It Started With a Number

In the previous posts, I talked a bit about ambition, the story of Nhance, and entrepreneurship. In this one, I want to go back in time and reflect on where this ambition of becoming an entrepreneur actually came from.

The strange thing is that in my family, which Alhamdulillah is a very large one with more than 12 uncles and aunts, their children, their grandchildren, and even great grandchildren, there has never really been an entrepreneur. Not one.

The closest person I can think of is one of my cousins who works as a carpenter. Even then, I would not necessarily call him an entrepreneur. He is more of a skilled craftsman than someone building a company. He has his own woodworking workshop and employs a few people, but he never struck me as someone with an entrepreneurial mindset.

When you look at hundreds of family members across generations and not a single one even runs a business, it is a little strange that I ended up with this ambition.

The funny part is that before my 20s, I actually shared the exact same mindset as the rest of my family. Almost everyone around me was either a government employee or worked in a trade. My biggest dream back then was simple. Finish school, find a stable job with a decent salary, and live a comfortable life.

As I mentioned in the previous article, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everyone has different ambitions and different capacities.

That was simply the highest goal I could imagine.

I finished my studies in Development and Multimedia, which was exactly what I had always wanted to study. Alhamdulillah, finding work was relatively easy. My first job paid well, and from the perspective of my family and the people around me, I had become a successful person. I had reached what they considered the highest level of success, and perhaps with less visible effort than they expected.

In reality, I had worked incredibly hard. The difference is that when you work hard on something you genuinely love, from the outside it looks like you are just having fun.

Especially back in 2015, someone who made a living working entirely from a computer seemed almost extraordinary. Today that is much more common.

Everything was going well.

I went to work every day, never questioned anything, and throughout my entire life I had never even heard the word entrepreneur. The only concept I knew was TIjarrah, business in the traditional sense.

Even that was never presented as the ideal path where I grew up. The image of business was someone who owned a small café, or at most someone like my carpenter cousin with a couple of apprentices in his workshop.

So in my mind, I had already made it.

I was successful, and all that remained was to continue following the script. Buy a house, buy a car, get married, and complete the classic Moroccan dream.

Then one day, everything changed.

My boss and I were driving back from a work trip. Since he was driving, he handed me a letter and asked me to open it.

I opened it.

"Read it," he said.

I started reading. It looked like some kind of sale agreement. Then I reached a number.

He asked me, "Read that amount in Moroccan dirhams."

I couldn't.

The number was far larger than anything I had ever read before. In school, the biggest numbers I was used to seeing were around 10 million. Anything beyond that completely confused me.

He noticed I was struggling and simply said,

"35 million Dh."

I was still trying to process it because my brain automatically converted everything into centimes back then.

Then he added,

"3,5 milliard centimes."

I was completely shocked.

I honestly could not process what I had just heard.

The only thing I managed to say was,

"Tbarkllah."

Then he casually said,

"I sold my shares in one of the companies. Finally got rid of the headache."

In my head I was thinking,

"The headache is in my head right now. I'm still trying to understand the number I just read."

He continued talking about the company and the disagreements between the partners.

I was no longer listening.

The entire drive back, my mind was completely occupied trying to understand what I had just witnessed.

As soon as we got back to the office, I grabbed a piece of paper and a pen.

Keep in mind, I was only 21 years old. I barely understood anything about life. The internet was nothing like it is today, where information is available instantly.

So what did I do?

I wrote down the amount.

Then I divided it by my monthly salary.

I wanted to know how much bigger it was than what I earned.

Then I wondered how many months it would take me to save enough money to reach that amount.

At the time, I was earning around 500euros a month.

3,5 million euros divided by 500.

The answer was 7000 months.

7000 months of saving every single euro without spending anything.

That is roughly 500 years of salary just to see that number sitting in my bank account.

No matter how much I try to describe that afternoon, I cannot explain the scale of the shock.

It completely shattered my understanding of success.

The model of success I had believed in for my entire life suddenly felt like a lie.

Not because it was wrong, but because I realized it was only one model among many, and I had never even been told the others existed.

I spent the entire afternoon silent.

Normally I was the one playing music in the office.

That afternoon, the office felt unusually heavy.

Eventually my boss came over and said,

"Mustapha, you didn't play any music today."

He liked my taste in music because it reminded him of his younger days.

I simply replied,

"I got busy and forgot."

He could tell something was different and asked if everything was alright.

I asked him,

"Can I ask you something?"

My relationship with him was much closer to a father and son relationship than a typical boss and employee. We always talked about everything. Music, sports, politics, life.

So we went into his office, closed the door as usual, and I told him everything.

I admitted that after we got back, I had taken a pen and paper and calculated how long it would take me to earn that amount.

He burst into laughter.

Not because he wanted to mock me, but because the innocence of my thought process genuinely amused him.

I doubt he had ever met someone who thought about it that way.

Eventually we were both laughing.

Then he looked at me and said,

"You're my employee. I'm an entrepreneur."

That conversation was the first time in my life anyone had explained what entrepreneurship actually was.

What companies were.

How ownership worked.

How equity worked.

How businesses were built.

Until that moment, companies had always felt like abstract institutions to me, almost like governments.

I had never questioned what they actually were because they simply existed outside the world I grew up in.

While he explained everything, I filled pages with notes and recorded voice memos, something I always did so I could revisit conversations later.

When he finished, he asked,

"Do you understand now?"

I smiled and said,

"Ask me tomorrow."

That afternoon had completely turned my world upside down.

On my way home, my mind was completely empty.

I barely thought about anything.

I was simply in shock.

For the following week, one question kept repeating itself.

How had I lived for 21 years without ever asking what a company actually was?

Who exactly was the owner?

Why had I never questioned any of this?

Eventually I realized the answer.

I grew up surrounded by employees.

Conversations about "the boss" were almost always negative because salaries were low, or because of the many stories employees naturally share with one another.

Without realizing it, I had absorbed that perspective.

I had never understood that "the boss" was actually another model of life entirely.

A completely different path from being an employee.

That realization planted a new question in my mind.

What other models of success exist besides becoming a successful employee?

And how does someone actually become an entrepreneur?

That was the moment it felt like a new version of me was born.

I suddenly realized I needed to unlearn21 years of assumptions before I could start seeing life differently.

There were countless models of success that nobody had ever taught us in school.

And if you grow up in an environment like mine, you do not even learn that different models exist.

Sometimes those people are even portrayed as the bad guys.

Or they are simply absent from your world altogether.

After that experience, and after finally understanding what entrepreneurship actually meant, which took nearly 3 years of reading books and watching everything I could find on the subject, the ambition was born.

I wanted to become an entrepreneur myself.

And why not?

Maybe one day I would also receive a letter showing the sale of shares worth 3 million euros.

Today, Alhamdulillah, I have read as many books as I possibly could about the different models that exist in society.

How each one works.

What kind of lifestyle it creates.

Where its journey begins.

And what success actually looks like within that particular model.

As we grow older and mature, we begin to understand the role each model plays, especially when we look through an Islamic lens.

Because in the end, that remains the most important standard by which success should be measured.

And that is the story of where my ambition to become an entrepreneur came from, even though no such model ever existed in my family.

May Allah grant all of us what is best.