1. EachPod

Three truths

Author
Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center
Published
Sat 12 Apr 2025
Episode Link
https://mhmic.org/fajrreminders/three-truths/

Auto-generated transcript:My brothers and sisters, there are three kinds of people in the world. There are people who have experiences. Everyone who lives has an experience, some experience, good, bad or ugly. But there are some people who have experiences and they learn nothing. There are other people who have experiences, they suffer, they get into trouble, they have lost, they have gained and they learn something. There is a third kind of person who learns from the experience of others. So who is the smartest? Last one, right? Learns from the experience of others. The way of learning from the experience of others, there are two ways. One is reading and especially biographies because biographies are real. You know what actually happened to the person, this was a real person, but also other things, histories and so forth. So reading. And the other way, second way is by talking to people, by having friends who are older and wiser than you are. Throughout my childhood and growing up well into college, even now, but my childhood, my mother used to joke and she used to say all your friends are at least 20 years older than you, which was a fact. And I said, Hamdhar is good because how else will I learn? If I am 15 and I am hanging around with a whole bunch of 15 year old people, I am learning nothing. Because there is nothing that they know which I don't know. So what will they teach me? Similarly, I think I mentioned this before in one of the khatras, there is a university in Delhi called Hamdhar University. In Hamdhar University, they have a place where people who are studying for our UPSC, United Public Service Commission exams, which is the IPS, IAS, IFS, Indian Foreign Service, Indian Administrative Service, Indian Police Service, which is the cream of the government bureaucracy, extremely, extremely difficult examinations. They all gathered there together to study. So I was invited to speak at Hamdhar University once I went and then I asked to see this place. When I went to see the place, I saw there was, you know, it was a hostel kind of thing. There were rooms and there was a reading room and the reading room had some books in it. Not a very impressive library, but it was there. So I said, what happens here? Do you have classes and so on? They said, no, we don't have any regular classes. Once in a while we get some IAS officer or somebody who is willing to come and talk to them, he talks to them. So I said, how do you get the results you get? Because they had fantastic results. The people who went to study there, they are among the trappers of the whole exam. So I said, you don't have a particularly impressive library. I'm sorry to say you have you don't have any regular classes and coaching and so on. People come occasionally. How do you get the results? They said, we get the results because of the quality of students who come to study here. Just being in the company of smart people, that's it. Everyone has only one focus in their mind, which is to get into the civil service, nothing else. So they are studying 20 hours out of 24. And there is huge pressure, there's immense peer pressure to study. If you are not studying, they look like you, they look at you as if you are, you know, some creature from outer space. Why do you do? Why are you here? So nobody oversleeps, nobody is fooling around, nothing, because people are completely focused on study. The company you keep is extremely, extremely important in terms of driving your own excellence or the opposite. I want to share three lessons of my life which I learned with, which I learned in my whole life and which I continue to learn, Alhamdulillah. The first lesson is, nobody owes me anything. And I strongly recommend that you think about this for yourself. Nobody owes you anything. Today we have a generation which thinks that the world owes them a living. This didn't happen, that didn't happen. You must hand over this to us. On what basis? On what basis? You know,

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