Bismillah-ir-Rahman-ir-Rahim
Assalam-o-Alaikum ladies and gentleman and thank you so much for having me here.
Let me actually start by turning things a little bit on their head in congratulating the parents, the mentors who supported and grounded and groomed the class of 2017 and congratulations on your dedication parents and congratulations on your patience and your hard work and congratulations on what your children have achieved and all of you deserve another round of applause for who you are.
To the graduates, at the end of the day and at this stage of your life, remember you don’t have to be famous, you didn’t have to start off being rich and you have to make your University proud of your achievements and starting position; you have already done that by graduating today, everything else is the icing on the cake. So I could stop here and wish you all well but very sadly, life is not all that simple. You have to endure me a little while longer and it would make for the shortest convocation speech at LUMS ever, but as it is, I need you to know that I start off by being a little bit intimidated because this is the first convocation ceremony I’ve attended in my life; I didn’t attend my own.
Having said that I’m going from here to my alma mater, the London School of Economics, where I’m receiving an honorary degree as well this week, so I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.
Before I get started, it is important to note that you graduate today from one of the most impressive universities in the world. It’s easy to be myopic and say that I’m a graduate of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), which is the finest school in Pakistan and stop it at that. I’m here to tell you that it is actually one of the finest universities in the world and it is a source of enormous pride for me as well as I go around the world, as a traveller, as a business person, I come across people who are graduates of LUMS all over the world and it is so gratifying to see them holding positions of authority, of responsibility and positions that actually help them and their families in the furtherance of their careers.
As a result, as you graduate today you carry with you from this day forward a very important responsibility by virtue of your degree; you are now a global Pakistani, not just a graduate of LUMS. Many of you probably and possibly travel regularly outside of Pakistan but your degree now confers upon you an expectation that you will do much more and as a result of your degree and the nature of the now globalised world that you are now about to enter you are also going to become a global citizen. But always and never forget that you are an ambassador of our proud country and whilst I am on the spirit of congratulating all of you for what you have done let me not let just the Vice Chancellor get away with congratulating Pakistan on the Cricket victory, I add that as well; I was actually there so I’m feeling doubly pleased.
So my work and my life has meant that I am also a global traveller with a global world view but I have always proudly said that I am first and foremost a Pakistani and that is actually what defines me and you are all to have a similar identify. As you head into your professional careers or your further studies, represent both sides of that same equation with pride and with honour.
Now I’m going to come to the part of the speech that is supposed to offer you some council but you know there are somethings that make common sense and once you set your mind on this exciting journey that you’re about to start the advice that I’m going to give you as you to engage with the world, it’s worth stopping and surveying what the world looks like today and place your graduation in the context of that world. As I look out and I think about what is ahead for you, I envy your youth, I envy your passion but most importantly of all, I envy your timing. You really could not have gotten your degrees and your timing better. It is such an incredibly exciting time for the world if you take just a moment and pause and think and step back, we are at a renaissance moment.
If you read the headlines here, at home or all around the world, it doesn’t sometime feel that way but if you look at where we started and where we stand in human history it is never actually been better for most human history. A third of any given population was lost to either disease, famine or war. A hundred years ago, diarrhoea was as likely to kill you and in the 1900’s, the average lifespan was just 30; that’s just a 100 years ago.
Today, given that most of you were born at the dawn of the century, the fact is that most of you are expected to live at or about a 100. Advances in science and medicine mean even the life of a centenarian will feel short in the years ahead. Many of you are going to contribute as you go forward to these advancements and further advancements. In fact, the people that come from our part of the world, the part of the world that others like to refer to as emerging markets, this is our golden hour. What a lot of people do not understand is that we are not emerging, we have emerged. In fact, in the next 20 years, you will deliver an incredible statistic which I’m sure a lot of you don’t know which is that 70 percent of the world’s growth is going to come from the world immediately around you which some still patronizingly refer to as the emerging market and in which Pakistan is very much at the central and core of opportunity.
So I hope that you see the contextual nature in which I’m placing you. Since Trump came to power under the slogan, ‘Make America Great Again’, we just need to let people know how great we are. So the age at that you’re entering into is an age worth exploring and I look at all of you and I think about where we stand in human history, on the cusp of yet more major achievement. I’m reminded of how bamboo grows, even if you water it regularly, giant timber bamboo doesn’t appear to make any gains for the first 3 or 4 years of its life but then suddenly it will sprout 90 feet into the air in just a few months. Today, as you become of age and the world comes of age, you will both be sprouting by leaps and bound at the same time and growing alongside it.
