If you're 18-24 years old, please watch this video.

Two complaints get made about the same job market, and both are true at once.

On one side, the graduate. Four years of university behind him, a degree in hand, and the sentence he keeps repeating is that there are no jobs. He applied, he waited, nothing came back, and by now he half believes the market simply doesn't have room for someone like him.

On the other side, the employer. Ask anyone who actually hires in this country and you get the opposite story. The problem isn't a shortage of candidates. It's that the candidates don't show up. They beg you on a call to be given a chance, you agree, you set the interview, and on the day nobody turns up. Not one of them.

The graduate isn't lying and neither is the employer. And the thing that decides which side of that room you end up on is almost never the degree. It's something nobody quite told you to build, in the years when building it was easiest. Just the conversation I wish someone had sat me down for at eighteen or nineteen, when I still thought the path had it all figured out for me.

The boy who came looking

A little while ago a nineteen-year-old came to my office. He'd come looking for me on purpose, to ask about his future, and the questions he asked were sharp enough that halfway through I realised something. This conversation, if I'd had it fifteen years earlier, would have changed my career.

He told me he was doing a bachelor's in artificial intelligence, in Sargodha. My own degree is computer science, from COMSATS, so the field wasn't new, but a full AI programme running in Sargodha was. He said he was in his second semester, and most of it was still basic.

They'd told the class that the real material, the deeper things, would start after about two years. So in the meantime, to grow his own knowledge and widen the opportunities in front of him, he'd started teaching himself digital marketing, and picking up a couple of other things on the side. That's a signal, and it's the first thing I want you to take from him.

Nobody is coming to teach you

You think the set of steps you were handed is enough. Finish college, get into university, get out of university, find a job, and after that everything is arranged. Your parents laid that path out, the people older than you confirmed it, and it looks complete.

It was never complete. Nowhere on that path is it written that you have to learn actual skills, that someone will pay you for those skills, that you have to build value for another person.

And the reason it matters is simple. Nobody is coming to teach you the part that pays. Until the wanting-to-learn is inside you, no teacher on earth can put it there. So the first thing I told him was that whatever the university gives you, the skills are on you. That was already what he was doing at nineteen, and it's the reason a boy in his second semester was, in the way that counts, ahead of graduates twice his age.

Then why go to university at all?

You'll notice the obvious objection here, because most people push it hard. If the degree doesn't get you the job, don't waste four years on it. I don't agree, and I want to be honest that I'm holding two things at once here. Do not sit through four years believing the paper at the end is what hands you a career, because it isn't, and it never was. And also, you should go to university.

You go for what surrounds the degree. The experiences, the connections, the people who pull your thinking into a shape it wouldn't have found on its own. At that age your brain is still soft, still in what neuroscience calls neuroplasticity, a stage where it can be moulded.

That's exactly what happened to me. I went to COMSATS in Abbottabad, and my closest friends there came from all over. A couple from Punjab, one from Jaranwala, some from Multan, one from Lahore. One friend was from Abbottabad itself, and there was another who'd come from Saudi. That last one talked in a way none of us Punjabi boys did, and every time he spoke I felt like he was five or ten steps ahead of me.

That's what university is for. The degree is the excuse that puts you in the room. The room is the point.

Everything you do is sales

The second thing I told him is the one I resisted hardest myself, for years, so I'll tell it the way I lived it. When I came out of my computer science degree, the word sales was dirty to me. And to be fair, sales jobs in Pakistan do have real problems, that part of my contempt wasn't entirely wrong. But the contempt itself was.

I went to FAST for the master's, I failed there, and I ended up back in Sargodha for about a year and a half, and in that stretch the whole picture I'd built of myself came apart. And when my actual journey started, truck dispatching first, then my own business five or six years after that, every bit of it came down to two things. Communication and sales.

Selling is getting another person to act on what you're saying, and you've been doing it your whole life. When you convince your parents to let you travel out of the city, or to give you a little extra money, that's sales. When you talk a friend into lending you his bike, that's sales.

