding academic performance.
Off she went to attend Wits University at the age of 16 enrolling for a six year degree in the Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery(MBBCH) and graduated at 21 on December 17, 2020!
Her academic excellence earned her the Golden Key International membership, a recognition for students who are doing well academically and excelling in Universities all over the world.
(3) DR DECENT MKHOMBO
He was promoted from grade 4 to grade 5 at Thulamahashe Lower Primary School, and later from grade 8 to grade 9 at Orhovelani High School, where he matriculated in 2015.
Come December 21, 2021, the 21-year-old from Thulamahashe, Mpumalanga was among 47 young medical doctors who took their oath at the university after completing their degree in medicine.
NOW LET'S REFLECT A BIT
Were these young people smart? Yes they were ALL very hard workers! Was it easy? Not at all, they had to bust their backsides, through it all - slogging, taking extra lessons and tuition out of school.
Can all young people be like them? We donโt know until we make an effort to find out. This is what we now know: some will be and finish A BIT EARLIER, some will finish AT THE PRESCRIBED TIME, and some will only get it done OVER A LONGER PERIOD THAN PRESCRIBED. Thatโs natural. Our children are different and we have to treat them accordingly.
Whatโs not natural is to assume our children are standardised 'things' and treat them all the same. Imagine the evil of keeping a child scooped in a grade or standard level that they have long passed โ or forcing them to achieve in seven years what they can in 5, 6, 8 or 10? Itโs akin to witchcraft!
All the South African schools we read about, above promoted their children โ read that again: "PROMOTION!" What an apt term for this phenomenon.
Letโs promote our children โ almost ALL of them are way smarter than us! I read every day and I consider myself smart, but in the past 10 years I havenโt met a single student who is less smart than me! So what makes us think our child is NOT smart enough to be promoted to the next level WHEN they should? The belief that they are like us.
NEWSFLASH! They are not and stop kidding yourself. We have been giving birth to geniuses for a while now and the digital age keeps catapulting them to stratosphere!
Letโs get out of our childrenโs way. They need promotion and not restriction or, for that matter, pressure. And promotion is only possible by making them try new things โ set the bar a bit higher than before, see who jumps how far and then determine their fate from their own attempts and not according to our sterile or obsolete beliefs!
We sincerely thank you all for your endless support! Happy and safe holidays to you and your loved ones!
READ AND BECOME A CHILD AUTHOR!
By Saidi Mdala
I am not sure what Orison Swett Marden had in mind when he said: โopportunity always looks bigger going than coming.โ All I know is that itโs a very profound maxim and it would have been really tragic for GameChangers Media to watch this one go, if we had passed on it. The thing is we almost did. We were up to the neck with other projects when the call came in on April 20, 2021.
โI got your number from the Botswana National Library Service. Our child wrote a book and we would like a quotation for printing,โ said Mr Thekiso. It sounded like a done book that just needed printing, so our initial response was that we couldnโt take the job. But wait a moment, did he just say their son wrote a book?
We called back and told him, we might consider the project. After seeing our published work, he seemed to be excited about the quality of our work, but that didnโt really matter because heโd been advised to request a few other quotations for the same job โ you know the โat least three quotationsโ drill. But our interest was not on the quotations anymore โ it was on the author. Now we knew he was 9!
Curiously, we asked to meet with him and six days after that call, we visited the Thekiso residence. Young and unassuming the nerdy author looked like he wouldnโt answer any questions. But hear this... the interview, for thatโs what we had planned to go and do, took almost an hour! Yes, we were really talking to a child author! My colleague and I are both former broadcast and print journalists, respectively. Seasoned ones at that.
We sent them the quote, which turned out to be the lowest and got the project. Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development (MYESC) was the client. Six months later we had a completely expanded version of the original version of โDear Mr Presidentโ and both the young author and publishers had learnt a ton about writing a book at 9. Now here is the BIG deal; when you are an editor for a 9 year old, your job is to make sure that the book that comes out is that of 9 year old and this particular one was -smart., I remember having to replace such words as โdebilitateโ from his original manuscript.
โCan you do research Katlo?โ we recall asking him. โYes, I can,โ he said without thinking much about it. And so for four months, he did his research for the bookโs new chapters that we had suggested and then spent the other two re-writing the book. We advised him to write the book as if his audience was going to be five year olds and he had no problem with that.
