Today is Thursday, and most work of the week is done. So let’s take a minute and resume our weekly talk about MONEY. Loads and loads of it. Don’t be shy, you deserve a trailer load of MONEY. Come with me… I will talk about Titus Muya, founder of Family Bank, owner of Kenya Orient Insurance and Daykio, one of Kenya’s largest real estate developers. I had the great fortune of helping him write his autobiography, and learn some very insightful secrets about money. But first a brief background. His father was killed by the homeguards at Githunguri when he was 10 years old in 1953, because he was in Mau Mau. The same homeguards injured his mother’s head so that she developed mental sickness, and for the next 60 years she virtually lived at Mathari Mental Hospital. But that did not prevent TK, as we all fondly call him, from achieving his wildest dreams. It all started when he was in form two. Barclays Bank refused to open an account for him because (1) he was a poor boy and (2) his family was Mau Mau. There started an obsession that would become Family Bank decades later. He vowed that one day he would start his own bank, a bank that would not care who you are, a bank for poor people like him. TK never trained in banking, and he was an immigration officer when he started the building society that later became Family Bank in 1984, in a single room of 10 by 10 feet at Standard Building. He never looked back, and I will not revisit the amazing story here. You will read it when the book is back home after publishing in London. Moral of the story. Do not complain about anything. What losers complain about, winners see MONEY in it. When I was growing up, I was a voracious reader, often spending all my pocket money on magazines and books. I even stole books from a library once, when they refused to lend me (God forgive me). Exactly 27 years after TK started his enterprise at Standard Building, I started mine in a single room in the next building, Hamilton House. I wanted to write, publish, print and sell books that could be affordable to poor men like me. Books that can cost less than a magazine. Like TK, my enterprise has been answered by unprecedented enthusiasm by people like me who had difficulty buying new books from elite bookshops. Moral of the story? Look around you. What were you denied when you were growing up? Take that as a challenge and provide it for the next generation as you would have wanted it to be provided to you when you were growing up. You will be answered with an approval made of gold…. And loads and loads of money.
Posted on: Thu, 15 Jan 2015 08:44:55 +0000
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