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The question that I’m asked from time to time by thinking individuals, thinking young people is, how should I focus on a goal? How do I arrive at a goal for myself in life? Now those who are born with that thought and that knowledge and that focus clearly in their minds are blessed. But those who are not born with that are in a way blessed even more. Because when you get something easy, sometimes you tend to lose value for it. You think it’s okay, it comes easy to me, so it must be easy. Whereas the reality of life is that it’s not easy. And for those to whom it does not come easy, I’m saying they are even more fortunate, they’re more lucky because on the one hand they will get that knowledge when they work hard enough for it. And meanwhile, they will have the opportunity to develop resilience, to develop perseverance, and to develop consistency, and to develop persistence, and to develop commitment, and to develop discipline. All of which are critically important to achieve that goal no matter how easily or no matter with what difficulty you arrived at it in the first place. Because even the person who knows from the moment you open his eyes that I want to be this, whatever that this is, he will need persistence and he will need a sting power, he will need the commitment and he will need all of that if he really wants to achieve the goal. Getting that you want something is one thing, getting it is a whole different ball game. The benefit or rather the only benefit of knowing clearly what you want is that you can start working in that direction sooner than somebody who has to go through a lot of soul searching and so forth before he or she gets to that clarity. That’s about the only benefit. But if you know it clearly, but you do not do anything to develop, to bring discipline into your life, to be persistent, to be consistent, to have determination, then good luck to you because you are not going to achieve that goal. Now therefore how to do this? So I’m not talking about the one to whom this is clear, I’m talking about the one to whom it may not be so clear and they are struggling. The first thing to do is to make friends with yourself. I’ve said this many times and I believe this and I believe it very strongly that one of the greatest things that we have lost, which used to be a strength, maybe for some people it was a strength by default. I mean, you know, they didn’t ask for it, but it was there. It became part of their life. It’s like people living on steep hillsides, they get to do a lot of cardiac work, walking because they’re interested in cardiac fitness, but because that’s how you get around. You live on top of the hillside, you would go down to the river for water, carry the water back up again and so on and so on. So you are getting, you’re doing some work for some other reason, but you’re getting cardiac fitness as a bonus and I think that is something which is, you know, worth thinking about. The thing to do, what we have lost is this, which is the ability to be comfortable with yourself. The comfort with silence, the comfort with solitude, comfort with being by yourself. And when I say by yourself, I don’t just mean by yourself physically, personally as in one human being, but one human being minus their phone, because the phone is the biggest distraction and the biggest interference that we have bought and brought into our lives. And we have created this completely toxic lifestyle, which is based on where the most common feeling is that of fear, FOMO, fear of missing out. And if you just think about all the time we check the phone so that we don’t suffer from FOMO, so that we don’t miss out something and see, okay, so I check my phone, you know, 10,000 times a day because that’s the truth of it. That’s how much we check every three seconds and say, okay, sure, so I did that. Now what did I get? Well, obviously I didn’t miss out. I was taking care of that every three seconds. So I must have got what I was chasing. What did I get? I ask you, sir, what is the answer? You know the answer. I know the answer. The ability to be alone and to be comfortable with yourself being alone. So number one, you’re talking about how do I get to a life goal? So first step, make friends with yourself. Learn to be alone. Seek being alone. Don’t seek company. Seek being alone. Seek solitude. I don’t mean seek solitude as in, you know, somebody who is dysfunctionally introverted, somebody who is depressed. No, as a perfectly healthy human being who’s very comfortable with other people, who has high social skills and so on, but they like to be alone by themselves for some part of the day. And that’s where we need to get. Today, there is a whole branch of psychology which deals in these things, which is anxiety creating moments for people who hate being alone. Solitude, khilwat, being by yourself creates anxiety in people, creates fear in people. I’m asking you, get to a point where you will be happy with that. You will seek that. And if you don’t have that for some time, that will make you unhappy. That will make you not anxious, but it will be something that you would want to have. You say, oh, I wish I could be by myself. Not because I hate people, but because I want to be by myself. So make friends with yourself. The second thing is, once you are alone, and believe me, be prepared for pain, be prepared like anything else. If you go into the gym and you say, well, you know, my muscles right now would, they would look like, look nice on a chicken, but since I’m not a chicken, I need to do something about