In fact, for the first time, someone understood after being told only once, what that means. I say this to all my speech coaching clients a lot, but have to repeat it endlessly for most of them. By the way, itโs not a walk in the park writing for a five year old. And this is what added this young chap to my list of young heroes. And the rest, as they say, is history!
Now to the general questions many may be itching to ask. We did pepper him with a ton of those too, on that initial interview and we were quite aggressive: โDid your parents help you write the first book?โ โDid they plant the idea in your head?โ โDid they tell you what to write about?โ โDo you really like the President?โ โDid your teachers put a hand in the first manuscript?โ and on and on we went and the answer was a consistently calm: โNo.โ The boy is incredibly patient.
Then we followed up with a volley of open-ended questions and the more the questions got trickier the more the genius in this young chap came out. And then when it looked like we were done with him, he makes an announcement: โI have started working on my second book.โ
OH-KAY! So we turned our third degree to the parents and then it all fell into place. Katlo Christian Thekiso did not become a child author by a fluke. These two very proactive parents โ a military officer and an accountant, decided they were going to teach their child to read from a very tender age. So they bought him lots of childrenโs books and taught him to read. By the time they had enrolled him at the BDF pre-school, the reading bug had caught on. He was only 23 months old! I doff my hat to these amazing parents!
Later, in primary school Katlo read a book by the prolific British Author, Tessa Krailing, called โThe Case of the Smiling Sharkโ. He loved the book so much and something more. Somewhere he read that Tessa had written her first book when she was four! That was the spark to the flame that became: โDear Mr Presidentโ and itโs 12 chapters of sheer child genius.
I told his mother to tell Katlo; โWhen I grow up, I want to be like him!โ That was my version of: I wish I had met Katlo when we were in primary school. He just turned 10, launched his book at his school, courtesy of Legae English Medium School and MyscBW who sponsored the event, as well. And he says he has finished the first draft of his second book, this time itโs a fictionalised story from his parentsโ farm.
One last question: โBut why write about the President, Katlo?โ
โBecause I have three dreams: to become a medical doctor, book author and the president of my country.โ Well, the president believed him โ surely he knows more about this than you and I, right?
I also know what I know: your child can read and become a child author too! This is one of the things Katlo stresses in his book.
!
Bravo Katlo C Thekiso!
READ AND TURN YOUR PRISON INTO A UNIVERSITY!
By Saidi Mdala
It starts almost a century ago. The date is May 19, 1925. Malcom Little, โXโ is born, fourth of seven children, and immediately thrust into a systematic degradation tracing its roots back the days of slavery.
Six years later he is just beginning to make sense of life when the system murders his father and tosses him onto the road to be run over by a car and make it look like an accident. The insurance company reneges on its promise to pay out and this thrusts the whole family into a period of untold suffering.
Not long after, the state machinery shows up, putting on the hat of social services, to do what they did best to African-Americans in that era โ shatter familial bonds and destroy the family itself. They target the family anchor first. Malcolmโs mother is driven nuts until she loses it and gets condemn to an asylum.
With both parents out of the picture, the children are trying to hold together what little is left of their family when social servicesโ shows up again โ this time to divide and systematically destroy that effort. Older siblings drop out of school to assume parental roles. Then, one by one, the children are reallocated to new alternative families.
Sooner a reason arises โ they always do โ to have Malcolm transferred into an institution. He is in 8th grade when some daft teacher tells him to be realistic when he shares a dream to become a lawyer. He is dashed and, soon after, at his sisterโs โbidding,โ leaves the institution never to return. Off he romps to Boston and thenโฆ hello Harlem!
Another episode of the system takes over and what follows is enough to make up a stand-alone autobiography of a street hustlerโs life. Gripping, telling, riveting and schooling, but ruthlessly destructive; street hustling is an inevitable alternative created by the system to ensnare African American young people, Malcomโs age at the time. An inevitable option that Malcolm, inevitably, becomes part of.
Street hustling turns Malcolmโs life into what seems like an eternal nightmare. Starting with a mind-numbing episode spanning petty jobs; shoe shining, dancing in clubs, waiting tables and the rest of that shebang; it gives way to the next level of perilous hustling that defines the murky alleyways of Harlem and every other bloodcurdling nook and cranny of the black American community of the time.
Here, Malcolm peddles ma*****na and hard drugs. He pimps prostitutes, goes into gambling, racketeering and eventually breaking into wealthy white peopleโs homes to steal valuables. He is now a hardened criminal and because he is also consuming all these vices, he too, becomes a j***y.
