Auto-generated transcript:
Bismillahir Rahmanir Raheem. Alhamdulillahi Rabbil Alameen. Wasalaatu wasalaamu ala ash-sharafeel anbiya wal mursaleen. Muhammadur Rasoolullahi Sallallahu Alaihi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam, tasliman kathiran kathira. Fumma badhu. My brothers and sisters, one of the courses I teach is called the elevator speech. Now the scenario of the elevator speech is that we say, we tell the people imagine you are CEO or imagine some very powerful person who has the ability to do something that can change your life positively, right? Now imagine that you are in the Trump Tower and on the 80th floor and as you are in the elevator and as the doors are about to close, you hear a shout, hold the door and you hold the door and Mr. Donald Trump walks into the elevator. The door shuts and the elevator is going down, right? You can change the name of Donald Trump to whoever you want to change, meaning this powerful person who can do something for you. Now those elevators, they travel pretty fast, right? It’s not a slow train to Kokomo. So you have maybe, I would say, 20 seconds or so, or 25 seconds before you come to the first floor, doors open, the man is gone. So now you have this person with you exclusively for 20 seconds. The question I ask people is, what will you say to that person which has the potential to change your life? Obviously positively. What will you say? Most people will say, my name is so-and-so. Your name might be the most interesting thing for you, maybe it was for your mom, but for anybody else, makes no sense. Why is he interested in your name? Now you have 20 seconds. Out of the 20 seconds, mine is so-and-so. How much time? And obviously you can’t ask the man, what is your name? Because if you didn’t even know who he is, then what are you talking about? So you are supposed to know his name. Then most people will say, I’m a businessman. So you are a businessman. We are in the United States of America. They are like three and a half zillion businessman and you are one of them. Very nice. I’m an IT programmer. That’s fantastic. 80% of the IT companies in the world have Indian IT programmers. I’m a doctor or even better. So what would you say that sticks in the mind of the person? That’s the question. So I’m not going to give you any answer. Answer it for yourself. The point I want to make here is this. The principle I’m talking about here is what I call differentiation. What differentiates you? What makes you different from everybody else? What makes you stand out? Because differentiation creates brand. Brand inspires loyalty. Loyalty enables influence. Memorize this. Differentiation creates brand. Brand inspires loyalty. Loyalty enables influence. When you go to a grocery store to buy toothpaste, you don’t say, give me toothpaste. You name a brand that you use. Right? If I tell you I’m going to go out of here and I’m going to buy a car, what’s the first question you’re going to ask me? What’s the question? Which car? Exactly. I said, Nabil, what do you mean which car? I’m going to buy a car. You tell me, Sheikh, what is a car? There’s no such thing as a car. Is there something called a car in the market? Tell me seriously, is there something called a car in the market? There’s no car. There’s a Mercedes, there’s a BMW, there’s a Tesla if your brain has fried. There is a, you know, there is a Maserati, there is a Bugatti, there is a this and that. What’s a car? What’s this thing in the car? Differentiation. Branding is all about differentiation. What makes you different in a positive way? Which touches the heart of your customer? Without brand, you are one grain of rice in a sack. You’re still rice, but you’re one grain in a sack. Nobody knows you live, nobody knows you died, nobody cares. Differentiate. How do you differentiate? You differentiate by surrounding yourself with people who are better than you, who will push you, who will stretch you, in whose company you will be uncomfortable because you are trying to catch up with them. Which means that if you are in a group of friends with whom you are very comfortable, run like hell. Get out. If you are in a group of friends who make you feel that you are God’s gift to mankind, run like hell. Because the only person who believes that you are God’s gift to mankind is your mom. For almost everyone else in the world, you are a pain in the you-know-where. But what’s the normal tendency of people? We like to be with people who we are very comfortable with. We like to be with people who never ask us any uncomfortable question. We like to be with people who make us feel great, oh fantastic, you are the best. You’re not the best. You are a nice person. You are not the best. You are not even close to the best. Because the best, what is the best? If I think I’m an olive, I don’t. I’ve said this in a million places in the world. But suppose I say, people like to come, oh, you are a good… I tell them, look, a man came to Imam Ahmad bin Umar, Mahatul Ali, and he asked him to do, to make istambadul hakaam, to be able to extract a ruling, how many ahadis should a person know? And no meaning by heart, not, you know. Imam Ahmad didn’t say anything. So the man was persistent. So he started. Guess what number he started with. Did he say 10 ahadis, 100, 500, 1,000? No. He said 10,000 ahadis. Is it enough? 10,000 ahadis memorized with the chain of narrators. Imam Ahmad bin Umar said no. He said 20, he said no. He said 30, he said no. He went all the way to 100,000 ahadis. Imam Ahmad said maybe. Maybe. Imam Ahmad himself, Rahmatul Ali, is reputed to have in memory 120,000 ahadis. Or more. Allah knows. Now that is an ahli. But if you are in a group of people who tell you, MashaAllah, Sheikh, you are the best of the best, and you feel nice, ah, MashaAllah, very nice. In India, there is an exam called UPSC exam, United Public Service Commission, which is the exam for our cream of the bureaucrats, the IPS, IAS, and IFS, Indian Police Service, Indian Administrative Service, and Indian Foreign Service. This exam every year, one million people sit for the exam. And it has a pass rate of 0.2% out of one million. 