Things I wish I knew before graduation

“Embrace failure instead of trying to run away from it”, said no one ever to a graduating class in Pakistan. There are so many monumental failures in life that I could have coped with better had my professors at university actually taught us something about life beyond the obscure pleasures of solving a quadratic equation. This was the first thought that came to mind when the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) invited me to speak to their graduating class, as part of their clutter breaking personal effectiveness programme.

After talking to more than a dozen IBA alumni in preparation for this session, the biggest insight I stumbled upon was that no IBA student will ever go hungry at night or stay single for the rest of his/her life. Once they graduate, they will all get jobs and be reasonably successful in life. And that is precisely the problem; the brightest minds in Pakistan realise that a reasonably good life awaits them. Once they graduate, they’ll be so busy building a good life for themselves that they’ll never challenge themselves to build a great life.

More often than not, the lives of the brightest minds in Pakistan are a mad dash to meet other people’s expectations. First, it’s your parents who want you to get a job at a multinational company so they can show you off to their friends and within the family. Next, there’s the girlfriend who wants you settle down quickly so you can send a rishta because other weird guys are already beginning to send rishtas and she can’t keep saying no to her mother without sharing a half decent reason. Then there’s the ultra-possessive boyfriend who wants you to take care of his mother after you get married, while he pursues his dream career, even though you studied exactly the same courses at IBA or LUMS and you, in fact, used to tutor him before exams.

My first piece of advice to the students was to think deeply about what they wanted to accomplish in life before entering this mad dash to meet people’s expectations. Ask yourself: what is the one thing God sent you to do on earth that no one else can do? The answer can bring direction and focus to your life. Every time you create a ‘to do list,’ create a ‘not to do list’ to include things that don’t bring you closer to your unique purpose in life. This is important because the brightest minds in Pakistan are extremely good at passing expectations other people set for them without really thinking about why they’re doing things in the first place.

We’re a jugaru nation that will always deliver stunning results with the bare minimum amount of effort required. What we lose in the process is the ability to be surprised by our full human potential. We’re almost afraid of realising the full spectrum of our human potential because we might have to risk failure. More than the infamous four letter word beginning with the letter F, it’s the word ‘failure’ that carries the real stigma on Pakistani campuses. This is a pity: our narrow definition of success encourages us to seek shortcuts to reach life goals at the expense of experiences that will actually enrich us.

My last piece of advice for the students was that money can pretty much buy everything, including health and happiness. But the one thing money can’t buy back for you is your youth. Dedicate your youth to something bigger than yourself. Our country needs us now more than ever before. Our country has given us the best it had to offer and then some. We need to put our best minds to work on the worst problems in our society. The personal effectiveness programme, led by the indefatigable Nadia Sayeed, aims to do exactly that by grooming the next generation of Pakistan’s leaders and is the brainchild of Dr Ishrat Husain, Dean and Director of IBA. Dr Ishrat is one of those rare visionary Pakistani leaders who transformed IBA to the extent that when he was a nominee for the post of the caretaker prime minister, most students and faculty members were hoping he wouldn’t get the slot for fear of the institution being orphaned. His challenge, now, is to inspire his students to become equally audacious: to live life for a purpose bigger than themselves.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 26^th,  2013.

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