Your Lord or Your Ego?

He walked from Bosnia to Mecca to do. But you know what he had? He had the effort. He had the will. And that is the most important thing. The GPS that we have is the Quran and Sunnah. But effort without direction is pointless. Suddenly you're going to start to worship a cow or a table, right? Or a chair. >> What is your Barakah Blueprint? People think like, "Oh, Islam is something you add to your life." No, Islam is life. >> Who are we? >> Who Who are we when no one's looking? >> I' I'd always have to explain my existence to people. >> Why can that not be me? Why can't that not be another Muslim? >> The gold is in the work that you don't want to do. >> You lose everyone. Don't lose your prayer. >> You can fool people, but [music] you cannot fool yourself and you cannot fool Allah. >> You're reaching for something in the duny. You're reaching for Allah. It does not matter what I want. It matters what Allah wants. >> The ego cannot survive [music] under the light of awareness. >> My Barakah Blueprint is the Quran. >> I love that you called your podcast Barakah Blueprint because the blueprint is baraka. [music] >> What is your Barakah Blueprint? [music] Welcome to the Barakah Blueprint podcast. If this is the first time you're listening to this, let me give you a quick introduction about myself. My name is Ibrahim Shareef. I work as a project manager here in Dubai. I pretend to be an entrepreneur as well. I run a brand studio called Itan and I have my own production studio for my content called the Sharif Productions. I also am a Quran. Alhamdulillah. This is the reason why I created my content here is that life is best lived by following the Quranic compass. And my mission and why I created this podcast and why I'm even creating content to begin with is to tell people about this compass. And I also want to share my lessons learned, the achievements, uh if there are any that I have gained from my journey. Uh what I have learned in terms of my development and in terms of my mistakes as well so that other builders, other creators, other founders can take this with them and build something better. Now, one thing that I have started to do since moving here, alhamdulillah, is that I've started to take my religious studies more seriously. So even though it's a very simple very very basic uh level uh I'm studying uh to better myself in my Quran recitation I'm studying to better myself in my understanding of Jewish prudence and also the theological understanding of Islam and with my teacher and mentor subhan Allah we went through a very interesting concept and this is a concept that is strictly related to the worship of God Almighty and is particular particularly mentioned in fat the first chapter of the Quran. I want to talk about this as well and I want to draw a parallel between this and running and creating your brand both as a business but also as a person. And the concept that I learned was which is coming from the word slave or to worship. That what we learn is that our relationship with God almighty number one we dedicate all forms of worship to him the our creator the manufacturer of life while at the same time we do that no questions asked. We don't impose the conditions. We are merely in a relationship of obedience to the creator. Why? Because that creator deserves the obedience. Now why am I mentioning all of this specifically and why am I quoting my uh mentor in that particular regard is that at the end of the day this relationship is not like any relationship between a master and their subject as we have seen in history or as we have seen in other uh areas of life. [gasps] This relationship is unique and interesting uh specifically from the following angle which is that this master or this manufacturer or this create this cre this creator actually is interested and invested in rewarding his creation and and rewarding his subjects and this only happens if the subjects are able to follow the the manufacturer's manual correctly and accordingly. Now the part that gets very interesting here is usually to dedicate worship and to be in this relationship you serving that master theoretically speaking means that you are smaller you take less size you are you know you if you're obedient that means what you're leaning down you're bowing that means you're you know you take a smaller portion of life which means you're more invisible and this makes sense because if you are in an obedient state normally You are not commanding anything. You're being commanded. So you're following the instruction. You're the pawn basically. All right? This is the the the the per standard understanding of what obedience and slavery is. Okay? And it's true. But [snorts] the difference here, your relationship to God almighty of obedience is not a restricting relationship. It is an empowering relationship. Right? Now, what I mean by this very, very simply is you're either obedient to your Lord or you're obedient to your ego. And we talked about this comparison before. Okay. What we did say is that if you're if you choose to be obedient to God, that means you are following the commandments in accordance to the nature of that creator. Now, since this creator and this master is maximally perfect in his attributes, and one of those attributes are goodness and kindness, you're expecting goodness and kindness back. But if you're going to be obedient to the self, the self is limited. And the self is going to push you to evil and corruption, especially if the environment is construed in a certain way. That means what? That means if you are obedient to maximal perfection, you're going to enjoy and reap the rewards of that. But if you're but if you're instead obedient to possibility of corruption, you're going to be limited from goodness. And this makes perfect sense if you think about it. So if your pleasure is synonymous with the pleasure and the and the satisfaction that your Lord gets over you, then your satisfaction of life is automatically amplified. But if you instead choose to satisfy your nef your ego, you're not going to be getting any uh lifelong satisfaction