Start Your Online Business
Simple, Not Easy
I recently had a discussion with Yasir Nisar over a cup of warm tea and hot samosas. Yes, tea and samosa. Yasir is a professional photographer here in Pakistan. His pictures can sell upwards of 50,000 rupees each. Each. His calendar for the next few months, by his own...
A Word of Advice on Words of Advice
A lot of people share and keep sharing Steve Job's Commencement Speech at Stanford. The official video released by Stanford 6 years ago, has so far garnered 18 millions views. It's a great speech. If you haven't watched it, you must. A lot of people share that video...
The New Language of Starting A Business
He was leaving the next day and I hadn't visited him yet. The night before his flight back to San Franscisco, I joined him at his aunt's house for dinner. My family and his family were there. Sitting around the dinner table. His mother wanted him married, he joked...
Listen to the audio first (it's in Urdu): I recorded this while in a car - gotta love the SoundCloud app! 🙂 Some observations and perspectives: Quran is pure guidance. It's primary guidance comes in matters of "deen" ("deen" is inadequately translated as religion......
The Collector of Good
I had just arrived in Islamabad via Daewoo, and the old friend who came to pick me up was having car trouble. The car's headlights were just not functioning, and it was getting dark. We assumed the problem to be the simplest: a fuse had shorted and a simple...
Acknowledgments and Your Invisible Team
I am re-re-re-reading The Lean Startup as I am preparing a workshop on business growth. I noticed the Acknowledgments section which I had of course seen before, but haven't read read it. Then I took out my pen and listed the people Eric Ries acknowledges. About 5...
How to Never Have Problems Ever Again
Two types of people: those who say there is no opportunity out there, and those who say there are so many opportunities that it's hard to pick. Seeing opportunities is a skill. And an easy one. The pursuit of an opportunity, being persistent and showing up every day -...
The Pull of Work
I have been paying attention to my hobbies lately. This has seen me work like never before. For the very first time in my life, I have worked at one thing for this long. It is paying dividends in terms of happiness (for happiness is found only in progress), and I am...
Are you Paying Attention To Your Hobbies?
We are trained to pay a lot of attention to our “work”. Work is sacred. But here's an interesting experiment: look up the big events of the past and see if they were brought about by people working jobs, or by people who were doing what they were passionate about?...
Marketsman
Marketsman noun a person who is skilled in launching a product/service in a market. --- Riffing on how Merriam-Webster defines a Marksman as "a person (especially a man) who is skilled in shooting a gun at a target" Came up with this word while writing about people...