Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure

A 14-year-old selling credit cards in a Canadian mall

The episode opens with Muzamil introducing Fahad Khan as the CEO of Canada Prime Marketing — a company recognised among Canada’s fastest-growing for three consecutive years — and asking the obvious question: how did a Pakistani kid end up running it? Fahad answers by going back to the start. He left Pakistan in February 2000, more than twenty-one years before the conversation, after a childhood spread across Rahim Yar Khan, Goth Machi, and Lahore, where his father worked as an engineer at the Fauji fertiliser plant.

The Canadian arrival is the part most immigrant stories skip. “When you’re new, it’s a cultural shock,” he says, “especially when high school starts.” His English was thin. A friend’s aunt was working in mall-based marketing, selling credit cards at trade-show booths, and a slot opened up when she was short-staffed. Fahad was sixteen. The minimum age was eighteen. Somebody made an exception, and he started selling.

That first job set the pattern for the next four to five years. The minimum wage at the time, he recalls, was about $5.90 an hour. He sold credit cards. He was, by his own account, an average student — Bs and Cs, a single A-plus in an open-book organisational behaviour exam he still remembers. His mother had always told him one of her sons would run his own business. His two older brothers became engineers. By process of elimination, Fahad got the assignment.

The eleven-thousand-dollar paycheque that arrived as nine hundred

The pivot moment Fahad keeps returning to is a single project at a ten-day festival. He was working a booth for a company that had set him a commission-based target. By the end of the run he had submitted what he calculated as roughly eleven thousand dollars in earned commission. The cheque that arrived was around nine hundred and eighty dollars. The company kept the rest.

“That was not the first time,” he tells Muzamil. “Several companies didn’t pay me.” The pattern repeated across employers. The grievance was not abstract — these were hours and shifts he had actually worked, sales he had actually closed in front of customers whose IDs he had personally taken. The result was a private decision rather than a public one. “Something inside kept poking me — enough of this.”

He enrolled in a two-year marketing diploma rather than a full undergraduate degree, partly because the family could not afford more. By 2009, at the peak of the financial crisis, he started Canada Prime Marketing. The first contracts were small — pre-buying car-incentive trip certificates, working a pilot with a telecom company rolling out fibre-optic television. Then came door-to-door selling in minus-40 weather for one of Canada’s three telecom giants, the ones with the kind of reputation that makes referrals difficult. “If you tell someone in Pakistan they have to knock on doors house to house, they’ll say what a loser job,” he says. “I did it.” He learned, as he puts it, to fight back. Most people don’t.

Twelve years, three or four lean ones, and the test clients pose

Muzamil presses him on the arc since 2009 — twelve years in — and whether there were moments he considered the decision a mistake. Fahad does not soften the answer. “Never regretted it. I think it was the best thing.” Growth, he says, was thin for the first three to four years. The inflection came when larger clients started testing the company on specific projects. Pass the test and the relationship continues, because replacing a partner inside a large enterprise is genuinely costly. Fail it and the door closes.

This is the moment Muzamil widens the lens, because he can hear the audience he is concerned about. He points out the implicit risk of conversations like this one: a young listener hears the seventy-, eighty-, ninety-million-dollar revenue figures and concludes that quitting in six months will land them in the same place. “I feel like one of the biggest things that this generation particularly lacks is patience,” Muzamil says, and Fahad immediately agrees. “We are living in a world of instant gratification. Everything is on our button.”

The framing Fahad reaches for is borrowed from a researcher he cannot name but a concept he can: grit. Three months of trying is not perseverance. He is direct that this disqualifies most people from the path. “Ninety-eight percent of people shouldn’t” become entrepreneurs, he tells Muzamil, “because they’re not going to put in the ten hours, they’re not ready to walk out in minus-20 with their bag.” It is not a moral failing. It is a fit question.

The line he wrote in Australia on his birthday

The most personal section of the conversation arrives when Fahad describes one of his mentors, Tony Robbins. He has done sixteen events with Robbins and is one of his platinum partners. On a birthday in Australia, in the middle of a Robbins event, he was asked two questions. The first: what is life? The second: what is your purpose of existence, what are you here to create and leave behind?

He had been financially successful by then. Something was still missing. “Success without fulfilment is the ultimate failure,” he says, attributing the line to his mentor. He wrote his own mission statement that day, combining it with a phrase he had been circling for years. “Life is a gift and giving is our lifestyle.” That one line, he tells Muzamil, changed the way he sees things. Giving, in the version he now operates by, is not just money handed to someone hungry. It is knowledge handed to someone who has given up. “If you can help one person stay alive or move to the next level,” he says, “there is nothing more fulfilling. Once you help one, it becomes an addiction.”

Network is a story we tell. Relationship is a value exchange.

