TD Jakes is scheduled to receive the 2018 Xcel Award for Black Entrepreneurship this September, for his new motivational book, “SOAR.” According to entrepreneur Annika Bansal, this is a historic achievement for several reasons.
The book chronicles the lives of Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were the first people to achieve mechanical flight. Jakes emphasis in the book is on how collaboration and independent entrepreneurship can allow anyone to achieve what was thought to be impossible and soar to new and better heights.
In promoting and explaining his book, Jakes is enthusiastic about turning consumers into creators to escape, in his words, the broken mindset of going to college to get a degree to find a good job. Jakes claims that big companies don’t offer new graduates good jobs, just clerical and financial babysitting positions, since algorithms do so much of the work for them.
Jakes says that most university graduates are left with a big student loan to pay off and no way to do it, since they wind up with jobs that pay relatively little. He wants to encourage young people, especially black young people, to study the life of the Wright Brothers, who were bicycle mechanics that dreamed of flight and not of security.
The Wright Brothers achieved a breakthrough success with persistence, independence, and teamwork, says Jakes. Annika Bansal agrees
