If we actually listed Azeem’s accomplishments, you wouldn’t believe us. The fact of the matter is, this 34 year old, was one of the wealthiest young people in the UK, named one of the top 100 Global Thinkers of 2009, attended Cambridge University, is a research scholar at Harvard University, served in the British Army’s elite airborne infantry reserve…and now I’m officially tired. Despite all of these accomplishments, Azeem is well grounded and hasn’t forgotten about his community or where he came from, what we think is his greatest asset. elan got a chance to chat with him.
At such a young age, you’ve accomplished a lot. You advise governments on investment strategies, are a scholar from Cambridge University, are one of the richest men in England, dine at the White House and speak four languages. What is your key to success? And more importantly, what has motivated you to be so focused?
There are no rules one can follow. There is no key to success and the reason for that is simple because everybody defines success in a different way. In all honesty I don’t really have an answer as to why I’ve been successful in some fields rather than others, I really think it’s down to me being lucky. But one thing I do think I have a very good ability of is to be organized. The key is to basically compartmentalize your day into blocks and do one thing at a time, and nothing else. At the moment I have about 23-24 projects going on, but the thing is most of these projects don’t take a lot of time. The key is I don’t think about it unless there’s a need for me to think about it, I’m just providing strategic direction to these organizations when a decision is required.
Who has been your biggest role model?
I don’t really have one in particular, but I’ve had a lot of people that have been inspirational. One of them in particular is someone like Greg Mortensen. I’ve met a number of different high profile business leaders through the last decade or so, and some of them are extremely smart people, you can almost hear the machinery in their head as they’re talking to you, because they’re always thinking a few steps ahead but what surprised me about Greg is that he is just a completely normal guy. He’s just a regular guy that made a decision to make a difference, and it was just his determination that was basically responsible for him transforming that region of the world.
Another person that I found inspirational is George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist, not necessarily because of his personal success but for the amount of good he’s done around the globe with the Open Society Institute and his educational institutions. I remember reading about him in a paper at Harvard that he’s done more for world peace than any other private citizen and one of the reasons was because after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he employed all these nuclear scientists who would have been picked up by other States for their valuable skills in nuclear fusion, and he actually employed them all.
How has being a practicing Muslim helped in your success?
It’s not helping directly but I don’t think its been hindering at all. I make no secret that I’m a practicing Muslim and I take my faith very seriously, and at no point at all have I ever found it being a hindrance. If anything a lot of people are astonished, especially in the policy world to hear that you are a practicing Muslim and that you are successful. They’ll always be keen to hear what you have to say because it’s a general perception in many circles that the only good Muslim is a secular Muslim.
What do you think has been your greatest accomplishment so far?
I would like to think that my greatest accomplishment is actually ahead of me. That being said, I’ve done a few things that I’m quite happy about. One of the first charities that I set up has still been one of the most satisfying, and that is the European Benevolence Fund in which we sponsor scholarships to high achieving Bosnian students. The goal is for them to come to Europe to undertake graduate and post graduate education there and then go back to Bosnia to try to get them senior positions in the private sector. It’s a very elitist project, we only took the best of the best students and gave them this opportunity, to me that was extremely satisfying because I’ve always believed if you want to bring about social change in society, there are not 2 or 3 ways of doing it, only 1 way, and that is education. Education is the only driver of bringing social change to a society, and that is something we are trying to do with the Benevolence fund, is a very long-term project.
What advice would you give to young Muslims just starting out professionally?
You should always be proud of being a Muslim. I think at the same time I would advise them to open their eyes and look at the world. Muslims in America are the wealthiest and most educated Muslim minority community in the whole world. They have an immense opportunity and people don’t realize this, that America is a country in which the only thing that matters is your credentials and your willingness to work and if you’ve got a combination of the 2, there’s nothing you can’t achieve in a country like America. Muslims in America have got an immense opportunity to progress and move forward and we should really appreciate that we should look out in the world and see the great opportunities we have here.
You’ve recently, been asked by the government of Pakistan to develop economic plans to help the country to recovery. How do you begin to tackle this?
I’ll give you a little bit of history behind that. My friend, Dr. Nadeem-Ul-Haq, was a chief economist at the IMF. He and I were thinking about setting up Pakistan’s first economic development think tank, we had a number of conversations over a couple of years, and we secured funding for it. He called me from Pakistan one day and told me, ‘Look Azeem, I have just been appointed the minister for planning and I need you to come over and help me out.’ I realized what he had in mind for me was a little more ambitious than what I thought. He wants to actually offer a new national economic strategy for the whole country and wants me to take a key role for something like that. I’ll be going to Pakistan in November, to undertake an appreciation study to see the situation myself, and from there I will ascertain what can be done and what needs to be done.
You meet with a lot of politicians and dignitaries. I find it hard to small talk with them. Do you use any tricks?
I think you really have to be at ease with a lot of these politicians. They meet many people throughout their whole day and they don’t even know whom they’re meeting or why they’re meeting them. I think you just have to relax and get to know them on a personal level instead of trying to impress or educate them on a specific issue you have to make some sort of personal bond initially before you delve into the deeper issues. So my advice is to get to know them on a personal level, ask about their families, ask about their personal situation/views, and don’t immediately delve into any professional issues. If you do, you’ll probably get the same answers that they usually give on that particular topic and you wont get very far at all.
What does your family think of your success?
My family is not always aware of exactly what I’m doing. Like for example my mom doesn’t really know what I’m actually up to. She reads it in the papers and that’s how she keeps up to date but she really doesn’t understand all the different things I get involved in. To be honest I don’t always remember on a day-to-day basis a lot of the stuff myself.
What do you do in your spare time?
I don’t really have a lot of spare time. I hardly ever do any leisure reading. I have a whole bunch of books I’d like to get to. One thing I really enjoy doing is traveling, and particularly historical traveling. I like to read up on the history of a country and then actually visiting it. My wife and I really enjoy that.
Images provided by Savera Iftikhar
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