Muzamil draws him back to something Fahad mentioned earlier — the instruction to go and build a network of people you can serve. Muzamil sharpens it for the audience. People in Pakistan, he says, hear “network” and think of adding strangers as friends on Facebook. The thing that actually compounds is a relationship, and a relationship is a value exchange. He asks Fahad to expand.

Fahad lists the three things people should stop doing. The cold “Hello, how are you?” The “HRU.” The “NYC” that he still reads as New York City. If you actually want to connect with someone, the message has to be specific: where you met them, what you discussed, what you took from it, what you are asking for. “Lay out your full agenda,” he says. “Chances are I will respond.”

Then he gives the story he keeps for the end of this argument. As a student, he had a branding instructor named Theresa who used to say in class that she was so loyal to Starbucks she would drive fifteen minutes off her route for the coffee. Years later, after his business was settling, he ran into her at a networking event. He remembered the line. He told her he wished he had known she would be there because he would have brought her a Starbucks. The connection clicked. That evening, on his own initiative, he walked to a card shop in the same mall, bought a thank-you card, added a Starbucks gift card, wrote a handwritten note, and dropped it off. No agenda. She posted it to her followers. A few months later, the college called and asked him to be a brand ambassador. The line he had used in class — “transforming vision into venture” — became the headline of a half-million-dollar marketing campaign that ran for eight months with his face and name on it. “All you did is something good without expectation to receive.”

The sense of entitlement that screws everything else

Muzamil raises a case he has been thinking about — a young man who has been jobless for two years and keeps turning down offers because they are not the “perfect” job. He calls it a sense of entitlement. Fahad agrees and adds that he expects to be cancelled for saying so.

He gives the example that made the point for him. Three years earlier, on an early visit back to Pakistan, he sat in a friend’s real estate office. The tea boy was polished enough that Fahad suggested the friend train and groom him, because clients would see him. The friend’s response was that elevating staff that way would only make them arrogant. Fahad’s reading of that mindset is brutal: “You’re screwed already.” His counter-example is his own company. “I’m the ultimate janitor,” he says. He has swept the floor of his first office, cleaned the bathrooms, picked his sales team up from their homes, dropped them home at night. Canada Prime’s first office was a corner of his aunt’s forty-thousand-square-foot furniture store, a space “the size of this table.” The current head office is five thousand square feet on a top floor. The path between the two was not delegated.

The seventy-eight percent that won’t work

Later in the discussion, Muzamil walks Fahad through a number he has been carrying. According to a Pakistani government study, seventy-eight percent of IT graduates in the country are not employable. A private Pakistan Software Association study puts the figure above eighty-five percent. Four years of degree. Eighty-five out of a hundred unable to be productive on day one. The technical syllabus is not the gap. The personal-development layer between graduate and operator is.

Fahad agrees and points to a conference he had flown in for that was cancelled because of the OIC summit — a conference designed, in part, to address exactly this gap. He is not optimistic about the government solving it. He is not optimistic about incubators solving it either. He recounts a conversation with an incubator’s programme manager who told him, in effect, that ninety-seven percent of the startups that come through end up taking jobs by the end of the cycle, and the surviving three percent rarely last more than eighteen months. Muzamil’s response is sharp. “You’re giving the wrong solution to the right problem,” he says. Run six-month courses. Get them ready for jobs. That is what the money is actually doing.

Fahad adds a friend’s framing he likes: split the students into three buckets. The top one percent who genuinely want to go abroad to Stanford-tier institutions. The middle group who want to make money — give them ten thousand rupees and have them turn it into twenty, then forty, through real business activity. And the third group, the talkers. “I don’t buy that bucket either,” he says. “Very few will even be ready to talk.”

Unstoppable Pakistan and a thirty-year bet

Toward the end, Muzamil asks the question he asks every guest. Fahad will be sixty-six in thirty years. How does he see Pakistan then?

Fahad does not hedge. Power, he believes, is shifting toward Asia — China, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan. China is already a technology powerhouse. Pakistan’s asset is human capital, and specifically a youth majority that the older economies do not have. He reveals on the podcast, for the first time publicly, the name of the organisation he is launching to address the personal-development gap directly: Unstoppable Pakistan. The choice of name is the same choice he has been making since the credit-card booths. External forces will come. The country has survived seventy years of them and done reasonably well. “Now we’re at the point where I think there will be the breaking point where we’ll be a dominant factor.”

He gives one condition. Work ethic has to rise, and the small dishonesties — the do-numbriyaan — have to fall. If those two move, he says, the thirty-year picture is genuinely good. By the end of the conversation, Muzamil closes at the fifty-two-minute mark, gestures at his sister podcast The Pakistan Pivot, and signs off. The argument Fahad leaves behind is simpler than the revenue figure in the title. Build the mind. Give first. Define success in a way that survives the cheque.