0.2%. That only the exam. After that, there’s an interview in which that 0.2% is also slashed mercilessly, and only then whoever comes, comes. There is a joint examination for the top MBA schools, business schools in India, which are called the IIMs, Indian Institutes of Management. I went to the best of them, Indian Institute of Management, Andhavad. When I went in 1985, there were only four. Now there are more. That joint exam, 200,000 students sit for that every year. Now I think there are 5,000 seats, so 5,000 out of 200,000. When I went in 1985, there were probably about a thousand seats. So it’s five times more difficult. We have another set of colleges in India called the Indian Institutes of Technology, which are engineering colleges. They say people who fail the IIT exam join MIT. That’s how difficult it is. 1.2 million students sit for the IIT joint examination. There are 10,000 seats in the whole country. Now I was on the board of a trust which gives scholarships, which belongs to the Islamic Bank in Jeddah. And I was in Delhi, so I went to see a place, which is a place where students go to prepare for the UPSC exam. So when I went there, I expected to see a fantastic library and a guest list of professors from top universities and so on who are coming to coach these people. Nothing. It was a hostel. There were study rooms. That’s it. So I said, where is the library? They said, no library. They bring their own books. So I said, does anybody come to give them? Yeah, we have them once in a week. Somebody comes and… So I said, how then do you have students who come here and that particular institution had the highest rate of students who passed the exam? They said, what are you doing here? How are the students passing the exam when there’s nothing here to see? They say the students are their own boosters. He said, all the students here, they are here with one focus, which is to pass the exam. So he says, the atmosphere of competition, of stretching is so huge, they sleep in that whole period. He said, they sleep for maybe two hours in the night. That’s it. So when you are in that, it stretches you. It makes you hugely uncomfortable, which is very good for you. That’s how you grow. When you go to the gym, what do you do? You lift teaspoons? No. You lift heavy weights. When you lift heavy weights, the first thing that happens, your whole body pains. Suppose you say, no, no, no, no, don’t do that. Like most people say today, no, no, keep everything short, five minutes, because our youth, they have no attention spans. Attention span is only five minutes. So I said, that attention span is only for the word of Allah. What about when they are watching basketball? Do you have a five minute basketball match? Have you ever seen a five minute soccer match? So what happens to the attention span there? I sometimes tell my young friend, people look down on you, man. You should counter these arguments. Tell people, excuse me, uncle, I’m not so stupid. Don’t keep saying we have no attention span. Who told you? Maybe you don’t have an attention span. I have an attention span. Because the world goes to the people who have concentration. The world goes to the people who are consistent, because consistency beats brilliance every single time. You need concentration. You need attention spans. You need consistency. You need to push yourself. That’s how you build strength. That’s how you build diligence. So if you are with a bunch of people who are asking you uncomfortable questions, whose level of intellectual, their understanding, their reading, their knowledge is way above yours, what will happen? You will be hugely uncomfortable, and you will try to catch up with them. That’s how you grow. That is how you grow. You don’t grow by hanging out with people who are just like you, who make you feel very comfortable, whole bunch of mediocre people who will go nowhere. Who will go nowhere? Take my word for it. Take a photograph. And 20 years from now, by then I will be in my grave, inshallah. Look at the same photograph and see where those people are. They go nowhere. Because when you’re just coasting along, it means you have no engine. You have no drive. You will coast along as long as there is a gradient in the road, and then you come to a dead end. The moment you see a little bit of an incline, you’re dead. You start going backwards. The world is full of people like that. That’s a choice. I want to end with this. The world is full of people like that. They did a study in 1999. They did a study in the United States. They said, what is the number of people who reach a level of excellence? They marked a level of excellence as an Olympic gold medal. How many people reach a level of excellence in their field? 2%. 98% are sheep. That’s the choice you have. You want to be part of the 2%? You can be. You want to feel comfortable and relax and have a great time and hang out with all your friends? That’s your choice. Don’t complain. You will be part of that 98%. That is the majority of the world. Sheep. The 2% around the world. That also is your choice. So choose wisely because it is your life. We ask Allah, subhanAllah, jala jala, to help us to make the choices and then give us the grit and the determination and the consistency to stay with the choice. And we ask Allah for barakah and His help in reaching levels never reached before, so that when they look, they will see a Muslim standing in the top place. Wasallallahu alayhi wa sallam. May Allah be with you.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (11.5MB) | Embed
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Email | Youtube Music | RSS