The next episode is not difficult to predict, even for Malcolm. His options are fast diminishing to just two: prison or death on the wrong side of the gun. After both the gun on the street and in the hand of a police officer fail to go off โ literally โ prison prevails. And guess what? He is barely an adult! Yes, I was stunned too!
Prison could have lasted two years for his petty crimes, but it was stretched to several ten-year sentences to be served concurrently. Malcom and his co-hustler had crossed a sacrosanct racial line. Together with his co-thief they had two middle class white sisters in their team, who they were also sleeping with. White supremacy did not take kindly to that.
A โniggerโ consorting with a white woman was a hard slap in white supremacyโs face. And it didnโt help that the two women in question, were not prostitutes, but well-to-do upper-middle- class whites, one of whom was engaged to her white fiancรฉe. Malcolm and his friend had to be removed from society for a very long time. Fortunately for Malcom Little, this marked the biggest turning point in his life.
Prison becomes his salvationโฆ He come across BOOKS and the idea of AVID READERSHIP!
When he went to prison, Malcom could hardly read. Neither could he write to save his life. Then he resolved to conquer both limitations and prison became a university where he read every book, he could lay his hands on, and there were thousands of those at his disposal. Reading became a spark to the flame that later became the white supremacyโs biggest headache for the rest of Malcomโs short life after prison.
โI read more in my room than in the library itself. An inmate who was known to read a lot could check out more than the permitted maximum number of books. I preferred reading in the total isolation of my own room,โ Malcolm writes in his autobiography compiled by Alex Halley.
Then avid reading replaced all the drugs he had ever taken before coming to prison โ all of known drugs combined. The street hustler had just discovered the ultimate drug โ READING BOOKS, and its incessant craving needed a shot, every free moment he got. And this was not without its challenges.
โWhen I had progressed to really serious reading, every night at about ten P. M. I would be outraged with the โlights out!โ It always seemed to catch me right in the middle of something engrossing.โ
But, certainly, no challenges that a book addict could not navigate.
โFortunately, right outside my door was a corridor light that cast a glow into my room. The glow was enough to read by, once my eyes adjusted to it. So when โlights outโ came, I would sit on the floor where I could continue reading in that glow.โ
But there was another problem, the prison guards.
โAt one-hour intervals the night guards paced past every room. Each time I heard the approaching footsteps, I jumped into bed and feigned sleep. And as soon as the guard passed, I got back out of bed onto the floor area of that light-glow, where I would read for another fifty-eight minutes-until the guard approached again.โ
And that would go on until three or four every morning. Sleep became a casualty.
โThree or four hours of sleep a night was enough for me. Often in the years in the streets I had slept less than that.โ
Think of this next time you are moaning: โI donโt have enough time to read.โ
Meanwhile, thatโs how six years of reading turned a common thief, j***y and prisoner into a global agitator. Once released Malcom X rises to the top of the lists of white supremacyโs most hated and most watched black person in the US. Elsewhere, he rises to prominence, enlisting the support, sympathy and admiration of many world leaders in Africa and the Middle East.
Then it gets more excitingโฆ
A New York Times poll, conducted on college and university campuses, ranked Malcom X โthe second most sought afterโ speaker at colleges and universities.
โWhen that New York Times poll was published, I had spoken at well over fifty colleges and universities, like Brown, Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Rutgers, in the Ivy League, and others throughout the country,โ Malcom writes.
And here is how he would open his speeches at universities:
โGentlemen, I finished the eighth grade in Mason, Michigan. My high school was the black ghetto of Roxbury, Massachusetts. My college was in the streets of Harlem, and my master's was taken in prison.โ
READING BOOKS became Malcom Xโs alma mater that turned prison into a university and him into a sought after university guest lecturer. You and I can take a leaf from โXโ and exploit AVID READING to turn our respective prisons โ be they: ignorance, poverty, debt, unemployment, insecurity, inferiority, whateverโฆ โ into blissful universities!
Through AVID READERSHIP โXโ captured the imagination of the world then, and for always.
Read And Achieve the Unthinkable
By Saidi Mdala
Elon Musk is, today, the richest, richest individual with an all-time high net worth of 315.2 billion, American dollars. This is over 100 billion dollars more than the last highest net worth posted by the former richest man, Jeff Bezos, last year.