So the idea is that I would like to leave you with pointers that I feel are important as you look forward to where you’re going. First of all, always remain flexible. When I talk to investors, entrepreneurs and business people around the world or indeed to my colleagues, I am known to remind them with regularity, that today’s peacock is tomorrow’s feather duster. This has never been truer in today’s world, given the rapid advancements that we are making and what that means is that you won’t or can’t follow a straight path. You are destined to zigzag; you are destined to adapt to changes that you didn’t anticipate when you first set out. So those that go in a straight line often miss a lot of life and end up contributing a lot less to the world. To me, life is about the zigzag and not just the simple straight path, the start-ups and the start stops that you will inevitably come up with in life and in these terms will define you. Embrace it specifically at this age. At some point, age and responsibilities are going to catch up with all of you and will force you to go down this straight route but at this moment in your life, take the risks, in fact, for as long as you can take the risk, be adaptable, be malleable because you will shape the world with the hammer which is your degree and don’t just wait for the world to shape you.
Second and equally importantly, be hungry, stay hungry and work hard. This has been a maxim that I’ve followed all my life and every single person that I know who has achieved something in life follows this maxim as well. This is not an adaptable truth, this is reality. We can romanticise the notion of dreams but dreams stay dreams unless you put work into them. Part and parcel of staying hungry is always to be learning, always keeping your ears open and frankly that is why God gave us two ears and one mouth; use the ears more, listen and learn; be a sponge. In business and in life, listening is one of the most important skills that you need and that you will sometimes acquire.
Today technology is giving us Alexa, it is giving us Siri and it’s giving us a whole host of artificial intelligence, enhanced technologies, that you are probably more comfortable with than I am. But then that is your competition that is who you’ll compete with. But you are different from a machine. You have a different reason for listening. What you have is humanity. A machine cannot acquire humility. To learn from listening, it is important to check your ego because listening is really all about what I am not seeing, what do I not know and remember your blind spots are bigger than you clear spots; be humble, listen and then be ready to forge ahead.
The next point I want to bring forward in front of you is to act fast and be nimble, if you are eager to get ahead, do things that no one else wants to do in this life, do them better than anybody else would, what that means is that you will almost inevitably fail at times but believe me when I tell you that if you fail at something, that you love doing and you’re motivated to go out doing and keep doing, it will never feel like failure. As an investor I’m often told by Silicon Valley types, let us celebrate failure and to be honest. I’m always puzzled by this a little bit. Remember what I told you earlier about being a global Pakistani, that’s where I get stuck. It is the Pakistani side that means I know that I don’t celebrate failure, I understand it. It’s not comfortable telling Pakistani parents, ‘beta kia kar rahey ho? Abbu failure celebrate kar raha hoon, saal doh saal baad kuch aur karron ga’. I don’t think that goes down well in our environment. We just have to keep doing what we do and learn from it and understand it and maybe, it is the millennial mind-set that all of you are so comfortable with and all the people up here find difficult sometimes to understand.
But I can tell you that what you will find most important is to learn what you know but importantly learn what you do not know and focus on just that much and this is why I keep saying that the meaning of humility is that you have to treat success and disaster with equal anonymity. It is about the process of moving towards triumph; it is about learning from each failure in terms of how you move forward, always staying ahead as you grow. It reminds me of the story of a lion and two people sitting on a campsite and they watch this lion coming towards them and they figure out that the lion is going to eat them. So one of them starts putting on his running shoes and the other one turns to him saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re doing that because that’s a hungry lion and we’re never going to be able to get away. Why are you to get away from the lion?’
The first person putting on his shoes says, ‘Actually I’m not putting them on so I can run away from the lion, I’m only putting them on so I can run faster than you’, and that’s an important point.
Empathy, ladies and gentleman, is your strongest asset, one thing that everybody seems to care about today, seems to be so sure about today, is the advent of artificial intelligence. As I was referring to earlier and the automation of our jobs, it’s the reality that we can’t really avoid, it is here! We are not too far away from cyborgs, doing a lot of the things that we actually are trained to do and are comfortable doing ourselves but the reality is that in doomsday terms this is inevitable; this is upon us and cannot be avoided. However, it is one thing to be thinking about automatic car production, which the experts tell us is inevitable and it is another thing to imagine someone automating the job that all of us in the service industry are used to. But let us not forget, what a robot will have is something called A.I.Q, which is the Artificial Intelligence Quotient.
What you have is E.Q, which can never be replaced, and I think at the end of the day it will come down to the difference; it is going to come down to empathy, to humanity and that is the difference between you as you move forward and the world of technology that will surround you.
So in summary, we talked about being flexible, we talked about thinking anew, we talked about acting anew, we talked a lot being hungry, we talked about being industrious. I asked you to consider the fact that you need to ask a lot of questions and then listen to the answers, even if you don’t like to hear them. Forth, I suggested that we act fast and that you be nimble and that you embrace humanity and fifth, whatever you choose to do, love doing it, love it truly because life is too short for any other alternative.
Empathy is integral to all of these things and in all of these things, it is important to understand that you will be forging your own future. Circumstances will help you get there but you will be forging them and in the course of doing that, you are going to come across adversity, embrace it, do not be scared of adversity, be prepared for it. A famous poet from our country, Syed Sadiq Hussain said,
“Tund ye baad-i-mukhalif se na ghabra ae uqaab,
Yeh tou chalti hai tujhe ooncha udaane ke liye.”
