Consistency has helped me in my personal and business life, and I value it as the number one trait for success. In the sixties as a teenager in Pakistan, I used to bike ride around 5 miles every day from a small town we lived into a neighboring village where I was born. My father owned land there where we obtained daily fresh buffalo milk. Often, I had to milk the buffalo, carry around five liters of milk...
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My first decision to enter the oil and gas business came with a lot of uncertainty! On a bright summer day in 1979, I got a call from my brother Aziz. I was in Edmonton, Canada living a middle-class Canadian life with a secure government job and a few side hustles. Aziz asked if I could go to Kansas in America and try to buy oil leases there and he had mentioned the same opportunity to another family...
My mother taught me common sense as a child growing up in our tiny village in a remote part of Pakistan. She had no formal education of any kind and taught me common sense in subtle but deeply meaningful ways. They are engraved in my heart and soul. For example, when she made roti (round flat bread) three times a day or gave me a glass of milk, she would make sure that I did not waste any part...
n the late seventies, when I moved to America, I often heard of stories that if you had a viable business idea and could work hard, the West was the place to launch a start-up company and be an entrepreneur. I constantly had this thought in my young mind as I launched my first start-up, which was an oil & gas production company in Kansas. Prior to that, I started in the oil business as a landman,...
When I was a young boy, I grew up in a remote part of Pakistan with no savings and our family lived a “hand to mouth” existence. My father was a land-rich, but a cash-poor farmer and in those days, farmers rarely obtained loans from the banks. So, you can imagine that I learned thrift the hard way at a very early age. I had only 2 shirts growing up. One was worn at home and the other was ...