it. And you start, under a coach, you start a regimen of calisthenics and weights and so on. The first thing, the very first sensation that you will feel, which will be very strong, is that of pain. You will feel pain. You, your whole body will pain. You will question your sanity. You will say, what the hell? Why did I do this? Am I insane? And the answer is no, it’s not. You say you are the sanest person in the world. So why did you choose the pain? Because you know what is behind this pain. The pain is a mask. The pain is a barrier. And once you go over that barrier, then there is beauty, then there is comfort, then there is great, beautiful health, all kinds of good things. So the same thing with solitude. Be prepared for the pain. Be prepared for anxiety. Depending on what kind of a frenetic lifestyle you have, depending on how addicted you are to your phone, all of this is going to come up. Don’t even take your phone with you. Don’t give yourself more difficulty by saying, I’ll take my phone, but I won’t look at it. No, you won’t. You will look at it. Keep the phone at home. Keep the phone as far away from yourself as possible. And if the phone is linked to your watch or something, imagine, see how we have physically and voluntarily put chains on our ankles and our wrists and on our necks. The real chains, these are the real chains, right? Not the steel and iron chains that slaves were forced to wear. The slave didn’t like what he was wearing. We love it. And that’s where the problem is. I was reading some stuff by George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, two philosophers. George Orwell wrote the book in 1984, and I suggest you read it. And Aldous Huxley wrote the book Brave New World, which also I suggest you read. And somebody else who made a wonderful commentary on them, comparing them. And he said, George Orwell feared that we would be enslaved by the things we hate. And Aldous Huxley feared that we would be enslaved by the things we love. And so on. I mean, I think this is where we are. We are enslaved by the things we love. We spend money we can’t afford to get more and more sophisticated phones. Most of the features of it we don’t use. And then we also make sure that we are hooked up in other ways, where the phone is hooked up to the watch and the watch is hooked up to something else and so on. So chain after chain. You need to break out of that. So throw all that. Leave your watch, leave your phone. Don’t take any watch. You don’t need a watch. The world doesn’t depend on you. If you are not contactable for a few minutes or a few hours, believe me, nothing will change in the world. And if you don’t believe me, go to the next funeral that you go to, next janada, and see The people who come to the janada, people who pray the salah to the janada, people who go to the cemetery, people who are burying the person who has died, look around. See how committed they are to their task. See how interested they are in the person who died and how interested they are in getting it over and getting back to their lives. Just see that, right? It’s a very salutary thing. No matter how much that person was loved, everybody loved. No matter how much that person was respected, no matter how big a crowd there was of the janada, the crowd at the kabiristan and the cemetery is smaller and so on and so forth. So the point is that that’s exactly how important you are and how important I am. So let’s not get sidetracked by that. Nothing in the world will change if I disappear for a few hours. Nothing at all. And if you don’t believe me, disappear and see what happens. Nothing will happen. So stay, go and sit in the forest, ideally forest. There’s something beautiful about forests, there’s something beautiful about trees, but if you are not fortunate enough to live in the forest and find something, find a park or something, go out. Go outside, into a place of nature, into a place where the khuda wa ta’wa Allah swaha wa ta’wa surrounds you. Go and sit down and just be by yourself. Do nothing, say nothing, speak nothing. And I said, alone. Don’t take your best friend with you. Don’t take your cat or your dog with you. Don’t take your phone with you. Definitely don’t take your phone with you. Be comfortable with yourself. You’re talking about getting life goals. How do I get clarity on my life goals? This is the first step. Make friends with yourself. Second thing you do is you then learn what to do with yourself when you are low. And that is the skill of introspection. Reflection, introspection and abstract conceptualization, three very critical things to do. Reflection, introspection and abstract conceptualization. So this is another word which David Cobb uses in his beautiful model. He calls it reflective observation. It’s a very beautiful term, reflective observation, which is in reflection thinking about the incident that you are reflecting on. Now he’s talking about specific incidents. I’m talking about being there with yourself and your time and trying to be with yourself and your time and see what can I learn. So reflection. For that, for you to be able to do reflection observation and abstract conceptualization, you need a pad and a pen. Again, no tablets, no electronics. Your pad and your pen. Take a pad and pen, sit down in this forest in silence and reflect and introspect. Keep your heart alive with the zikr of Allah. Keep remembering Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala. Let your heart be beating to that, to Allah, to the Duru, to Salam on the Prophet, whatever, subhanAllah, alhamdulillah. But keep focused on yourself and