I don’t need to translate it. I know all of you know what it means but loosely translated it says, that do not be scared of the hurricane or the violent winds; they only exist to make you fly faster and higher. So the one thing that I would like to add before I finish this moralistic side of what I’m talking about is something that my father always used to tell me. He passed away nine years ago but he always used to say to me as he watched me grow, he would always say, success and wealth is something you should stand on; never put it on top of your head because when you stand on it, it will make you taller. If you put it on your head it will make you smaller and if you follow that understanding and if you follow that reality, what you will realize is that wealth, success, being famous; all these are transient things. What people will remember is who you are, how you dealt with them, the empathy you had, the humility you show and the route that you followed in helping people understand where you come from and where you come from is a nation which has not achieved its potential, that is trying out to achieve its potential that is misunderstood in the world. Alongside our religion, which is also often hijacked by people that should not hijack it and who use very narrow ideology to hijack it and to mislead the rest of the world in to who we are and we stand for.
As you go out, as you celebrate your life, please understand the responsibility on your shoulders is just for yourself. Again going back to my father, when he passed away and I was collecting his belongings, I came across a large box and when I opened it, I saw going back 15 years, a collections of articles, videos, stories and news clippings about myself and my sisters and I realised at that point that he was living his life vicariously through us and that source of pride that he felt is the source of pride that every single person in this room, in the back rows is feeling right now as I’m speaking. These are the parents that you need to make proud, this is the country that you need to make proud.
Finally, I would like to talk to you a little bit about leadership and what that means in 2017. So what does it mean to be a leader? You may be surprised when I tell you what I consider to be a good leader. I’m fortunate enough in the course of my life, I’m a traveller, I prefer defining myself as that than anything else because I’m also a continuous learner and I meet people from different walks of life and I’m fortunate to have a job that helps me back great leaders. So I have to look closely at that and whether that’s a large corporate my organisation is going to buy or it’s a new entrepreneur that’s hungrily going out into the world or someone who’s going to lead a non-profit that we’re going to support; an artist, a student, it doesn’t matter who it is, leadership gets stamped very early and I’m always on the hunt for great leaders. So I ask you as you go forward, to look for two things in leaders, attempt to be that yourself.
The first is that they all want to contribute and cultivate resilience in this world. Secondly, they do what they do and they do what they can in service of others and in a way that is very authentic in defying who they are. You are very fortunate that your Rector is a global leader and is defined by that around the world; you are fortunate that you have among you faculty leaders and you are fortunate that you have, in your community and in your families, leaders that you can emulate and think through and follow up on and I personally live my life in a very similar manner. I look for leaders, for people that can be backed and that can actually overtime force you to look at them and say I am here, I am a leader, they do not do it through noise, they do it through force of habit and in their way in which they walk this world.
So it is very important as you do so that I want to talk to you now about the non-profit side of life, about health, about education, about water platforms, about people in markets that need the quality of life that they are denied, that you are blessed to have and we talked a little bit earlier in the Vice Chancellor’s introduction about Aman Foundation; where I was fortunate, alongside my family, to create something that is focused on giving back to Pakistan. But you know if you want to be a leader, you have to find that authentic part of you that ultimately focuses on service to other and for all the positive things that I described about the world today, there is no denying that we continue to face challenges around this income inequality, around climate change and around all kinds of biases. A lot of which we face as Pakistani’s daily.
Think for yourself that you can connect whatever it is you want to do in life and it is going to be multiple things, think of you connecting all of those in helping them make the world a better place. Do not try and boil the ocean, stay smart and do what you can as your bit in helping make the world a better place. Be a mentor, there is nothing more important than leading by example. Give someone whether, it is as simple as a chai or a pani, to start with when they need it. Help build resilience in this world by thinking of others because it is going to bring you success, it is going to bring you happiness and most important of all it is going to make you feel good about yourself.
Do not procrastinate as you go through life and let me say something in conclusion which is obvious, but one you can hang your hat on. Life is too short if you live to be a 100 years old. You are now starting a journey where you have about 30,000 days ahead of you; maybe a bit more with advances in technology and science. But at the end of the day that is a motivator and as Muslims we all know that we have to accept it with finality.
I do not want to sound sad about this but it exists in order to stop us from procrastinating, it exists in order to force us to make our life more meaningful. An 18th century English poet said, “Procrastination is the thief of time”. So whatever you do, even when it feels you have a lot of time on your hands do it fast, do it quickly and understand and recognise, that your place in this world today, your presence in this graduating class, the reality of sitting here and embarking on this journey means that you are already in that privileged 1 one percent of humanity. Use that wisely ladies and gentleman and enjoy your lives. You have much to look forward to and I congratulate you Class of 2017.
