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.

Read those two side by side and they can't both be right, except they are. The graduate isn't lying and neither is the employer. They're standing on opposite walls of the same room, describing it. 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.

I want to walk through what that thing is. Not as motivation, and not as a list of rules that worked for me and might not fit you. 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.

I judged him a little at first. You do, when someone comes to you like that, because most of the time you can pour effort into a person and they'll follow you up to a point and then it goes over their head. But this one was listening properly, nodding, actually taking it in, and I could tell early that he was worth the extra effort. So I gave it to him.

I asked what he was doing. He told me he was doing a bachelor's in artificial intelligence, in Sargodha. That surprised me on its own. My own degree is computer science, from COMSATS, so the field wasn't new, but a full AI programme running in Sargodha was.

Then I asked what they were actually teaching him. He said he was in his second semester, and most of it was still basic. Nothing advanced yet. 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 line is where he stopped being just another student to me. A nineteen-year-old, two or three things already going on his own, without anyone assigning them. That's a signal, and it's the first thing I want you to take from him.

Nobody is coming to teach you

Here's the belief that quietly wrecks a lot of careers. 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. When I was that age those ideas didn't exist in my head at all. I could see the path, college to university to job to settled, and I couldn't see that nobody had put the important part on it.

Nobody had told me I could just go and learn things myself. That I could stack one skill on another, teach myself something new, become someone who builds value instead of someone who waits to be assigned it. That option was invisible to me. And the reason it matters is simple. Nobody is coming to teach you the part that pays. There's no one whose job it is to walk up and hand it over. 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. You go out and seek them. 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. Skip university and go straight to skills.

I don't agree, and I want to be honest that I'm holding two things at once here. The degree will not get you a job. I mean that plainly. 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. Whatever you're exposed to then, the new things, the kind of friends you make, presses your mind into a shape it keeps. Better experiences now build a mind that handles real problems better later.

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.

So I'd listen. Then I'd go back and quietly research whatever he'd talked about, so that the next day I wouldn't feel so far behind, so I'd look a little less out of place. I was trying to fit in, honestly. But if those experiences hadn't been in my life, my mind wouldn't run the way it runs now. The failures came too, those are just part of it, but the wiring came from being around people who were ahead of me.

That's what university is for. Treat it as a place to meet people and collect experiences, not as a machine that prints a job at the end. 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. If anyone suggested a sales job, I'd think, why would I do that? I'm a computer science graduate, I'm going to do my MS at FAST, why on earth would I take a sales job? The picture I had of sales in my head was low, and I looked down on it. 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.

That mirror in my head shattered later. 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. I wanted to learn again. 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.

Because sales is not the narrow thing you think it is. 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. You're using your communication to get someone to accept what you want, and the thing they accept can be a product, or it can be anything at all.

It runs right through my own work. In truck dispatching I'm on the phone with my drivers, telling them what the market's doing, that I have this load, this option. 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.

So the lesson was blunt. Your entire life is built around sales, and you have to get good at it. Run from it and you're running from the thing underneath every field you might enter.

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.

Think about how most of us saw work growing up, in a lot of Punjab households at least. The adults went to work in the morning, came home in the evening, and complained about it. That was the whole picture of work we absorbed, that it's a thing you do and then grumble about. It never occurred to us that work is something you could be good at, something you improve.

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. Fine, I say, come in for the interview. And then nobody shows up. Not one of them. They wanted it badly enough to plead on the phone and not badly enough to walk through the door.

Now hold that against how the work actually pays. Every industry out there is a problem-solving industry. An industry has a problem. 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. That's the whole machine, plain simple math, and I've said it so many times I'm tired of saying it. Solve a real problem for someone and the money is the natural result.

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. If you're working locally, in Urdu, the same rule holds. The way you talk to people decides how much they listen to you.

You already know this from your own ears. There are people you listen to and think, this person speaks beautifully. 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. You have to imitate someone first. Nobody starts out original.

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. That's the whole of it. Look at the smart ones who've built entire brands for themselves, and they're all just using AI. A very good friend of mine, Arshman, you'll find him on Instagram, built his whole brand on it. He was putting up AI videos, saw a business opportunity open up out of that, and built a business from it. He's doing well, because of AI, not in spite of 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. He wasn't a coder or a creator to begin with. He used AI to build a new identity for himself, and now he's out there and he's successful.

I gave the boy the internet as the parallel. When the internet first arrived, people started pulling work off it. 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. That's the moment it went dead. Once the uncles are recommending it, the easy opening is already gone. 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. AI, digital marketing, copywriting, anything. 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. You're not a child anymore.

The window that closes by thirty

I'll tell you about two sessions I ran the other day, because they sit at the heart of this.

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. Then I moved on to the next meeting and told myself I'd wait until about half past four, and if nobody came by then I'd get up and leave.

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. That's the word. 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.

That gap is the whole thing. Curiosity is what you have to grow in yourself, because the more curious you are the more of the world you'll explore, and the more experiences you'll gather. Failure comes with that, and failure is good for you, because if everything always goes smoothly you never learn the thing only failure can teach.

And here is what I told the boy directly, and what I want to leave you with. At your age the window for recovering from a mistake is enormous. However many times you fail now, you bounce back fast. You take a loss, you waste some time, whatever happens, you have more than enough time ahead of you to win it all back.

I don't. I'm thirty-one. If something goes wrong for me now, recovery is hard. 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. So use it. 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. Every part of that world had a person standing over you, keeping you on the path. The mother, then the teacher, then the path itself.

By eighteen or nineteen, that person is gone. Nobody is watching over you now. 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. Every lesson in this piece is a response to that one quiet fact. 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.

That's also why I keep telling people that investing alone will never make you financially free. You don't fix a life by earning a bit and putting it into stocks. You redesign the whole thing, the habits, the mindset, the knowledge, the skills, the income, or the money you make just leaks back out the same holes it always did. The work in your late teens and early twenties is the start of that redesign, at the one time the raw material of your brain is still soft enough to take the shape.

Nobody is standing over you anymore. That's not the thing that went wrong. It's the opening, and it stays open for about ten years. What you do inside it is the whole game.