A jury of distinguished scholars and scientists, including Albert
Einstein and Orville Wright thought enough of Jimmy Yen to vote him one
of the top ten Modern Revolutionaries of the Twentieth Century. Yet all
he did was teach Chinese peasants to read.
What made that so amazing was that for four thousand years
reading and writing in China was only done by the Scholars. "Everybody"
knew, including the peasants themselves, that peasants were incapable of
learning.
That thoroughly ingrained cultural belief was Jimmy Yen's first
impossible" barrier. The second barrier was the Chinese language itself,
consisting of 40,000 characters, each character signifying a different
word! The third barrier was the lack of technology and good roads. How
could Jimmy Yen reach the 350 million peasants in China?
Impossible odds, an impossibly huge goal-and yet he had almost
attained it when he was forced (by Communism) to leave his country.
Did he give up? No. He learned from defeat and expanded his goal:
Teach the rest of the Third World to read. Practical reading programs,
like the ones he invented in China, started pumping out literate people
like a gushing oil well in the Philippines, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Nepal,
Kenya, Columbia, Guatemala, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Ghana,
India-people became literate. For the first time in their entire genetic
history, they had access to the accumulated knowledge of the human
race.
For those of us who take literacy for granted, I'd like you to
consider for a moment how narrow your world would be if you'd never
learned how to read and there was no access to radios or TVs.
180,000 Chinese peasants were hired by the Allied Forces in
WW1 as laborers in the war effort. Most of them had no idea-not a
clue-where England, Germany or France was, they didn't know what
they were being hired to do, and didn't even know what a war was!
Try to grasp, if you will, the vacancy, the darkness, the lack that
existed in those people because they couldn't read.
Jimmy Yen was a savior to them.
What was the secret of Jimmy Yen's success? He found a real
need, and found in himself a strong desire to answer that need. And he
took some action: He tried to do something about it even though it
seemed impossible. He worked long hours. And he started with what he
had in front of him and gradually took on more and more, a little upon a
little.
The English author Thomas Carlyle said, "Our main business is not
to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand."
And that's what Jimmy Yen did. He started out teaching a few peasants
to read, with no desks, no pens, no money, no overhead projectors. He
started from where he found himself and did what was clearly at hand.
And that's all you need to do. Start now. Start here. And do what
lies clearly at hand.
