Live well through global citizenship, International education & multinational businesses.

Celebrate Life

By Azeem Ullah Khan, SOP Mentor, AukSun Consultants Ltd.

Dear Readers,

Hope you are doing good MashAllah.

I have spent a good part of my working life sitting across from people who are about to change their address on this earth. Students going to Italy. Families going to Canada. Professionals who have finally decided that the town they were born in is not the only town Allah made. I have watched their hands shake over forms, and I have watched the same hands, two years later, send me a photograph from a street they could not have pronounced when we first met.

So let me tell you what I have learned from them, and from my own years, about how to live and how to lead a life.

One Address Is Not a Life

There is a quiet tragedy that nobody writes about. A person is born in a place, educated in that place, employed in that place, married in that place, and buried in that place, having seen perhaps four percent of what was created for him to see.

Allah spread out this earth. He did not spread it out for us to memorise one street of it.

Travel is not tourism. Tourism is photographs. TrAVEL IS CORRECTION… It corrects your assumption that your way of cooking, socialising, arguing, queueing and doing business is the only way. You go somewhere else and you find good people doing it completely differently and doing it well, and something inside you loosens. That loosening is education (the real kind, not the certificate kind).

And do note this carefully, because many of our people get it wrong. Modernization does not necessitate Westernization. You can carry your faith, your language and your mother’s manners into any airport in the world and lose none of it. You are not going abroad to become someone else. You are going abroad to become more of yourself, in better light.

My elder brother says, ‘high thinking, simple living’ (Hashmat Ullah Khan, 01 June 2025). Take that in your suitcase. It travels well everywhere.

Believe in Allah, Believe in Yourself

Tawakkul is not sitting still. Tie your camel first, then trust. The believing in Allah part gives you the courage to attempt something bigger than your bank balance. The believing in yourself part is what makes you open the laptop on Monday morning and actually do the work.

I have seen clients who pray beautifully yet prepare badly. I have seen others who prepare brilliantly and panic at every delay because they have nobody to hand the outcome to. Do not be either one. Prepare as if it depends on you, and then hand the result over, InshaAllah, to the One who actually controls it. That combination produces a very calm and very unstoppable kind of person.

There is a line from my mother that I keep close: apno kay bajayey apne per bharosa karo (Azra Aftab, March 2025). Not a bitter line. A liberating one. Your friends will have opinions about your life. Only you will live it.

Opportunities Do Not Knock. They Pass By Quietly

We have been told opportunity knocks. In my experience it does not knock. It walks past the window, quietly, while you are busy scrolling.

Chasing what you desire will exhaust you. Opening yourself to what life is actually offering will surprise you. The scholarship you did not apply for because you assumed you would not qualify. The small city university with a superb faculty because everyone was fixated on the famous one. The visa route nobody in your circle had heard of.

So you are requested to keep your eyes up. Read the notices. Ask the aukward question. Send the email you think will be ignored.

And remember, fear of losing is the single biggest thief of learning. Ten failed attempts teach you more than ten years of not attempting. It is better to fail at something new than to succeed at doing nothing at all.

Be Entrepreneurial, Wherever You Sit

Being entrepreneurial is not the same as owning a company. It is a way of standing in the world. It means you look at a problem and your first instinct is not “somebody should fix this” but “what would it take.”

Entrepreneurs have one unusual quality that I want you to develop, whether you ever register a business or not. They have an abnormal tolerance for hardship. They can sit inside an unresolved, uncomfortable, unpaid situation for far longer than most people, because they can see the far end of it.

Two corrections while we are here.

First, hard work alone is a myth we were regimented into. Smart co-work exists. Collaboration beats competition almost every time. Find the three people whose skills fill your gaps and stop trying to be all four of them.

Second, sell certainty, not possibility. Clients, universities, embassies and employers are all buying the same thing from you, which is the confidence that you will deliver. Give them that.

Build a Business That Can Travel With You

This is the part I would emphasise. The digital nomads got something right that most of us missed. If your work lives in a laptop, then your life can live anywhere. Teaching, consultancy, design, coding, writing, translation, editing, online courses, e-commerce, bookkeeping, support services. Every one of these can be run from Lahore, Lisbon, Milan or a village with decent internet.

Start where you are. Take one skill you already have, package it so a stranger can buy it, and sell it once to someone outside your city. That single transaction changes your understanding of what is possible more than a hundred motivational videos.

Then build for perpetuity, not subscriptions. Build the thing that keeps paying, not the thing that keeps demanding.