In 1999, Musk founded X.com, one of the first online banks, which merged with Confinity a few years later to become PayPal. When PayPal was bought by eBay, Musk walked away a multi-millionaire and went on to found SpaceX, the worldโs first privately owned company to send a liquid-fuelled rocket into orbit.
Founded in 2002, Space Exploration Technologies Corp. or simply, SpaceX, is an American aerospace manufacturer, space transportation services and communications corporation headquartered in Hawthorne, California. If SpaceX succeeds in its second reason for existence, Musk will add to his firsts, the first man to take us to Mars!
Meanwhile, Musk is the first person to mass manufacture 100% electric motor vehicles. In 2004, he invested 6.5 billion dollars to become part of a one year old Tesla Inc., an American electric vehicle and clean energy company based in Palo Alto, California, founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. Tesla Inc., has reached a market valuation of over one trillion dollars, employs over seventy thousand people and, as of last year (2020) had more than half a million cars drive out of its plant.
In 2016, Tesla Inc., acquired SolarCity, for US$2.6 billion, and added solar energy generation to Tesla Energy's business. As of 2020, Tesla Energy was generating 205 megawatts (MW), of solar energy, ranking it third in U.S. residential solar installations, while deploying 3 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of battery energy storage products.
As you might have picked by now, Elon Musk wants a fossil energy free earth. OK, let me rephrase that. He is obsessed with clean energy and this obsession is rooted in a dream he developed when he was still young, THANKS TO AVID READING. And boy, did his chap read tons of books when he was young!
โThe most striking part of Elonโs character as a young boy was his compulsion to read. From a very young age, he seemed to have a book in his hands at all times,โ says Kimbal, Elonโs elder brother, in Ashlee Vanceโs biography book: โElon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Futureโ.
Kimbal adds that it was not unusual for Elon to read for ten hours a day. An on weekends, it just got more intense. โโฆ he could go through two books in a day.โ it was also not unusual for Elon to go missing from the family while shopping at the malls. Yes! You guessed right.
โMaye (his sister) or Kimbal would pop into the nearest bookstore and find Elon somewhere near the back sitting on the floor and reading in one of his trancelike states,โ writes Vance.
And when old enough, young Elon would go to the bookstore after school and from 2 P.M. until about 6 P.M. he would have his head buried in books โ burrowing through them.
And here is the big biggie. Elon Musk read through two libraries and โฆ wait for this โฆ by fourth grade! That is like, around 10 years of age.
โAt one point, I ran out of books to read at the school library and the neighborhood library,โ Elon tells us in Vanceโs book.
When entreaties to the librarian to order more books were fruitless, Musk turned to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and burrowed through two of its 32 sets, before he discovered free reading at the mallsโ bookstores. And that is how the richest, richest man was inspired to, one day, see to it that the world drove all electric cars. Avid readership!
!
"Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book." โ John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Happy Mother's Day to all the mums!!
๐จ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐จ
๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐๐ ๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐
"๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐" ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐โ๏ธโ๏ธ
โ
Visit the Portia Chipaladza-Tobedza "PCT" Readership Campaign page.
โ
Like or Love the post asking the question(s).
โ
Answer the question(s) and hashtag
โ
๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐ ๐๐๐๐โ๏ธ
๐๐๐ฒ๐
๐๐ฎ๐๐ฌ๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐
a) When did the Portia Chipaladza-Tobedza National Readership Campaign start (month & year)?
b) Where did the Portia Chipaladza-Tobedza National Readership Campaign start (location)?
c) At which school did the Portia Chipaladza-Tobedza National Readership Campaign start?
#๐๐ข๐ง๐๐๐จ๐ฉ๐ฒ๐๐๐๐ง๐จ๐ฐ๐๐ก๐๐ญ๐๐๐ญ๐ญ๐๐ซ๐ฌ #๐๐จ๐ฐ๐๐ซ๐๐๐๐ฒ๐๐จ๐ฅ๐ฎ๐ฑ๐๐ซ๐จ๐ฎ๐ฉ
#๐๐๐๐ญ๐๐๐๐๐๐๐ #๐๐ญ๐๐ฒ๐๐จ๐ฆ๐ #๐๐๐๐๐๐๐จ๐จ๐ค #๐๐ญ๐๐ฒ๐๐๐๐ #๐๐๐ฏ๐๐๐ข๐ฏ๐๐ฌ
Be the first to know and let us send you an email when GameChangers Media posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.
We sincerely thank you all for your endless support! Happy and safe holidays to you and your loved ones!
Want your business to be the top-listed Media Company?
