How I got rich running a US trucking business from Pakistan

For about a year, my days ran on a loop I could have set a clock by. I gamed through the night, slept past sunrise, woke around noon, went to the gym, met a few friends, came home, and started the same night over again. If I'm honest about it, I had given up on my life, and I'd have told you so plainly if you'd asked.

I'd do a master's in data science at FAST, become a lecturer, and step right back into the campus world I didn't want to leave. Two months into the data science, the plan and the reality had almost nothing to do with each other. I dropped out, went home, and stopped.

The depression felt like the end of something. What it actually was, I only learned later, was my mind being forced to redraw a map it had been using for years.

Your brain doesn't see the world, it predicts it

I later watched a neuroscientist explain something in a TED talk that put a name on it. Your brain doesn't take the world in as it is and then react to it. It's constantly guessing what happens next, and it builds those guesses out of your past experience, your emotions, the whole picture of the world you've carried until now. Predictive processing, he called it.

When the world you predicted and the world that actually turns up are two different things, the brain hits what they call a prediction error, and it doesn't take that quietly. Picture walking out of an interview certain you've won the job, certain nobody could take it from you, and then the rejection lands.

I'd built an entire internal model, FAST, data science, lecturer, campus life for good, and when I stepped into it, none of it matched. My brain didn't have a small correction to make. It had to tear down the map and draw a new one, and that process, felt from the inside, is what we call depression.

But you don't have to earn every update the way I did, by burning a year. Albert Bandura's social learning theory makes a simple point: you can learn from someone else's experience, not only from your own pain. If a dish is hot, you don't have to burn your own hand to find out.

There's a line from the Quran I kept coming back to in that period, and I'll paraphrase it rather than quote it: with every hardship there is ease. Part of it is the update itself. You go through the hard thing, your map corrects, and the next mushkil that would once have flattened you doesn't, because you aren't the same person walking into it.

When I line up everything that eventually pulled me off that sofa and turned me into someone running a business, it sorts itself into three stretches. I've come to call them showing up, skilling up, and stepping up. They're just the order it actually happened in, and I've come to think anyone who builds something real moves through the same three, whatever the thing is.

Luck couldn't reach me until I was moving

The thing that finally broke my loop was a question, and I didn't go looking for it. One day a friend at the gym asked me straight: do you want to do something with your life, do you want a job? He said he worked at a trucking company and could set up an interview if I wanted. On any ordinary day, in the state I was in, I'd have said no, because some part of me didn't want anything good to happen. For some reason, that day, I said yes.

The interview itself went badly. There were two men in the room, and one of them plainly didn't like me. But the second man saw something in me I couldn't see in myself, and he said, let's give him a chance, a probation period, and then we'll decide.

This is where I started to understand what luck actually is, because for years I'd have called all of that a fluke. Naval Ravikant, in The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, lays out four kinds of luck, and the first is exactly the fluke we all picture: the lottery ticket, the plot that suddenly sells, the tukka that lands with no effort behind it. Nobody can build a life on that one, because you can't summon it and you can't repeat it.

The second kind is different, and it's the one that changed everything for me. Naval calls it luck from motion. When you're moving, trying things, failing, showing up again, luck starts finding you, precisely because you're out where it can reach you. The second interviewer only saw something because I was in the chair.

If your mind demands that every effort pay off right away, you'll quit long before the luck arrives, because it doesn't run on your schedule. What's certain is the reverse: show up never, and nothing reaches you at all. The first job is just to get off the sofa and be somewhere luck can find you.

Showing up got me in the door, it couldn't keep me there

The job I'd said yes to was the back end of a US trucking business, run out of Pakistan. A trucking company makes its money when a truck moves from point A to point B, and my work was to make sure that happened and that it paid. For the first few weeks I was certain I couldn't do it. It ran on communication, on speaking English well, on building strategy, and I'd never really done any of that.

