Words from the heart – Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Centre

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Alhamdulillah Rabbil Alameen wa salatu wa salam ala ashrafil anbiya wal mursaleen.
Muhammad wa Rasulullah sallallahu alayhi wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa sallam tasleeman kathiran kathira.
My brothers and sisters, I want to share with you some words from the heart.
I call these attitudes of success.
The first one of them is an attitude of gratitude.
To be grateful and to express gratitude.
To thank people.
We landed here in Hyderabad less than a week ago.
And two things that simultaneously stood out for me.
One was the attitude.
The absolutely tumultuous welcome that we received.
From friends, from relatives, from neighbors.
Absolutely.
As if I was the best thing or we were the best thing, my wife and I, that happened to them in their life.
I ask Allah to make that true for them.
And for them not to be disappointed.
So, amazing.
We are settling into our house.
And we are flooded with food.
Different people send us all kinds of absolutely fabulous Hyderabadi cooking.
From their homes, hot.
Fills up the fridge.
At the same time, I go on the street and there is completely insane traffic.
And unfortunately,
unfortunately,
the infrastructure is so bad that on the one hand, we have these buildings which if you keep your eye and you look at the angle of what 45 degrees, you will not be blamed for imagining that you were in Manhattan or you were in downtown Chicago or something.
Beautiful buildings, huge skyscrapers, absolutely steep.
And glass everywhere and so on.
But lower your gaze and you find a road that is from the previous century.
Completely filled with, I mean, I don’t think you can call it a road because it’s like one pothole joined with another pothole.
And people are, you sit in the car, you have to hold on because you’re being thrown from side to side.
The only good thing about it is that traffic moves at walking pace.
Now, I have a choice.
I have a choice to moan and groan about that and say how bad the traffic is and how bad the road is.
And obviously, there’s a lot of pollution and so forth.
Or I have the option of feeling immense gratitude to Allah SWT for putting love and respect and honor for me and my wife in the hearts of people.
So people go out of their way.
People welcome us.
People are, you know, very, very good to us.
Now, this is a choice.
And believe me, no matter what situation you are in, this choice is always there for us.
Which aspect of your life do you want to look at?
Everybody in the whole world, no matter who they are, have things in their lives which are good and they have things in their lives which are painful.
Everyone.
Irrespective of…
Place, irrespective of position, irrespective of wealth, health, you name it.
And at the same time, they have a choice.
What do you want to look at?
So I remind myself and you, let us have an attitude of gratitude.
Be grateful for what we have.
Don’t worry about what we don’t have.
Bear what is painful with dignity and silence.
And then you make sure…
Make sure that you thank other people.
You thank the people who are doing all this good for you.
The good comes from Allah .
But Allah uses people to get that good to you and me.
And that’s why Rasulullah said, the one who has not thanked the people has not thanked Allah .
It’s very important to thank people because you may forget, but they won’t.
And that is called reputation.
And you can’t put a dollar.
Value on it.
So the first thing to do is attitude of gratitude.
Second one is to define your purpose.
Don’t live life by default.
Cows live by default.
Buffaloes live by default.
Get up in the morning, go eat some grass.
Uh, come back to the stable in the night.
I go to sleep.
That is the life of animals.
It’s not the life of human beings.
So take thoughtful decisions based on their expected outcomes.
And as far as we are concerned, the expected outcome is the effect of that decision in the Akhira, not just in this world, in this life.
I want to suggest to you a wonderful book in this context called Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin.
G-E-O-F-F-C-O-L-V-I-N.
Talent is Overrated.
Now he talks about this.
What is what he calls thoughtful practice?
Thoughtful practice.
Not by default.
Consciously doing something.
Very aware of how you are doing that and the expected outcomes.
So my advice to myself and you is don’t live by default.
Make active, thoughtful choices.
Not to do that is also a choice.
Meaning not to live thoughtfully.
It’s also a choice.
But what you are really doing, if you do that, is choosing to hand over the control of your life to someone to whom you are at best a resource.
Like raw material or money or something else.
They will spend you and can afford to lose you.
If you do this, you will be used.
Then don’t complain.
I was here in the United States in 1997.
Not here.
I’m right now.
In Hyderabad.
But, you know, I just came here a week ago.
So and I went to the United States in 1997 with the idea of setting up a consulting company.
I went through a period of almost six months of practically no work because naturally I was building the business I was making lots and lots of cold calls.
I was driving.
I was literally hundreds of miles going from one town to another town.
Trying to try to make up, you know, draw some clientele and so on and so forth.
So I had no money.
Zero income.
A lot of people, well-meaning people.
They said to me, why don’t you work in a convenience store?
Why don’t you work at a gas station when you are free off?
Because, you know, everyone does that.
This is how all the Desi start.
They start from a gas station.
What I would do in that free time.
I would start from a gas station.
Free time was I would spend that time in the masjid in ISWM in West Springfield.
And I would study under the Imam at the time, Sheikh Wissam Abdul-Waqi.
Sheikh Wissam taught me Tajweed of the Quran.
He taught me Usul Tafseer.
And he taught me many things.
He taught me the love of Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala and the love of his Rasul alayhi salatu wasalam.
SubhanAllah, there are two things I remember about Sheikh very well, which is his.
Complete and total commitment and strong faith in Allah and commitment to Tawheed.
