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Bismillāh ar-Raḥmān ar-Raḥīm, al-ḥamdu lillāhi rabbil-‘alāmīn, wa salātu wa salāmu ‘ala ashrafil-anbiyā’ wal-mursalīn, Muḥammadur Rasūlullāh ṣallallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam, tasliman kathīran kathīrā. Umar Badu, my brothers and sisters, we are looking at the rules of success. These are things that Allah subḥānahu wa ta’ālā sent us into this world to be successful, and to live a life which is productive, beneficial for all those connected with it—so for yourself, for people around you, and so on.
Now, these rules of success: the first one they say is that most people spend their lives trying to avoid loss, playing not to lose. Basically, you are trying to protect the downside; you avoid risk, you avoid embarrassment, you avoid uncertainty, you avoid all things which might go against you. Therefore, you avoid growth. Because growth and progress are functions of risk-taking.
You simply see how you walk. The most stable position for a person is to stand in one place, sit down, or lie down. If you are lying down, you can’t fall. It’s impossible to fall if you are lying down. But if you are lying down, you will lie down until you die because there is no way to move. So when you are walking, think about this: you are actually doing two things. You are walking. You are consciously upsetting your equilibrium. You are standing straight, so when you are walking, what do you do? You lean forward. Now, you lean forward, what happens? You lose your balance. When you lose your balance, you put out your leg to stop your balance from falling. Right? So, you are standing still in one place, you are stable. You lean forward, you lose your balance, but to prevent yourself from falling, you put a foot forward—you don’t fall down. What happened just now? You took a step forward. Then you do the same thing again and again. That’s how you move.
If you say, “I don’t want to lose my balance,” then you stay in one place; you will go nowhere. When you are running, you are only accelerating that. You are enhancing your chance of falling. From walking to running, one way of looking at it is you are enhancing your chance of falling. If you are walking, the chance of falling is less; if you are running, the chance of falling is more. But which is more progress? Which is faster? Right, so this is also in life because the opportunities of life can only be accessed if you are willing to take risk. The biggest risk is to take no risk. Because then you have to fail—I mean, there is no way you cannot possibly succeed. Right? So that is the first lesson: unless you take risk, you will not progress.
You get married—that’s a huge risk. Your life was going perfectly fine; now you bring another person into your life. Things may work out; things may not work out. So I mean some people don’t take that risk; they live their lives as bachelors. To have children is a risk. We don’t know how the child will turn out. There is some control because you are hopefully raising the child and guiding them, but there is no guarantee. Take any business risk, of course—we know you are investing money and so on. Everything connected with developers involves risk.
The second very important thing to understand is the second rule: everything gets worse before it gets better. Before I come to that, let me explain why we don’t take risks. It is because we feel we will fail—there is a fear of failure. Fear of failure is based on the fact that we look at our own life experience to decide whether we can do something and succeed in the future.
It’s like driving while looking in the rearview mirror. Usually, for a lot of people, suppose I tell you, “Babi, I am going to give you an opportunity to speak here, and there will be a crowd of maybe a thousand audience members.” Are you ready? Usually, the response would be, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it.” My simple question is: How do you know? You are saying, “I cannot do it.” My question is: How do you know that you cannot do it? Did you do it before? No, never. If you never did it, how do you know you can’t do it? Logically, it’s impossible. Right? Logically, the only thing you can say with certainty is based on your experience: “I know I cannot do this because I tried and failed.” Even that is not a definitive statement because you tried and failed once; it doesn’t mean you will try and fail a second time. But at least there is some basis to say, “I tried and it didn’t work.” Right?
But if you never tried, then how do you know? You don’t know. But the usual response 99% of the time is, “I can’t do it.” So we have to challenge ourselves and ask, “How do I know?” You cannot live your life based on your previous experience. You have to live your life with the excitement of what is possible in the future.
