Redefining Success

Tarek Elgawhary remembers a wisdom about success and failure that his teacher Dr. Ali Gomaa taught him when he was studying at Al-Azhar University.“My teacher would always say to me, on the Day of Judgement there are Prophets who will come and they will have no followers. No one believed in their message, not even their own family. But they didn’t fail. They did what they were supposed to do; they delivered their message. So what you need to do is just do the work. And the result, you’re not always responsible for that.”“That was a big lesson for me,” Tarek tells me, “to help me redefine success and failure.”If something doesn’t work we think it’s a failure, or we try and measure success with tools and indicators, he says. “You can’t look at it like that all the time. You know you did something, Alhumdulillah, and it was the right thing to do at the time, and that’s success.”Day 20 Wisdom 20: Just doing the work is success.