Absolutely rigid commitment to Tawheed and also his immense love for Rasul Allahi salallahu wasalam.
Both of which Alhamdulillah he transferred into my heart.
And I thank him for that.
So this is what I did.
I spent my all my free time.
I would spend in the masjid in ISWM the entire day.
I would just hang around there in the library.
And the other two companions I had there was Sheikh Omar Yateen and Sheikh Malham Barhat.
May Allah Ta’ala grant them Jannatul Firdausul Aala bi Ghairi Hisaab.
They were like two pillars of this masjid, of that masjid.
So I did that.
Now obviously none of these were money making, you know, initiatives.
And so I was in need of money, but I didn’t do that.
Now that was a hard choice.
And my argument to myself and to whoever asked me was that I came here to do a particular job.
I came here to build a business.
I did not come here to pump gas.
And I definitely did not come here to work in a convenience store selling lotteries and cigarettes.
So therefore I will not do that.
I will work with my purpose in mind.
The result was that in a matter of about another two, three months,
I was hired by AMA International, which is the largest training company in the world.
And I was one of, I think they said at that time in the year they had, that year, which was 1997,
they had 14,000 applicants out of which they chose 15.
And I was one of them.
So literally one in a thousand was the choice.
And I got that, alhamdulillah.
And we never looked back.
I went to the point of, at that time I was charging, if I recall correctly, roughly $5 a minute.
If you, you know, both backwards, it was $2,500 for a training day, which worked out to about $5 per minute.
Now that happened because of focus.
And I was working.
And I was very busy.
I was working for a group in Singapore.
I had a very simple job.
I stayed in the hospital.
I had several more, there were trials and contracts to be announced.
Several times I was Jerusalem.
I was giving the prisoners a prescription that they only needed about six weeks or more
because they were givenщ기가 which was your stage of birth and wise placement of income.
Because I was wasn’t like.
That is why I could not.
And so how did I control the wasn’t until I was 10 or 11 or something.
I would not change the Patri saw me being responsible for it.
I would still put on that fight 처음.
pamher sekarang
steps, which is five miles. As a friend of mine tells me, who’s a physician who deals with
people who are trying to lose weight, he says, your weight is tied to your fridge.
Your weight is tied to your fridge. So make sure that you eat sensibly, that you eat
as much as you need, not as much as you want, and invest in yourself and measure that investment.
So your health. If you do not walk, if you do not have strong legs, you are looking at a wheelchair.
That incidentally is my motivation. Anytime I’m feeling lazy to go for a walk, I tell myself
wheelchair. I have this keyword wheelchair. And believe me, that gets me out of bed, gets me
into my track pants so fast, it’s not funny. So I do that. The second thing is, of course,
economics, which is when you, what you earn, never spend more than,
what you earn, never spend more than 60% of what you earn, 40% save it, invest it,
save it and invest it. So eventually you end up with earning assets that are earning for you,
and which do not require your daily input in order to earn. So you don’t necessarily have
to work in order to live. Create that kind of an investment. And third thing is,
invest in relationships. Believe me, never take people for granted. Never take people
for granted, any people, young people, old people, poor people, rich, rich people doesn’t
matter what kind of people. If they are people, they must not be taken for granted.
People are very important and people must be appreciated, and that appreciation must show.
Fourth and last one, an attitude of learning.
I remind myself and you, you don’t stop living when you die.
You stop living when you stop learning.
So ask questions, experiment.
Don’t be afraid to try new things and new places and new people and new food and new situations.
And document your learning.
What you don’t document, you lose.
This is very important.
Write it all down.
What you don’t document, you lose.
Invest in your own learning because that is a competitive advantage.
There is nothing that is better than that.
I have had cases, two distinct incidents I remember when in both cases,
these were clients who were considering different consultants.
And usually, you know, people make that excuse because that’s the easiest excuse to make.
So they said to me,
your fee is more than that of the other person.
So I asked them, I said, let me tell you, I said to them,
let me tell you what I have invested in my learning in the last 12 months.
And I showed them.
I said, I have read these books.
I have attended these courses.
I have done this, this.
And all of this I paid for.
You did not pay for that.
I paid for that.
And I am bringing that to you.
You today when I am speaking to you.
So most welcome.
Please ask the other person.
What have they invested in their learning?
Or are they coming to you with whatever learning they had when they used to learn?
Your choice.
Hire who you want.
I never, ever lost a client because of this.
Because when you bring to the client and say,
this is what I have been doing.
This is what I have gained.
And this is what I bring to the table.
This is what I have been able to do.
Believe me, there is no client in the world who is stupid enough to say,
well, I don’t care what you learned or you didn’t learn.
You are too expensive.
If they are saying that, then they are not your client.
They are not your client.
You are just talking to the wrong person.
So attitude of learning.
Learn, document that learning.
Monitor that learning.
Put a metric on it.
Take a measurement on that learning.
So quick recap.
An attitude of gratitude.
Define your purpose and take thoughtful decisions based on their expected outcomes.
Don’t live by default.
Then appreciate and take care of yourself because nobody else will or can.
And four is attitude of learning.
Because you don’t stop living when you die.
You stop living when you stop learning.
We ask Allah to help us to do that which pleases Him
and to save us from that which does not please Him.
And may Allah bless the most gracious, the most merciful and the most merciful.
I request you for your dua.
So please don’t forget me and my family in your dua.