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In the name of Allah, the most Gracious, the most Merciful. All praise be to Allah, the Lord of the worlds. And peace and blessings be upon His servants and messengers. Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace be upon him and upon his family, and upon the companions of the Prophet, peace be upon him. And many more. My brothers and sisters, the other day we talked about… I talked about needs and wants. And I mentioned to you and I said to you that the root of all problems, the root of all misery is when people convert their wants into needs. But if you keep needs as needs, and a need is something which if you don’t have it, it will result in harm. Dharuri. The absence of which will create Dharar. Something which is critical, essential, the absence of that will result in harm. It’s a need. Anything which does not fall into that category, it’s something which is nice to have, something which you will enjoy, something which is, you know, which will make you happy and so on. But it’s not something which is essential for survival. That’s not a need, it’s a want. Now if you convert these wants into needs, if you bring them into that scope of needs, then automatically your stress goes up, the amount of money you need to earn goes up, the space you need to live goes up, the number of people you have to satisfy and make happy goes up. And when all of these things go up, your own happiness goes down. Now in this context, the thing I want to say to you is this, second step of this, which is that you will find in life, and either take my word for it now and look at yourself and if you need to change, change, or wait for the next ten years, wait for the next twenty years and you will discover for yourself. Except that if you take my word for it now and do something to change yourself, you will benefit and if you don’t, if you wait, then you will discover in another way which will be highly painful and you cannot change that. Now and that is that discipline always beats talent. Discipline always beats talent. Discipline always beats talent. You can be the most talented person in the world, but if you are not disciplined, that talent will never flower, that talent will never do anything good for you. Now take for example, think of artists, think of musicians, think of since you guys are interested in sport, think of great basketball players, great soccer players, great football players, great cricket players and so on and so on. And people who seem to be tremendously talented, they say, but this person has absolute talent. And then go into their life and see the number of hours of practice per day that they put into their game. I was watching Tiger Woods tournament last night. It’s almost magical the way the guy puts, the way the guy drives from one hole to another hole. And I have to remind myself, it’s not magical at all. It’s the result of playing golf from the time he was two years old. His father put him, he started training him from the time he was two years old. And he’s been, he has hit more strokes, he has hit more shots than his competent, than the one who is competing against him. The same thing with Kobe Bryant, the same thing with, name the person you watch. Zach Hirosano recently died, the tabla player. Like any so-called talented person who is top of their job, top of their profession and who the world thinks is doing magic, it’s not magic. It’s sweat. It is sweat. This is something that people forget. people come to me and they say, you know, I don’t like this job that I’m doing. It’s okay. So what do you want to do? No, I want to give it up. I want to give it up. Okay, sure. Give it up. But do me a favor. Go to Walmart and buy yourself a plastic bowl. Why? Because then it will be useful when you have to stand on the street corner to beg. Plastic bowl is useful to have, you know, you can stick it out like that and people can throw money into it. Because if you are going to leave a job that you’re doing which is paying you money and you don’t have another one lined up, a better one lined up, then you are looking at standing on the street corner. Is that what you want to do with your life? And because I don’t like it, wake up, wake up, smell the coffee. You don’t have to like the job. You do the job so that you can do something which you actually like. If you can find a job that you also like, fantastic, brilliant. I was personally, I was able to do that practically all my life. But not everybody can do it. People do jobs to put bread on the table. People do jobs to pay their bills. People do jobs to send their children to school. They don’t necessarily like the job, but they do it so that lives are built. And they take satisfaction from the fact that I’m sending my children to good schools. I’m able to afford a standard of living for my family. Yeah, so I’m doing a job which I don’t like too much. I’m doing a job which is stressful but doesn’t matter because the satisfaction I get from what I can do from this job outweighs whatever stress there is in the job. So my submission to you, my brothers and sisters, get disciplined. Right? Take your, bring your head down from wherever you’re stuck it up. Take a look at the world. The world is not made for you to like it. The world is made. You learn to do what needs to be done. Discipline is to do what you need to do, not just do what you like to do. And as I told you, discipline will always beat talent. Get a skill. Get a skill. Any skill. It doesn’t matter. Electrician, carpenter, motor mechanic, you know, you name it. Get a skill, something which you can do with your hands, which is yours. I see a lot of people doing, working in call centers, working in, they’ve given them all these, you know, great titles. You think it means something, it means garbage. I’m in business development. What do you do? Tell me what exactly do you do? And what is it that you do which makes you irreplaceable? Business development? Who is she? Technical support? What is technical support? You’re answering phone calls. For God’s sake, you’re sitting in a call center, answering phone calls. And if you don’t have an answer, you escalate it. That’s all you do. Sure, so that, you know, you’re making some money, somebody’s paying you that. That is the number one job that will go out of the window the moment AI comes to power. Get a skill, something that you can do with your hands. No matter which AI comes to power, the kitchen sink will get clogged. The train will get clogged. Electrical connections will get shorted out. Buildings will be constructed, will continue to be constructed. But houses and buildings and commercial buildings and whatnot, all of which need wiring, all of which need electricity, all of which need plumbing, AI will not replace those things. AI will replace all these airy-fairy jobs which, you know, you’re doing it today, Alhamdulillah. Allah has given you some excuse to feed you. But if you think that thing has any longevity, zero. One of the downsides of working from home, which you think is such a great thing, most of you, is that you learn zero social skills. You do not know how to work with people. You do not know how to deal with people. You do not know how to deal with conflict. You do not know how to lead teams. You do not know how to inspire people. All of these are contact sports. All of these come by grazing your knees on the shop floor. All of these come by butting heads with other people. And all of these come by shedding tears and blood, by actual physical contact with other human beings, by getting into disagreements and resolving them in such a beautiful way that you come out as friends, not as enemies. Zero skills. Zero presentation skills. Because all you’re doing is sitting there getting chat GPT to write stuff for you and mouthing it and you think that this is learning something. No, no, no, no. John D. Rockefeller said, I will pay more for the ability to deal with people than I will pay for any other ability under the sun. And if you are working from your terminal, from your computer, from your home, believe me, you are not learning about how to deal with people. So what happens when AI replaces your job? It will. These are the primary jobs that will get replaced in one second. Your employer will be the dumbest fool in the world if he’s going to pay a whole bunch of people to sit around answering phone calls when he has, he can get that done, when he can automate that whole system. Then what do you do? Forget about liking. It’s about discipline. Get a skill, a unique skill to yourself. Which is marketable, which you can take with you anywhere in the world. And get disciplined. Forget about liking. Do the best job that you can do because that is going to build your competence. And if you are doing a job which is not building your competence, you’re selling yourself short. We ask Allah, Subhanahu wa ta’ala, to give us the sense to understand and to accept advice which we may not like. This tyranny of liking is destructive, believe me. Listen to experience, listen to the truth and whether you like it or not, recognize that that is the truth and learn to like it and learn to do what you are being advised to do.
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