Ammar Alshukry – You need this type of friend to CHANGE your LIFE

The most important thing that I want you

to know from this is simply the importance

of leaving bad friends if they're not inspiring

you to your potential.

And then number two is seeking out people

who will inspire you.

I'll give you two quick stories.

I had some friends of mine, and I

might have shared this with you before, Obama

was blessed, but I had some friends of

mine who made it a goal, they wanted

to memorize the 40 Haritha of Imam Mahdi.

Did I tell you about this before?

So I had some friends who wanted to

memorize the 40 Haritha of Imam Mahdi, and

they were like, guys, this is what we're

going to do.

We're going to spend, we're going to memorize

one Haritha a week, and we're going to

hold ourselves accountable for it.

And so I remember at that period of

time, I told them, I said, guys, this

project is going to fail, you're not going

to memorize the 40 Haritha of Imam Mahdi.

Not because it's too ambitious, but actually because

it's so simple.

It's so simple that it's not actually interesting.

Like how long does it take a person

to memorize?

You don't need the sentence.

How long do you need to memorize these

seven, seven words or eight words?

That's what, that's two minutes of work, maybe

10 minutes, maybe 20 minutes, let's say stretch

30 minutes.

That's it.

You need a week for that.

You don't need a week for that.

Sometimes when you aim so low, you become

disinterested, and so you fail not due to

lack of ability, but due to lack of

interest.

It's not interesting.

And so I told them, I said, guys,

this Haritha of Jibreel is like super long,

but this Haritha is like, it's just, and

there are many like that.

They're very short Haritha.

And so they ended up failing.

They didn't end up completing.

Another time, I meet this young man.

It was a long time ago.

I meet a young man in the masjid.

He comes in Ramadan to lead the community.

And everybody's calling him Sheikh so-and-so,

Sheikh so-and-so came, Sheikh so-and

-so just landed, Sheikh so-and-so this,

who's speaking of Sheikh so-and-so.

I'm like, I meet him later on that

day, Sheikh so-and-so, Sheikh so-and

-so.

And he's 16 years old, super skinny kid.

The clothes that he's wearing is swallowing him.

It was like his blanket, his shower blanket.

And he had two strands, you know.

And I was like 19, and he's, I'm

like, I, this is, I'm just like, I

don't get it.

Like, what is it about him that's Sheikh

so-and-so?

And they're like, no, no, he memorized the

Qur'an.

I'm like, I get that.

I'm like, I know a lot of people

who memorize the Qur'an.

They're often short, but they're not a Sheikh.

I still don't get it.

And then they're like, oh, but he also

memorized Bukhari and Muslim, and he memorized them

in two months.

So I'm like, Sheikh so-and-so, you're

my best friend.

MashaAllah, like, you're memorizing thousands of hadith in

two months.

Now compare what that did for my sense

of possibility.

Like, I didn't even know people could do

that.

And here you're meeting a 16-year-old

kid in the United States who did that,

did a program over a summer, memorized, you

know, thousands of hadith compared to, you know,

memorizing one hadith a week for 40 weeks.

So being in the company of someone like

this and his life undoubtedly over the course

of an extended period of time will make

you do things that you never would have

thought possible otherwise.

That's the importance of being in the circle

of people who are ambitious.

Very, very important that you simply put yourself

in the company of people who are going

in the direction that you aspire to do,

especially when it comes to the athil, that

you look at those who are doing more

than you, look at those who are accomplishing

more than you, and putting yourself in those

circles that you continue to aspire each other

to goodness.