Career choices, content creation, and the cost of comparison

From BBA graduate to content producer: how Hamza Bhatti found his direction

In this conversation, Muzamil sits down with Hamza Bhatti - founder and CEO of Hamza Bhatti Productions - to work through a question that most Pakistani graduates face but rarely discuss openly: how do you actually choose a career, and what happens when the path you picked turns out to be wrong?

The episode opens with Hamza describing his situation after finishing a BBA in marketing. At that moment, Dubai was the obvious next move for almost everyone around him. “Every person, when university finished, Dubai was very hot property at that moment,” he says. Thousands of graduates were heading there, making money, and the social proof was hard to ignore. He followed.

It did not go well. The stint abroad ended badly, and Hamza returned home having lost both time and money. He describes that period as hitting rock bottom - not something that was a very good time for him. But he also identifies it as the turning point. Once he stopped looking for jobs and started paying attention to what he actually wanted to build, things began to shift.

The problem with following a field rather than an interest

One of the sharper observations in the conversation concerns computer science graduates - though the point applies broadly. Hamza notes that by the time a student completes a four-year degree, the industry has already moved on. Artificial intelligence, network security, and other specialisations that were emerging when someone enrolled may be entirely different disciplines by graduation. “You graduate, and now what do those kids do? Computer science lab, computer science master” - cycling back into more education rather than engaging with what the market actually needs.

Muzamil pushes back gently on whether this is a problem of the individual or the system, and Hamza’s answer is that it is both. The curriculum does not keep pace, but students also rarely go into an industry and look at what is genuinely in demand before committing to a path. The mismatch between what is taught and what is needed is not accidental - it is structural, and young people pay for it.

The first video and the realisation that followed

Hamza’s entry into content creation was not planned. He describes launching his first Facebook video and watching it reach over three thousand views in three days from his personal profile alone. When he showed the video to people at his college, the reaction surprised him: “Yaar, tu idhar kya kar raha hai?” - roughly, “What are you doing here?” The implication was that he clearly belonged somewhere else.

That moment, he says, was a realisation. Media was something that genuinely moved him. He began focusing on content, eventually entering a competition and winning it - not the main prize, but enough to confirm the direction. Later, a video he made about rural development and the problems specific to Pakistan went viral overnight, drawing messages from Sri Lanka, Nepal, and India as well as from across Pakistan. The reach surprised him. It also clarified something: the problems he wanted to talk about were real, the audience existed, and the work felt worth doing.

Why career counselling is missing - and what parents get wrong

Muzamil raises the absence of career counselling as a structural failure, and Hamza agrees without hesitation. “Humein kabhi bhi bataya nahi jaata” - we are never told. The advice young people receive is almost always the same: study hard, get into engineering or medicine, find a stable job. The idea that someone might freelance, create content, or build something outside a corporate structure is treated as irresponsible rather than as a legitimate choice.

Parents, Hamza argues, are not the enemy - but they are operating from a model that no longer fits. The generation that valued a government pension or a fixed corporate salary was responding rationally to the world they knew. The problem is that they pass that model on unchanged. “Subah aath baje jaana, shaam paanch baje aana” - arrive at eight, leave at five - becomes the definition of a proper life, and anything outside it is suspect.

His advice to young people dealing with this is practical rather than confrontational: show your parents something concrete. “Unko koi aisi concrete cheez dikhao” - give them visible evidence of progress. An argument about passion rarely lands. A result does.

Comparison as the career killer

Later in the discussion, Hamza identifies comparison as the single most destructive habit a young person can develop. “Comparison jo na, woh sab kuch khatam kar deta hai” - comparison destroys everything. Watching what a peer is doing, measuring your own timeline against theirs, feeling behind because someone else graduated earlier or earned more sooner - all of it pulls attention away from the actual work.

He connects this to a broader point about identity. What Muzamil Hasan can do, someone else cannot replicate exactly - and the reverse is equally true. Trying to become a version of someone else’s career is a way of abandoning the specific thing you might actually be good at.

The practical alternative he offers is a simple filter: identify three things you would do even if no one paid you. Then find the people who are already doing those things at the highest level and study how they work. “Woh log jo ke top par baithe hue hain” - the people sitting at the top of those fields - are the ones worth learning from, not the peers one step ahead of you on the same conventional path.

Content creation as a profession, and what it actually requires

Hamza is direct about the gap between how content creation looks from the outside and what it demands in practice. The glamorous lifestyle visible on Instagram - the settings, the gear, the apparent ease - is not the job. The job is consistency, specificity, and a willingness to go out and find the story rather than wait for it.

He describes his own work covering rural Pakistan, travelling to Sindh and Balochistan, going to areas that most urban creators ignore. The argument is not just ethical - it is strategic. The competition for attention in those spaces is far lower, the stories are real, and the audience that finds them is genuinely engaged rather than passively scrolling.

He also makes a point about the difference between entertainment content and content with impact. Both have audiences. But the long-term relationship with an audience built around something substantive is different in kind from one built around novelty. “The market will always be open for all types” - but knowing which type you are building matters.

By the end of the conversation, the through-line is clear: the career question is not really about picking the right field. It is about developing enough self-knowledge to stop following the crowd, enough patience to show results before demanding recognition, and enough discipline to stop measuring yourself against everyone else’s clock.