Ismail Kamdar – How and why I started Islamic Self Help

			So tell us a little bit about your background. We were talking offline and you had said something
about, you know, you would reveal to us your age and you're younger than us. But you said you live
likely 10 years fast forward, like, Please elaborate. What do you mean by that? Yes. So I started my
Alim program when I was 13 years old, started lecturing when I was 16. Doing Dawa, when I was 17, I
started my first radio program, and I was 19. Graduated when I was 20. Got married when I was 20.
became a father when I was 21. He was a published author when I was 25. I started my own business
when I was 27. And yeah, I'm sitting at 32. And I'm really glad things are on track for me.
		

			Well, you got into this a lot of this life hacking stuff, right? When before it got really popular,
it was, you know, around the time when, I would say, Tim Ferriss and them were kind of really
pushing out this whole 40 Hour Workweek thing described to us for 34 Hour Workweek not the 40 hour,
that would be like the rest of us.
		

			So yeah, tell us a little bit about how you like you hadn't got into that. And then you
		

			because so I didn't do that by accident, actually.
		

			You know, I worked for the Islamic online university, or Dr. Bill Phillips and I started working for
him when I was about 23. And, you know, I was about 25, I got promoted to the head teacher position.
And I wasn't prepared for that for a management position yet. So I started reading personal
development books, like The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People How to Win Friends and Influence
People, The Four Hour Workweek, I started reading all these books. And it completely transformed me
in terms of my time management and my self confidence and my ability to set goals and even to my
running, you know, working for a management position. But then I found people coming to me and
		

			asking me, you know, about these topics, and they were asking me, you know, for the Islamic
perspective, like where can I get a book by a Muslim motto on time management? Where can I get a
book by a minister Motrin, self confidence, you know, they wanted to learn about these topics, but
they wanted the Muslim perspective. So that's when the light bulb went off, and I started writing my
books and started my blog on this topic. So it was actually by accident. No, I had no clue this
field even existed. It was just out of necessity. I needed to learn some management skills and some
people skills for my new job and, you know, it opened up a whole new door for me