Get your priorities right

Auto-generated transcript:My father taught me many lessons. And his way of teaching was he didn't sort of sit down with a class. He would just ask some question and that would be my mind. And alhamdulillah it worked very, very well. Two of the most critical lessons that he taught me, I want to share with you. One was, he always said, get your priorities right. Get your priorities right. Which thing should take the most of your time? Most of your energy? Most of your wealth? You know, and which should be next? Which should be next? Get your priorities right. The reason is because at any stage in life, whether you are in school or whether you are in college, university, whether you are working, you just got married, you have been married for a long time, you have children, no matter what, any stage in life, there will be many things that will try to draw your attention, try to draw, you know, come to you for various things. Give me time, give me money, give me donation, come and spend time with me, come talk to me, do this, do that. Many, many, many priorities. And if you don't get those right, and getting the priorities right means for some things you do, for some things you say, sorry, I have to do this. You say, sorry, I will not do this. I cannot do this. You have to say no. If you don't do that, then your life will be a dog's life, literally. Because you will get pulled in every direction. And your impact and your effect will be zero. Because nobody is, if you spread yourself that thin, then nobody even knows you existed, right? Although you try to help everyone. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. You cannot. So get your priorities right. And the second thing which he taught me was, he used to ask for everything. If I read a book, he used to say, what did you learn from that? If I went to, I spent some time with a friend, I came back home. So he would say, where did you go? I'd say, I went to so and so. Okay. So what did you learn from that? I mean, I went to spend time with my friend and, you know, I went to the gym. I went to the gym. What is the learning? He said, no. There has to be learning. There is always a learning. What did you learn from that? I go for a walk. What did you learn from that? I used to do a lot of horse riding. What did you learn from that? Learn from the horse? Yeah. What did you learn? I mean, Sheikh will understand this. Do you learn from the horse? Many things. Many things. Many things. What did you learn from that? Now, this thing is in my mind to such an extent that I continuously ask myself this question. I tell you, I have learned so much in life only for this reason. Because I ask this question, what did I learn? No matter what, what did I learn? So get your priorities right and what did you learn? So one of the most important things today in our life and our world, especially in the Muslim Ummah, is that as a rule, as a Ummah, as a people, we have got our priorities completely screwed up, completely upside down. Our attention, our focus, our resources, money, everything is spent on all kinds of things. All kinds of useless things. Whereas if you take at, if you look at, you know, key things which we need, they're always starved of resources. They don't have resources. Now, we like to, as general people, we like to criticize the billionaires and we like to criticize the kings. And we say, so-and-so bought this yacht, super yacht for a billion dollars. And see the standard of education in this country. Okay, fair enough. That's a reasonable comment, right? Ask yourself, where are you spending your money? Ask yourself in your country, in your place, what are the projects which are being funded? What are the projects which people are trying to raise funds for? If you see in this country, in America, one of the, and let me narrow it down, America, New England, one of the most crying needs, one of the most dire needs is for a world-class Islamic school. Right? For a top-quality Islamic school. Everyone that I talk to, their first moan is, the public school system is so bad. Our children are getting spoiled. They are getting this influence, that influence. All the woke culture. All right, all of that is correct. I agree. I completely agree. So, what's the solution? I wish we had a world-class, a very good quality Islamic school where we would teach Islam and we would also teach the regular sciences and so on and so forth. This time, we would teach STEM subjects and stuff so that the children could go from there to Harvard and Cambridge and MIT and wherever. Okay, excellent. Fantastic. So, what's stopping you? No, we have no money. Okay. So, raise funds. Raise funds. Let me ask you, in the last 10 years, I've been here last six years, how many projects did you find who are raising funds? I'm not ...