Coming straight off the year I'd had, I had two doors in front of me. One went back to the depression, and I knew that if I walked through it I'd never come out again. So I skilled up, because showing up had stopped being enough.

What I slowly understood is that the communication wasn't small talk, it was real-time problem-solving. A driver needs more money, so I learn to negotiate. He needs it steadily, week after week, so I build a strategy to route him toward the consistent work. All of it ran through communication skills that started out genuinely bad, and got better only because I kept listening to the calls, understanding the problem before reaching for a solution, and asking whenever I didn't know.

That one skill turned out to sit underneath everything. Every business that has ever existed is solving somebody's problem, and money is just the thing that moves from the person with the problem to the person with the solution, and onward, hand to hand.

I came in an hour early and often stayed two hours late, and not because it paid more. I listened to Alex Hormozi and a couple of others, who said learn marketing, marketing psychology, copywriting, so I did, badly at first, not even average. But stacked together, those half-skills became a toolkit, and inside my own industry I became the rare person who understood the business from several sides at once. I started putting everything I was learning on LinkedIn, and a small following grew, people who wanted to learn trucking from me.

Around that time, one of my drivers, not the company, a driver, handed me a $1,000 bonus. He was fifty-five years old, and when he gave it to me he said, you helped me like no one ever did. That sentence did more than the money did.

This is Naval's third kind of luck, and it only shows up once you've done the skilling. He calls it luck from awareness: your expertise gets deep enough that you start seeing gaps nobody around you can see.

As people engaged with me on LinkedIn and asked their questions, my own view kept widening, and I began noticing that the carrier companies in the industry were badly run. Trucking has a strange trap in it, you can be perfectly profitable on your own, but the moment you try to grow, the company tends to collapse. Nobody handed me that sight. I'd earned it.

I left the job I'd worked so hard to be good at

The job I walked away from was a good one, a company running a hundred and fifty to a hundred and sixty trucks, the kind of position I'd once have been amazed to hold. But I could see the gap, and I couldn't unsee it, so along with two partners I started my own company to fill it.

And then reality did to me exactly what it had done on the sofa, only faster this time. We were sure that with everything we could offer, clients would come pouring in. For the first three months, not one did. I recognised the prediction error for what it was, so instead of collapsing into it, we re-calibrated quickly, tightened our processes, and kept moving.

We onboarded a client or two and then over-delivered on purpose. Russell Brunson has an idea called the value ladder, where you give more value and charge more as you climb it. We did the first half and skipped the second: we kept giving more and more value, but held our price exactly where it was.

It worked in a way advertising never could have. Clients came because other clients sent them, and this is Naval's fourth kind of luck, luck from reputation. When enough people are saying your name, that this is the person who fixed our company, our revenue is up, we're finally growing, the reputation itself starts pulling opportunities toward you.

None of it was a fluke, and none of it was only me

So was I lucky? Honestly, yes. I didn't make my friend walk over at the gym. But it was never a tukka, never the lottery, because three of those four kinds of luck aren't given to you, you earn them.

I was lucky because I showed up when I could barely lift my head. I was lucky because I killed the version of me who was sure he couldn't learn, and skilled up anyway. I was lucky because I built something people came looking for.

Show up, skill up, step up, they're all the same act I described back at the start, on the sofa: a mind being forced to update its map against a reality that refuses to match its prediction. The three empty months in my own company were it shattering again, and getting redrawn in a fraction of the time. What looks from the outside like a lucky man is usually just someone who learned to let reality update him faster than most people are willing to.

Notice that almost none of this was really about trucks. If I rewound my own tape and dropped myself into some other industry, the word trucking would come out and another word would go in, and the rest of the story would run the same, because the phases don't change.

So I'll leave you where I'd leave the version of me on that sofa. On the other side of getting up, there's a version of you already waiting, the one who wants to see you make it. The only thing he needs from you today is that you get out of bed and show up.