The second thing which I want to mention is that everything in life or any development—let me put it this way, anything which involves learning something new—begins with a downside. It gets worse first before it gets better. The easiest example is to see if you learn a new language. They say the fastest way to learn a new language is to immerse yourself in that. They actually have immersion courses for new languages. In an immersion course, you sign an oath to say that you will not speak in any language other than the one you are learning.
So, what will happen to your communication? Goes to zero. Literally goes to zero. Because on day one, you don’t know the new language; the one you know, you are not allowed to speak. So what will happen? You have to use sign language or something. There is no other way. Your ability to communicate goes to zero. But if you stick with that, you go through the pain of learning the new words, the grammar, and all the rest. Then a day will come when you will speak in the new language as fluently, or more fluently, than you spoke in the old language. This is the basis on which these immersion courses are run. But you have to go through the pain.
If you plot a graph: say you are at this level, you go down, then you come up and you go further up. That delta going down—that part is painful. Anything new, without exception, anything new is painful and difficult at first. But if you leave it, there is no growth. Then you will not progress because progress means taking risk. Progress means facing the fear of failure and telling yourself—and convincing yourself—that until I do, I don’t know if I will succeed. So I have to try, and then I will succeed, Insha’Allah. And the third point is that you must be clear that at first, everything is painful. Because the whole secret of learning something new is that it takes you through that feeling of painfulness before you can get success. And most people quit. Most people don’t go through that pain. They give up. It’s too difficult; they can’t do it. So if you give up, you give up. I mean, then there is no result—you won’t learn that new thing. And again, we see this in all kinds of aspects of life. So I remind myself with you: if you start something new, it’s painful.
Whether it is tahajjud, whether it is changing—say for example, I must improve my manners. How do I speak to people? You try to do that. Everything is difficult. But if you stick through that pain area, then *Mashallah*, you become somebody who prays tahajjud every day; you become somebody who has beautiful manners, who is influential and so on. But only if you stick through that pain. Only if you take risks. Only if you are not afraid of failure. Or even if you are afraid, you get over the fear. Fear of failure is natural, so you will be afraid. But you must get over that. Do not allow that to block you.
The same thing applies in deen. Then you progress in deen as well. So, we ask Allah to help us live our lives in a way where He is pleased with us and where we focus on learning the joy of acquiring this new skill. That is incidentally one of the ways out of this: visualization. So, you visualize a time when you are good at what you have started. If you are starting a business, visualize a time when this business is massive, enormous, and highly successful. It hasn’t happened yet, but that is the direction you are going by visualizing it. “I am trying to learn a new language.” Right now, I can’t speak the language—a new language to save my life—but I am visualizing a time when I am fluent in that new language. Right? You get married; you are full of all kinds of fears and anxieties, but you look forward to a time when this marriage will be beautiful and you will have a beautiful family and so on. So, this visualization helps to break through these barriers. Because if there is a visualization, and if the visualization is beautiful, then it helps you to go forward. And that is also the principle in the Quran where Allah tells us about Jannah and so forth. Because to help us do what it takes to reach Jannah.
And that is the thing to remember: that is the reason why we have the description of Jannah and Jahannam for both same reasons. The description of Jahannam is so terrible that you don’t want to go there. The description of Jannah is so beautiful that you want to go there. So, it creates this drive because of that visualization, because of that target which is so attractive, it helps you to continue and go through the path of difficulty.
Same thing with exercise, for example. Whichever exercise you are doing, exercise itself is painful obviously. You get sweaty, you get pain, your body hurts, muscles are tense and so on. But you are visualizing a time when you reap the benefit of that exercise. If you are losing weight, you are exercising to lose weight; you visualize a time when you are twenty kilos lighter. Right? Or if you are doing it for strength, you visualize a time when you can lift your wife over the threshold. It depends on whatever you are doing. So, the point is that visualization is a very powerful technique which helps you to get over the difficulty of learning, the difficulty of initiation, and *Insha’Allah* succeed. We ask Allah to help us and enable us to succeed. Wa sallallahu ‘ala nabiyyil kareem wa ‘ala alihi wa sahbihi ajma’in bi rahmatullahi wa barakatuh.