per se or any satisfaction that is going to be uh lasting. Uh similarly the gave a perfect example. He gave the example of a GPS. We said if you're going to drive from city A to city B. Okay, I'm going to use Sweden as an example because my my heart still has some Swedish nostalgia. I'm from a city called Goththingberg. Yubori. Uh, and I know for a fact that if you were to drive from Goththingberg, Yubori to the so-called capital, the real capital is Gothberg Alfikra. But for some people, Stockholm is the capital, right? So if you were to drive to that city, right, it's a 5h hour driveish, approximately 500 km. That the you can't necessarily say that GPS is the make or break from you actually reaching there. This GPS will actually lead you to that destination. However, it still has many contingencies that are dependent on it. First of all, you need to have a vehicle, okay, to get there. Your vehicle can be your two legs, but I promise you, it's going to take a lot of time. And a third of the path, you're going to be asking yourself, why am I spending all of this time to go to a city like Stockholm, right? Uh so preferably you want to have a car or another uh vehicle that can get you there in a proximal pace and speed. Uh you need to have knowledge of the road as well because if you don't know the road um you will most likely get lost multiple times. So either you memorize the road or you have some sort of a GPS. Right now there's another layer and this is the layer of effort. You need to actually be willing to go to Stockholm. So to those of you who are willing to go to Stockholm, I'm very very sorry that you're in this position, but you need to have that much more than you need to have the compass or the GPS or the vehicle to actually reach that destination. This actually applies to everything. Like for example, there's there's a there's a Bosnian fellow or to to my Bosnian audience, there's a Bosnian Tak who decided to uh arrive to uh Mecca by foot to go and do Hajj. He walked from Bosnia to Mecca to do like a very very impressive gentleman as a matter of fact. So he didn't have the GPS, most likely had some knowledge of the road and the path and didn't have a vehicle. But you know what he had? He had the effort, he had the will. And that is the most important thing, the most important thing that you can have in literally any endeavor in life. uh one of the um u people that I am uh collaborating with and I'm that I'm coaching and being coached by as well. Alhamdulillah. And I'm grateful that I have that relationship with people. um they have a beautiful brand, beautiful company that they've built and they want to create content and they want to create a podcast but the issue is they don't have the microphone the camera the and I said like these these are all asb these are all just stuff at the end of the day it doesn't matter really if you think about it what you need much more than that is the effort you need to put in the time even start with something like a phone to record And from there, you're going to have [snorts] your content and you then you start and improve. Like those of you who who are watching the Barakah Blueprint, first of all, shout out and thank you. Remember the first video that I posted? Like literally remember it. Like [laughter] it was what? It was a choppy 24 fps 720p video with choppy audio quality and I still posted it anyway. Why? Has nothing to do with Ibrahim being amazing. has everything to do with the fact that I needed to start. I need to create that momentum and keep that momentum going. The sheh gave a very beautiful analogy because he said um you need to have the best way to reach your destination is to actually have that GPS and why because the GPS for example if you're using applications like ways not sponsored by the way uh you you're going to be warned about like uh traffic incidents uh you're going to be notified if like you need to take a different detour to uh reach your destination faster. um any hazards in the way that you need to be aware of and so on and so forth. Um and this together with the effort is what takes you to your destination. And the reason why I'm mentioning this as well, subhan Allah, is he g he gave the example he said the vehicle is like your your ability and capacity to actually do the thing. The GPS that we have is the Quran and Sunnah. That's the example that he specifically gave. And uh the Sharia of God Almighty is the turnbyturn direction, right? It's a very beautiful analogy and actually really really like it. And uh in the same way it warns us about like these these the bad things that can happen in the way don't take this road because you're going to end up doing or committing shik or any of these things right. So and the this entire journey all of this journey that I just described to you this is uba this is the action of worshiping almighty god you have the effort okay but effort without direction is pointless suddenly you're going to start to worship a cow or a table right or a chair right so while while while you may be sincere uh the action may not be correct right uh and similar ly if you don't have turnbyturn directions you know that we have to we know we know we have to pray five times a day but how do we actually pray five times a day right h what what are the steps that we're going to be taking exactly do we make do we clean ourselves or do we not clean ourselves right this is exactly why we need to schedule our time around salah we need to schedule our time around uh the the prayer timings because this is the one thing that will bless your schedule and I've talked about this in multiple episodes multiple times if you want your time to be blessed, schedule it around prayer. And with that being said, I'm going to be um finishing the video and I want to thank you so very much for listening to this episode of the Barakah Blueprint. And remember to renew your intention for every path you are taking and every action you're taking. If it's not for the sake of God, it's not worth doing. So do so in baraka style. Thank you so much.Alamah. amlaykum. [music] >> [music]