Mirza Yawar Baig – UMass – Facing Challenges
AI: Summary ©
The challenges of living the way Allah wants for them are a way of living based on their desire, with success in life being a focus. The shift from traditional family-based society to digital ones has had a significant impact on society, including the rise of homeschooling and faith-based schools, the shift from virtual schooling to homeschooling, and the need for schools to teach children to think in a way that is useful for the rest of life. Humility and embracing mistakes are crucial in learning and making decisions, and individuals need to have a clear mindset to achieve success. Representatives and leaders should prioritize the importance of thoughtful and deliberate decisions and remaining flexible in learning.AI: Transcript ©
The topic of my lecture today is facing
challenges.
There are 2 ways
to lead our lives,
the way we want
and the way Allah
wants for us.
Whichever way we choose, we will be held
accountable for it when we die. There will
be consequences.
The issue with living the way we want
is that our knowledge is limited,
and our desires rule
us. The benefit of living the way Allah
wants us today is that He knows what
is best for us and guides us to
that. And since the accounting is with Him,
if we live by His way,
that day will be the the day of
rejoicing,
the day of judgement.
I remind myself anew
that to live is not merely to draw
breath.
That is the way animals live.
They are slaves of their drives.
They follow their desires,
and one day, they die, and the story
is over.
Humans, on the other hand, have the option
of living like animals,
fulfilling every desire,
or
of living a life of purpose
and leaving behind
a legacy
of honor.
To underline this and set the standard,
Allah
Every soul shall taste death,
and you will only receive your full reward
on the day of
judgment. Whoever is spared and protected and
and saved from the fire from the hellfire
and admitted into Jannah
will indeed triumph. This is the only one
who would be
permanently successful.
Umal Hayatudunya
illa matawurhur,
whereas the life of this world
is no more than the delusion of
enjoyment.
Let's give this some thought and ask how
our lives compare to the standard.
Success and failure in life are the products
of the choices we make.
The Quran and
guide us to the best of them.
The path
of the was in the
path of those who Allah
rewarded.
And not the path of
not of those who angered
a
little bit of history lesson.
The industrial evolution
1740,
17/60 to 18/40
changed the basis of society.
It was less about assembly line or automated
manufacture
and much more about changing how people thought
and what they valued.
There were
3 major changes
from the Industrial Revolution which remain with us
to this day.
Aspirational values,
parenting, and teaching.
This is what changed society
fundamentally.
The challenge is to take the good from
it. In an agrarian society,
pre industrial revolution,
parents
are also teachers.
Children know what parents do and learn those
skills from parents.
Usually, the roles are gender specific.
Mothers teach daughters the skills of housekeeping and
animal husbandry
and caring for children,
including complex matters like assisting in childbirth and
dealing with minor ailments.
They're also scored in manners and traditions sun
on the other hand,
the
in the home.
The sons, on the other hand, they follow
their fathers to the field and the workshops,
and they learn the skills of planting and
harvesting in. Husbandry. They also learn to make
things and articles
and to repair farming farming
machinery and implements and to troubleshoot problems and
so on and so forth.
The skills learned by both genders are critical
to survival
and life quality,
and being gender specific
create,
creates a positive dependency
on one another.
In in agrarian societies, parents are mentors.
They are respected role models
and teachers.
Their experience matters,
and they have huge moral authority.
Joint families are the norm
and are a support system for raising children
and caring for elders.
Every family member has a place and usefulness,
and so is valued to the end of
their days.
You can see all this in this country
in the
Amish societies, Amish cultures,
caring at the expense of individualism.
The Industrial Revolution changed all this.
Clothing and fashion, gender roles and responsibilities,
authority structures, the concept of freedom and accountability,
and the basis of value
all changed
mostly to suit the needs of an industrial
society.
In all this, the fundamental change was with
what people value
and therefore benchmark themselves against. That primarily became
money.
Just ask yourself, when you say
net worth today, what are you talking about?
Are you talking about character?
Are you talking about learning? Are you talking
about piety? Are you talking about
somebody's culture? Are you talking about what is
their
monetary
or material worth or material
quantity of material possessions, which what what are
we talking about?
Mechanized agriculture eliminated
small farms,
and machinery
eliminated the need for farm animals.
Factories need people, so both parents went to
work,
and raising children was handed over to strangers,
daycare and
school. As a result today, most children don't
know or care
what parents do.
They are disconnected from the earth and nature,
and they wouldn't survive a week if left
alone in the bush
or even on a working farm.
Parents think that throwing enough money at children
is the cure for all evils and fulfills
all needs.
By the time they realize their mistake, it
is too late.
Joint families broke up, and with that, the
sense of identity,
cultural links, and responsibility
for others, including taking care of others.
Grandparents lost their position and role, and loneliness
became a major killer
despite people being financially
far better off today than they were in
the old days.
The day care person and school teacher
are strangers,
often from a different culture, race, and religion,
and value systems will naturally
impart those to the children.
Children experience alienation from culture and religion of
their birth and complain of confusion
and which in some cases
results in a loss of faith.
That is the reason why today
homeschooling
and faith based schools
have suddenly started becoming more popular.
Today, we are in the middle of another
revolution which is further dividing and isolating us.
Some of our modern ailments are loneliness
leading to depression and worse,
obsession with instant gratification,
disconnectedness,
emotional distance,
fear of death,
diminishing social skills, and ability to relate to
one another,
breaking marriages breaking up and reducing attention spans.
