How to become influential – #1

Fajr Reminders - Mahmood Habib Masjid and Islamic Center

https://youtu.be/bOzw3ViAYu0 Auto-generated transcript: In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful.All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds.And peace and blessings be upon the honour of the Prophets and Messengers.Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and his followers.Peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and his followers.Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, and upon his family and his followers.My brothers and sisters, I'm sitting here in one of my favourite places in Mitinayu Park.On the bank of this stream, which flows through the park.This is spring, so there are no mosquitoes.But later on, it becomes a bit of a test sitting here because of the mosquitoes.But right now, it's absolutely fabulous.It's early in the morning and you see the sun shining on the waters.Very, very, very beautiful part of the world.And one of my favourite haunts, I walk here from my house and. . .I go around the park.It's not a very big park, but I walk from my house, I go around the park and I walk back.And that is about six miles.So this is my Mashghala.Alhamdulillah, I want to talk about three things.Let's see how many of them we can hear.Maybe the first one.Question which gets, which I get asked because of my leadership development practiceand . . .the mistaken impression people have of my wisdom.People ask me, how can I become influential?And of course, by definition, they also mean wealthy, but they don't actually say that in so many words.But how can I become influential?How can I become powerful?Now, the answer is very simple.And first of all, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be influential and powerful.Because what is the alternative?To be powerless and uninfluential, nobody cares about you, you are a sort of, you know,a slave to people or something.No, that's not an alternative.So, wanting to be influential and powerful is good.How do you do that?The answer is pretty simple.You do that by three things, by doing three things.Number one is help people.Number two, become a cover for people, hide people's faults.Become a cover of Allah for people, hide people's faults.And number three is add value to people.So, three things.I want you to keep these three things in mind and we'll talk about them and we'll see how much, what we can do to this.So, first of them is help people.Secondly is hide people's faults.And I call it become Allah's cover for people.And that's my brother's term for it.I shall have a very beautiful and wise brother.Hide people's faults, become Allah's cover for people.And the third thing is to add value to people.So, let's see how do you do that.Help people.Very, very simple.Go around looking for ways in which you can help people.And some of these ways are so simple, it's unbelievable.We live in America and one of the joys of American life is that you get to take out your own light, own trash.So, in West Springfield where we live on our street, Wednesdays are trash days.Every Wednesday the trash goes.Every other Wednesday also recycling material goes.Each one of them has a different bin and each bin is about almost four and a half feet tall, quite big.And you might say, why do you need such a big bin for trash?Well, you live in America, you know why.Truly, the American lifestyle creates more trash and garbage than I've ever seen in my life.More paper, cardboard, plastics, you name it.Unbelievable amount of stuff that gets wasted.So, the issue of taking out trash.Now, you put the bins out in early morning, the trash truck comes around usually about eight-ish.But depending on where you are, I mean, obviously it can't come at eight o'clock in everybody's house.So, it comes along when it comes along.You go after it.You go after work and your trash bins are still sitting there in front of your house on the sidewalk or something,which looks bad, which looks nasty.So, what I started doing was,