Menete Hashipala

When the author left Namibia to study as part of a poverty alleviation programme at Manchester University, it was her passion to return home and make a difference. She thought she was going to learn how to catch fish. But to her despair, they did not teach her how to catch fish. Instead, they taught her how to provide people with fish and make them come back for more. The course didn’t reach her expectations, but it did fuel her passion to search further to identify the causes of poverty.

Whilst searching for the answer to assuage poverty in her community, a quotation from Albert Einstein went over and over in her head: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. The solution is not where the problem is.” This was the problem she had been grappling with while studying poverty alleviation. She then flipped the coin and began to study successful people. What do they all have in common? What traits do they share? Her findings were astonishing—they all seemed to have one thing in common, and that one thing that seems to have fuelled their success is what the author desires to share with you.