try to be aware of what is happening within yourself. What’s happening in my heart? How do I feel? Right? When you sit in that forest, try to feel your whole body. What do my toes feel like? My head and my arms and my fingertips start from the extremities and come inwards. What is each of these feeling like? This awareness, this physical awareness is very important. It does two things. One is, it is an exercise in developing awareness. And second thing is, it then cancels out the interference that that lack of awareness can Because you know, your back will pain and your leg will do something and so on and so on. And this will all interfere in your thinking and your reflection. So you want to get rid of that. The thing about that is, when you become aware of it, it goes away. It stops disturbing you. So become aware, consciously aware of what is happening to you inside yourself. Once you have done that, bring your mind to the task at hand, which is, what do I want out of life? And write. Don’t worry about grammatically, is it correct? What does the sentence look like? What will somebody who read it, will they laugh, will they cry? What will they do? It’s not about anybody. It’s not an exercise in composition writing. It’s not an exercise in writing poetry. It’s not an exercise in anything. This is between you and yourself and you and your heart and you and Allah. So write down whatever is going on in your mind. Ask yourself questions, write whatever the answer is. Don’t worry about the answer. It doesn’t sound nice. No, just write whatever is in your mind. Including, I think I’m insane. Why did I listen to this lecture? I think Shaikh Yawar is insane. Why write down? Write all of that down. But make sure that you are writing. Writing is critical, without a doubt. The writing is absolutely critical. So make sure you don’t not write. So make sure you write things down. Introspection. Now when you are writing down, remember, as I said, three-step process. Reflection or reflective observation, introspection and abstract conceptualization. So this is the first step. The first step is reflective observation. So you’re writing down what’s happening in your mind, your thoughts about your goal, what are the different goals that I’m potentially considering. Some of them might be clear, some of them might not be clear. And it’s a good thing to try at this stage to narrow down to, if possible, two or three goals. And again, having said that, don’t try and do that in the first attempt. Because especially if you are not used to being by yourself, it’s not easy. So don’t think that, oh, I spent two hours and I didn’t really get anything out of this. No. This is part of the development process. So keep it, keep the thought and keep on your focus on it. And keep working and it will come, inshallah, not to worry. So focus on writing down. And again, as I said, you may have to go again and do it a couple of times. No problem, Alhamdulillah. That’s the way when you start liking this and you will, I hope you will enjoy it as much as I do. So writing down. Now once you’ve written that down, so in that process, try and narrow down to two or three. It’s not difficult because you’re not looking at every single thing or human activity as possible. You’re looking at something which you would like to do when you’re saying out of these which are the top two. Now one caveat. Don’t get into what is practical and what is not practical. For example, you say I want to become a airline pilot. I want to be able to fly A380s or whatever, or whatever is the new plane that gets developed in the place of the A380. I want to learn to fly that. My immediate thought will come, you know, I am a poor guy or I come from a middle class or middle class family. We don’t have a lot of money. Flying school costs a lot of money. How is this going to happen? Don’t worry about that. Do not worry about the practicality of it. Right now at this stage of the exercise, we are looking at narrowing down possibilities of what we want to achieve. No matter how impossible it seems, no matter how unlikely it seems, no matter how difficult it seems, no matter how expensive it seems, no matter anything, we are just narrowing down on the possibilities. This is what I would like to do. So focus on that and keep thinking of that. Now once you have that, go home. Take your pad and go home. If you don’t have it yet and you spent a couple of hours and you are getting hungry or something and you want to go home, go home. On the question of hunger, feel free to take some food with you, coffee, tea or whatever is your drink, water, no problem with that. I just don’t want you to go there with your phones and stuff. So take this with you. Now go home. We then go to the second step. And again, we don’t go to the second step until we finish the first step. And the first step may take two or three iterations of this. So I go to the forest the first time, I come back with a few sketchy notes, I am not very happy with that. I go again and I work more on this until I’m satisfied with the notes I have and say, okay, I think I have everything that I need in order to go to the next step of this exercise, which is the step of introspection. So this step of introspection is where you are going to be working with the data you have. And at the stage of introspection, now you think of to make this happen, what are the steps? Once again, don’t worry about can I do it? Can’t I do it? Do I have the resources? Don’t have the resources? No. What is required? What are the steps required? And in that, these I’m saying keep it separate is because