Journey of an Entrepreneur: The Two Times I Received Life Altering Advice
Have you ever received life-altering advice before?
I’m fortunate to have received it, twice in fact.
“Good, go for it…”
The first time, the advice came from Jim Kellso, in California during the summer of 2006.
I had just graduated from the University of Michigan in Engineering. I was spending the summer working for Intel in Folsom, California and was scheduled to return to Michigan and spend 1 year to finish my Masters Degree in Industrial & Operations Engineering before — as most of the summer interns hoped— returning to Intel.
Jim Kellso was my manager’s manager, an eccentric cowboy hat-wearing, tractor-driving, Hawaiian shirt-sporting man. He could’ve been an inspirational speaker, but his technical title was Senior Supply Chain Master.
I wasn’t so sure though. I crushed it in Engineering (alhamdulillah), I was crushing now at Intel, but my heart wasn’t in it. I thought of my role models, like Malcolm X, who sacrificed so much to leave a legacy — and here I was sitting in a cubicle.
One day Jim gathered us (the three Michigan interns, Ryan, Cordelia and myself) in a conference room and launched into one of his motivational speeches. “You’ve got to know what you want to do in life. What you’re passionate about. What motivates you!”
Ryan and Cordelia proceeded to talk about how “passionate” they were about supply chain and semiconductors.
“What do you want to do Chris?”
“I want to open up a school”
[moment of awkward silence, Cordelia and Ryan look at me like I dropped an f-bomb]
“Good! Go for it!”
Now this is the story of how I started LaunchGood, not a school. But at that moment, Jim gave me the confidence, the permission, to not conform.
I didn’t have to stay in engineering just because I was good at it. I didn’t have to report to a cubicle every morning at 8am just because it earned me money.
Since then I went back to Michigan, changed my masters to Educational Leadership, worked in a New England boarding school for 2 years, helped establish a non-profit Arabic institute (Fawakih.com), then a for-profit film company (Beyond Blue Productions), before venturing off to start my own tech companies, LaunchGood.com and Patronicity.com
“The challenge is to walk away…”
This time it came from Mohamed Marei, in Jordan during the summer of 2008.
In June 2008 I flew from Boston to Amman to study Arabic at the world-class Qasid Arabic Institute.
Qasid was a dream come true — founded by two American Muslims, it reflected the high-quality organization you get in American companies, yet was steeped in Muslim values and had the most incredible local Arabic teachers possible.
It was the summer I was able to finally break through and reach a level of fluency I struggled for years to achieve; that point where you start to dream in the language, when someone’s talking to you and you don’t have to translate in your head anymore.
My friends idolized one of its founders, Mohamed Marei. He had the best of both worlds!
A UCLA/Harvard grad, he had worked for Boston Consulting Group (BCG) before going on a backpacking trip to discover himself and ended up in Jordan, becoming a student of the saintly Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller and establishing Qasid, the best Arabic learning institute in the world.
He had financial success from his business, and would split his time between two beautiful places: Amman and California. He was married, had beautiful children, etc etc etc.
I had to know his secret!
One day I arranged a meeting with him. We sat, and I asked him, “How did you get all this success in your life? How can I find it in my own life?”
“Spend your 20’s learning as much as you can; the challenge is to walk away from something once you’ve mastered it and learn something new. Then spend your 30’s coalescing your knowledge into a focused project.”
Although that advice felt vague at the time, it ended up being spot-on. After finishing grad school, I taught for 2 years. The first few months were strenuous, I spent hours every night preparing my lesson plans for the next day. By the end of my first year I could plan a week at a time. By the end of my second year I was cruising; I could plan for nearly the whole semester in just the first week, reuse old tests and quizzes by just changing variables, etc.
It was time to quit and move on. I was 24.
Read part 2 to find out why I packed up my 2002 Chevy Impala with everything I owned and drove 800 miles to Detroit!
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