In truck dispatching, if a driver won't take a load I know is the best one for him, I have to convince him, because if he passes on it his whole day can be wasted. That's a sale, and there's no product in a box anywhere in it. Your entire life is built around sales, and you have to get good at it.

Communication, not English

Sit underneath sales and you find the thing it actually rests on, which is how you communicate. And this is where Pakistan has its biggest quiet problem. Not a shortage of talent. A shortage of communication, of work ethic, of discipline. Nobody taught us these at university, and nobody taught us at home either.

You can see the ethic problem the moment you try to hire. Whenever I ask for CVs, people call and practically beg to be taken on. And then nobody shows up. They wanted it badly enough to plead on the phone and not badly enough to walk through the door.

Every industry out there is a problem-solving industry. You show up, you solve that problem, and the moment you solve it you've created value for someone. As the value lands, you get paid for it. And doing that, explaining a problem, convincing the person you can fix it, walking them through how, all of it comes down to communication. Not English speaking. Communication. The way you talk to people decides how much they listen to you.

You already know this from your own ears. You might remember Adeel, from those old Ufone ads. Listen to him talk, in Urdu, not English, and it's just lovely, the way he lands what he means. Find the people whose speaking your ears actually enjoy, and copy them. Copy, copy, copy, and after enough of it a more original version of you comes out the other side.

AI won't replace you, it replaces the ones ignoring it

His next question was the one everyone that age asks. Won't AI just replace us further down the line? It's the wrong fear. AI will replace the people who aren't using AI. A very good friend of mine, Arshman, you'll find him on Instagram, built his whole brand on it. There's another creator, whose name I've lost, who was a failed musician. When that fell apart he started his own AI firm, offering AI-made content as a service to people who need it, and everything he earns now comes through that.

I gave the boy the internet as the parallel. Then a moment came when your uncles, the chache babe, would tell you, you're not doing anything with yourself, go work on the internet, you'll find some job. A day is coming when those same uncles will start telling you about AI, and that's when it's over, and we are almost at that day.

So start now. Everything connects to AI, to human psychology, to sales. The sooner you take that in the better, because nobody is going to come and hold your ear and make you learn it.

The window that closes by thirty

I had a free one-on-one booked at four, with a Pakistani man, twenty-eight or twenty-nine. The next slot, half past four, was with someone from India I knew nothing about yet. Four o'clock came and the first man didn't show. At quarter past four I emailed him and said, honestly, this is unprofessional, you should read a few books on work ethic and discipline, because you won't get far in life doing things like this.

At twenty past, early, the boy from India joined. He turned out to be sixteen, a Sikh who spoke only Punjabi, no Urdu, no Hindi, and he was deeply anxious about his future. But he was curious, curious enough to show up early to talk to a stranger about his life, when a man ten years older couldn't be bothered to show up at all.

At your age the window for recovering from a mistake is enormous. Mine isn't. I'm thirty-one, and I have to place every step carefully, phoonk phoonk ke, testing the ground before I put my weight on it, because if I make a real mistake it doesn't land on me alone, it lands on my family.

But at seventeen, eighteen, for maybe seventy or eighty percent of people that weight simply isn't there yet. That freedom to fail is the most valuable thing you own, and it's the thing you're most likely to waste sitting still on the safe road.

The one thing that actually changed

Step back from all of it and there's a single change underneath every lesson here, one I don't think most people ever name. When you were small, your mother trained you. She told you get up and do this, do that, and you were built to follow it. And when she wasn't looking, you'd cut loose and do whatever you wanted, precisely because someone was normally watching.

By eighteen or nineteen, that person is gone. And that is why nobody is coming to teach you the skill, why you have to seek it yourself, why you have to build the discipline no one is enforcing. The supervisor left, and the whole of what we call growing up is what you do in the space where they used to stand.

It cuts the other way too. Where your mother once watched over you, you now have to become her support. And you can't be anyone's support by waiting on a degree to arrange it. You become it by building the skills, the communication, the ability to sell, so that you can actually create value in the world and get paid for it.

Nobody is standing over you anymore. It's the opening, and it stays open for about ten years. What you do inside it is the whole game.