there’s always this tendency and temptation to make compromises in the steps to say, well, you know, I don’t have enough money, I don’t have enough time, I’m living in the wrong country. No. The standard is very important. The requirement is very important. If the requirement is not clear, then you don’t know what resources you need to fulfill it. So make sure that your requirement is clear. This is what I need to achieve this goal that I have set for myself. So clarity on the goal, what out of that set of two and three, you can concentrate and try and bring it to one. Even if you can’t bring it to one, bring it to two. Usually a good idea not to take it beyond two. And then you come to the once you have two, then you look at those two and say to achieve number one, what others, what do I need to do? We need to have to achieve number two, what do I need to have? Some of the things you need to have material in terms of money and, you know, getting this or that material stuff. Others may have to do and will have to do with yourself. Developing myself now, developing myself is in two ways. Again, knowledge and so on, whether I need to, I need a PhD, I need a master’s and I need from this university or that university. That’s one part. Second thing is as a human being, what do I need to develop myself? You might say, well, I need to develop more patience. I need to develop better conflict resolution skills. I need to develop better communication skills. I need to develop better skills to communicate with people who I have serious differences with. It’s easy to talk to and be with people that we agree with. But what about people we don’t agree with? In life, you’re going to get both. You’re probably going to get more people you don’t agree with than the opposite. So what are the skills I need for that? Skills of empathy, skills of courage, facing danger and looking danger in the eye without fear. What do I need to do? So there’s a whole series of set of skills that you should identify and say, these are the things that I need to develop. One of the top skills that I recommend, and I think everybody should have it, is the ability to communicate through writing. The skill of writing, the skill of creative writing is a very, very, very important skill. Because remember, that is a legacy skill. Whatever you say is going to be finished. It will be forgotten, even if you record it. If you record it on some media, it might stay there for a while. But what remains is writing. That’s how today, 2000 years after Plato passed away, we still read the Republic. We still read the ancient books of different cultures because of writing. And that’s why even the Quran, al-Karim, which came as the spoken word, the Quran did not come as a written word, it came as a spoken word, was then written down. People didn’t say, well, you know, it’s okay, we all have memorized it and we know it and we love Allah and we love His Rasul and we have everything and we don’t need to write. No, writing is important. And even though the Prophet, sallallahu alaihi wa sallam, was unlettered, he didn’t know how to read and write, he encouraged it and he said, write it down. So that’s how the Quran and the ahadith, his teachings, his explanation of the Quran have been written down from day one. And those who say that the ahadith were not written down, they were not preserved and they’re talking through their hats. They do not have, you know, they don’t understand what they’re saying. It was written down and it makes logical sense. Why would you write down a command and not write down how that command was to be fulfilled? I mean, it makes absolutely zero sense, right? So you’re saying that somebody, people who say that the ahadith were not preserved, they’re effectively saying that we wrote down and what was written down was established the prayer, but not how it is to be done. I mean, it doesn’t make sense. It makes absolutely zero sense. No one with half a brain would do that. And the people who did it were a lot more intelligent than that. So that’s a side note. But on the important point is that learning to write is a very, very important and critical skill which I believe we should develop. So this is what you’re doing now in the introspection exercise. What do I need to succeed? Material things, non-material things, things that I have to do with acquiring knowledge and things that I have to do with acquiring skills and abilities. Some are skills as in to do with your hands and with your mind and so on and communication. So conflict resolution skills and communication skills and so on. But much more important are skills which are a state of being. As a person, what do I need to be and how do I need to be? What is that skill? Develop those skills. Not develop, I mean, write all that down. And this is what I mean. Finally, third stage, which is abstract conceptualization, which is your roadmap going forward. Where you’re going to say, right, so I now have all this data of what I need to do and what I need to develop and so on. So now going forward, what is my game plan? How am I going to do this? Where do I start? When do I start and how do I start? So this is where the issue of the, of coming, arriving at a goal is. So I wish you all the very best and you’re most welcome to comment on the video. Welcome to ask me for further clarification if you think you need it and all the best in setting inspirational goals for yourself and even more importantly in achieving them. Thank you very much and Alhamdulillah, the opportunity to talk to all of you.
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