All are symptoms of a fatal malaise that
destroys the cohesiveness of society
and concern for one another.
It is not for nothing that Rasool Allah
sallam defined his Ummah as one body.
When the head aches, the whole body feels
the pain, he said. Do we see this
today?
Add to that psychological
manipulation by consumerism,
by
influencers,
so called influencers,
pushing those influenced
to buy more and more and more.
And since research shows that singles buy more
institutional marriage and the importance of raising families
is undermined and discounted
in favor of so called independence and freedom.
We don't stop to ask, freedom from what?
And what is the benefit of this freedom?
The problem, says
Robert
Sternberg at con con at Cornell
University,
is that our education system is not designed
to teach us to think in a way
that is useful for the rest of life.
The tests we use, the SATs or a
levels in England, are very modest predictors of
anything
besides
school grades.
He says, you see people who get very
good grades,
and then they suck at leadership.
They are good technicians
with no common sense and no ethics
and no people skills.
They get to be president or vice president
of corporations and societies,
and they are massively incompetent.
I don't think we need to search too
far
for examples.
Technology gives us free access to vast databases
and the ability to acquire
knowledge in almost any area and flexibility in
ways of learning.
Potentially, this potentially,
this opens the doors to multiple career choices,
but the tools to make good choices
come from reflective
observation of life and abstract conceptualization
to extract application lessons.
This technology cannot give us.
These are mental and spiritual tools
learned from wise mentors who are willing to
share what they learned.
If you can convince them that you are
worth their time and effort.
Because knowledge without experience
is merely data.
That is as different from experience
as a lightning bug is from lightning.
In my opinion, there are 4 attitudinal
skills that are critical to success in facing
life's challenges.
Winners have a high tolerance for ambiguity.
They are willing to admit mistakes.
They're willing to learn,
and they are highly resilient. Four things.
The enabler of all this is humility.
Tolerance for ambiguity
is essential
because life by definition
is a daisy chain of unknowns.
If unknowns
freeze you or frighten you, then you can't
move forward.
What helps is to use probability analysis
and what if reasoning
to chart the best path forward.
And then be willing to change
that path if you discover that your method
is not working.
The key
is to maintain the integrity of the goal
while being willing to change the approach.
The core of this is tawakkul and complete
and total reliance on Allah
and total trust in his plan for us.
We must do our best and trust in
his wisdom.
Willingness to admit mistakes and willingness to learn
are related.
Learning doesn't always come from mistakes, but often
it does.
Making mistakes, if done intelligently,
shows the willingness to take risks.
Like someone said, the one who risks nothing
gains nothing.
But often people are so afraid of the
potential embarrassment of admitting a mistake that they
stay with denial.
We can see some very glaring examples of
that globally, but it happens at the individual
level also.
The result is the same.
Everyone knows you are wrong.
By denying it, you lose respect, and more
importantly,
you learn nothing.
But if you are focused on learning, then
the cost of that mistake is merely your
fee for learning.
I ask 5 questions when I make a
mistake. What happened?
What could have happened?
What is the cost of the mistake?
What should be done next time,
and what is the way to foolproof
the process.
Then document
and move on.
So how do you deal with your mistakes?
Finally, the most important thing is resilience.
I have a nesting box outside the window
of my study. In it, last year, a
pair of old world sparrows made a nest
and raised 3 chicks.
One day, a blue jay farmed them.
Now over a period of about a week,
despite all my efforts at preventing it,
the blue jay killed all of them.
The sparrows were distraught
and clearly
very distressed.
Then when it was all over,
what did they do? They rebuild the nest
and raised another brood. This time, 4 of
them, and they all survived.
That is why there are more sparrows than
jigs.
Resilience is the ability to get up after
a disaster and continue.
As they say, you don't lose the race
when you fall. You lose when you fail
to rise.
As the Chinese saying goes, if you fall
6 times,
get up 7 times.
That is why small birds inspire me as
they are the greatest symbols of resist of
resilience
in nature.
Totally defenseless,
totally focused,
and totally resilient.
Nothing short of death can stop them. Today,
as I speak,
the finest human example of resilience is being
live streamed to the world from Gaza.
That is why I say that what we
are seeing from the Palestinian people
is resilience of an order that couldn't even
have been imagined,
let alone expected.
But it is there before us,
A symbol of strength
that shows that the strongest force of the
world is the human spirit,
inspired by courage
and relying on Allah
alone.
There is no force on earth
that can destroy
that spirit.
Gaza
is so strong
that it is changing the world.
Lastly,
I must make a case for slowness,
not tardiness,
but deliberate
patience and thoroughness
which appears
as slowness.
We have made the mindless pursuit of speed
our goal.
Faster everything,
including decision making, which means there is less
time for reflection,
collecting more data, exploring alternatives,
what if questioning, seeking the advice of others,
all of which could have helped us to
make a better decision.
Was the quick decision really necessary?
Most of the time, no.
A delay or a day or 2 wouldn't
even have been noticed.
This drive for useless speed
also creates stress
and a sense of urgency
that's detrimental to sleep and rest,
and wrong decisions can prove to be very
costly.
It is time to stop living by default
and to start living
thoughtfully and deliberately.
I ask Allah
to help us and enable us to live
in a way that is pleasing to him
and to
enable us to do that which pleases him
and to save us from that which does
not please him.
Him.
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