You can just do things.
Life is only as serious as you make it.
I still got on the plane.
“Canada? I may never see you again!”
This was my first exchange with the Uber driver taking me to the airport to catch my flight directly into the worst snowstorm of the year.
My other flight had already been canceled due to the polar vortex, yet I managed to get it rescheduled a few hours later despite warnings that we were flying into a snowstorm that was causing trees to explode. My Uber driver, who owned an aviation business, kept emphasizing how he’d even canceled his own flight that night.
I still got on the plane.
Two weeks prior, I’d received a LinkedIn DM from some freshmen at the University of Waterloo inviting me to speak at a hackathon they were hosting. When we hopped on a call, it was little more than an idea. No sponsors, no registrations, no speakers.
Just three eighteen-year-olds, a pitch deck, and a claim that they would become the biggest Muslim hackathon in North America.
And in one short month, they’d pulled it off.
Somehow, they’d recruited prominent Muslim speakers across the tech industry, gained sponsors, rented a venue, and accepted over 300 ambitious applicants. Not only that, but they’d built a story so compelling that people all over the country were driving and flying through dangerous storms just to be a part of it.
I walked away from the event with people I still speak to and visit to this day. That was how I met a speaking agency I work with, the Muslims I now play tennis with weekly in SF, investors who reached out after the event, and more.
All because a few college kids had a bias to action.
And, though I didn’t clock it at the time, because I’d had one too. I got on the plane.
Intelligence does not equate to success.
After graduating from Berkeley, I can confidently say that while there are many brilliant minds on campus, the most successful people are rarely the most intelligent.
They are the ones with a bias to action.
And ironically, that often means thinking less and doing more.
The most successful entrepreneurs I’ve met at Berkeley weren’t thinking about the end goal; they were having fun. They became furiously obsessed with solving one problem, until it was all they could think about regardless of the external outcome.
When I was sixteen, I started an art business by shipping prints of my work all over the USA. I didn’t know what an LLC was, and I didn’t particularly care about the income.
Yet every day, I still spent hours preparing and packaging prints. Why?
Because I wanted to.
It was that simple. If I wanted to do something, I would. I didn’t need to watch 50 tutorials on how to build a stable business to feel ready. Because I wasn’t trying to be ready, I was having fun.
As a byproduct, I became ready.
The appeal, then, is not necessarily in the result but in the process. Because the process is proof that you exist. That you are moving through the world the way a child would: feeling for everything within your grasp, examining its tactility beneath your fingers and against your gummy teeth, exploring unashamedly what you haven’t yet given a name.
Not everything is a risk.
The thing that pulls us out of that childlike state, I think, is that somewhere along the way we start calling everything a risk.
As we age, we take ourselves way too seriously.
Growing up in an immigrant household, everything was assessed as a risk. My parents worked hard to navigate a world that wasn’t built for them, yet as a result, they learned to see it through a lens of skepticism rather than exploration.
To many immigrant families, everything must serve an underlying, practical purpose.
For years, there was so much added friction to convincing my family of any action I wanted to take — even something as small as taking a walk outside — that it was just easier not to do anything at all.
I remember in college complaining to a friend that I didn’t have a bank account, to which she responded: “Why don’t you just open one?”
I can’t, is what felt like my only natural response. It’s not something I’m old enough to do.
The idea of opening a bank account always felt monumentally paralyzing: I imagined it as an extensive legal procedure that I was heavily unequipped to partake in. That the minute I stepped into the adult world, I’d stumble. You can imagine my surprise when, after finally mustering the courage to walk into Chase, the entire process took less than half an hour.
And while the risk-averse philosophy passed down through immigrant families is protective and holds wisdom, at certain points in life, it becomes a hurdle that determines what a “realistic” goal is before we fully give ourselves a chance. And often, inconsequential things begin to hold more perceived weight and cognitive space than they need to.
I still remember, years ago, my mother sobbing as she watched me get my ears pierced. To my younger self, it felt exciting to do something so “risky” as proof of my autonomy.
“You look like a pasta strainer,” she said in utter devastation, “you’ll regret it when you’re older.”
Yet four years later, I still haven’t.
Now, at 22, I walked into a piercing store and spontaneously got my tenth piercing — a daith — not out of the same youthful rebellion or as a form of symbolism, but simply because I wanted to. I liked the piercing, so I just went and got it done. Nothing more.
Because sometimes, things don’t always need to be that deep.
And here’s the most exciting part no one mentions: If you ever change your mind, you can simply take it out.
Lessons, not life sentences.
One of my favorite Arabic phrases to say recently is “كل حاجة محلولة / everything is solvable.”
I find myself repeating it in every conversation or situation I find myself in. Because really, there are very few entirely unsolvable situations. Most things in life have solutions, although depending on the level of risk, the solutions may be more difficult or damaging to find.
Got a piercing you hate? كل حاجة محلولة. Take it out.
Plans changed last minute? كل حاجة محلولة. Make new ones.
Unsure about moving away? كل حاجة محلولة. Just move back if you hate it.
Scared of making a bad purchase? كل حاجة محلولة. Resell it or return it.
Because any decision towards the present moment is better than making no decisions to preserve an imaginary future.
The plane landed. The trees didn’t explode. The storm everyone had warned me about turned out to be survivable, the way most storms are. My flight home was on time.
And if it hadn’t been? كل حاجة محلولة. There would have been another flight.
But I’ll never know what I would have met on the other side, had I not gotten on.
You can just do things.
I needed this push to be more spontaneous. Thank you for writing this.
I genuinely needed this article and I've been aggressively using my free will nowadays.Keep writing <33