Read a book

One of the biggest obstacles to solving most of the world's problems  today is ignorance. People simply don't know enough and suffer as a result. Sounds kind of crazy right? But it's true.

For example, teaching people where AIDS comes from and how it gets transmitted has been the number one factor in dropping the spread of the disease. Yes, new and better medical practices have helped, but reducing ignorance has helped more.

Another example of ignorance that is kind of funny is Gerber baby food.  In some countries in Africa where the literacy rate is atrociously low they put pictures of what is inside the food containers on the labels. If you are at all familiar with Gerber baby food you know that there is a picture of a baby on every single one of their products. It took a great deal of convincing on the part of those that can read to explain to those that couldn't that it was food for babies not food made from babies.

IF you know what foods are poisonous and which ones are not you can safely feed yourself and those you care about. If you know how to defend yourself from vicious predators, both animal and human, again you can keep yourself safe. Knowledge can help us solve or eliminate most of our problems.

That's fine. But how do we obtain more knowledge? There's two main ways. The first is the harder and more dangerous of the two and that is learning through personal experience and trial and error, what works and what doesn't. The second, much easier, much safer way is to learn by reading about the experiences of others.

A person who has more words at his or her command, can more adequately express their needs and desires. And the easiest way to learn more words is to spend time every day reading. As you come in contact with more and more books you will, over time, get a better vocabulary. A great deal of how we absorb new words comes from examples of them being used in context.

See, what happens is, you read a bunch of words that you do know and then you see one or two that you don't. But based on how they are used in the sentence you can generally figure out the meaning of the ones you don't know, thus increasing your pool of knowledge.

Also, reading can be both fun and relaxing. The time you spend reading is time that you are not focused on your daily routine. It can be a short getaway from your problems.

You can't personally teach the whole world to read. And you can't protect the whole world from all the dangers that are out there. But you can increase by at least one the number of people that know enough to save themselves from all the dangers the world has to offer, just by making a habit out of reading, both for fun and to stave off ignorance. Remember, a person that doesn't read, isn't any better off than a person that can't read.