And consider consequences. Build long lasting companies rather than short lived ones. A business that survives you is worth ten that flare and die.

Succeed Successive Successes

Nobody arrives at a large success. People arrive at a chain of small ones that were completed properly and on time.

There is no secret to success. There is a system to success. Here is the one I use, and I offer it freely, even if it is priceless.

1. Proper Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. Prepare tomorrow’s tasks tonight, drawn down from your weekly, monthly and yearly plan. Keep a checklist for each task.
2. Apply the 80/20 rule. Identify the twenty percent of tasks that produce eighty percent of your result, and give them your first and best hours. Finish the substance first. The cosmetic polishing comes later.
3. Sort your list by the ABCDE method. A is the task that must be done. B is the task that should be done. C is the task that changes nothing. D is the task you can delegate. E is the task you can abolish entirely. Most people spend their morning in C.
4. Practise creative procrastination. Deliberately choose what you will ‘not’ do. Cut the non-performing activity without guilt.
5. Slice the big task. The salami method. A large frightening project becomes twelve small unfrightening pieces, and each completed piece releases a little energy that carries you into the next.
6. Protect large chunks of time. Fine work cannot be done in fifteen minute gaps.
7. Single handle every task. Start it, stay on it, finish it one hundred percent. Do not rest in the middle.
8. Develop a sense of urgency, like a professional athlete. Work as though you are leaving town tomorrow and everything must be closed today.
9. Make technology your servant. Do not enslave yourself to it. Social media is a beautifully designed hole in your afternoon.

Three Steps to Master Your Field

Please take these seriously, because they compound.

• Read for 60-minutes daily in your field. In three years you will be among the best informed people in your city. There is no faster path and no substitute.
• Know your unique values and nourish them. Your particular combination of skill, temperament, language and background exists nowhere else. Stop apologising for it and start charging for it.
• Do the thing that produces the highest impact in your life, and do it first.

Knowledge is the most valuable asset on this planet. Not information. We are drowning in information and starving for knowledge. Information is what you scroll past. Knowledge is what you can use on Monday.

And do note, your life will not change because of information. It changes because of decisions (a point Tony Robbins makes well).

Contentment, Not Excitement

Here is where I want to slow down.

Living simple is not simply living, just as working hardly is not the same as hardly working. Simplicity is a choice made by people who could have chosen otherwise.

Most people run after excitement, which lives in wants. Bigger car, bigger house, newer phone. Very few run after contentment, which lives in needs. A home, good health, work that means something, people who are interdependent with you rather than impressed by you.

Excitement is time bound. Contentment is perpetual.

Focusing on acquiring what you do not need will leave you unfulfilled no matter how much of it you acquire. So keep your possessions few and your experiences many. Not everything is about money. La dolce vita.

Give More Than You Take

Tony Robbins said; For the next five years, make your only job to become more valuable.

Do more for the people around you than anyone else in your area is doing. Give as though you are not counting what comes back. Something strange happens when you work like this. What returns is not only money. It is trust, reputation, opportunity, peace, and the knowledge that your life matters beyond yourself – Lenay ka na socho. Denay ka socho.

Life’s fulfilment comes not from what we take but from what we contribute. And please remember, a relationship is two ways, never one. To love and to labour is the sum of life. If you are not in love with something, a person, a craft, a mission, a place, you will not be able to do very much at all. Love is the oxygen of the soul.

So, Celebrate Life

Go and see the world. Learn a third language. Eat food you cannot spell. Study somewhere that stretches you (Italy, for instance, offers a genuinely unique learning experience for our clients). Build something that pays you while you sleep. Employ someone. Teach someone. Come home changed and change your home.

Bare khwabon kay liye bari qeemat chukani parti hai. Big dreams do carry a big price. Pay it gladly.

And in the words of Amma, very dear to me; mazey karo, tumhari zindagi hai yeh waqt (Azra Aftab Khan, 13 June 2025). Enjoy it. This time is your life.

Take the first step. Take one step at a time. Keep learning. And do prepare to be astonished, InshaAllah.

If you are thinking about studying abroad, moving abroad, or building work that lets you live abroad, do write to us. Whether you want us to walk the whole route with you or you would rather do it yourself with proper guidance, both doors are open.

AukSun offers a host of both Assisted and DIY (Do-It-Yourself) options to choose from >> https://immigrate.auksunlms.com/diy

Do write back and tell me which part of the world you are aiming for. I would like to know, and there is usually more we can do about it than you think.

Warm Regards,

Azeem Khan SOP Mentor AukSun Consultants Ltd.