Ammar Alshukry – You need this type of friend to CHANGE your LIFE
AI: Summary ©
AI: Transcript ©
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.