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Ahmad Fahmy got his first job at an investment bank at eighteen, as a second-year engineering student, before anyone used the word engineer for it. He didn’t balance it with school. He worked all day, taught himself at night out of books, and dropped semesters when the two collided. He describes the method as jumping into the lake and then buying a book on how to swim.

By twenty-three he had all of it: married, a son, a house, two cars, a career inside a firm he’d grown up in. He says he felt like his life was over, not beginning.

What followed was twelve years in London, a climb toward managing director, and a definition of success he now calls a pie-eating contest where the reward is more pie. Then nine days running across the deep Sahara with no signal and nothing to do but think. He describes the order his thoughts arrived in: work, for the first two days. Then life. Then his parents. Then his children, and a question he couldn’t answer. Provide them with what?

He left, eventually. A mentor wouldn’t let him quit until he could say whether he was running towards something or running away from something. He couldn’t, so he stayed until he could.

Today he coaches organizations through change and tells most of them not to hire him. He lives in Istanbul, homeschools four children, and runs his home on systems instead of willpower. And he built 114, a challenge that asks you to run a distance and memorize a portion of the Quran, on the theory that memorizing is to an adult what the open-water swim is to an Ironman: the part that sounds impossible, filters nearly everyone out, and turns out to be the easiest leg of the race.

When one community asked him to make it easier, he made it harder.

His own wird is small. Surah al-Kahf on Fridays with friends at Şemsi Paşa, read out loud rather than listened to, and then a run.

Man laysa lahu wird, laysa lahu wārid.

CHAPTERS

00:00 What the wird is

02:03 Growing up in his father’s shadow

06:10 A job at an investment bank at eighteen

08:10 Jumping in the lake, then buying a book on swimming

10:57 London, and losing himself

11:44 Success as a pie-eating contest

12:44 Nine days in the Sahara

14:38 Crying over an iPod

15:38 “Provide them with what?”

16:45 Falling for organizational change

20:05 What AI does to the line manager

24:32 Coaching executives

29:40 Who actually wants to change

32:13 The one-inch hurdle

33:34 What would an Islamic Ironman look like

36:54 Memorization is the swim

39:01 The terrain of the Mushaf

39:55 “They asked us to make it easier”

41:01 Everything by twenty-three

43:35 What a work year actually looks like

47:22 What’s below the lake

48:56 “Are you running towards something?”

49:29 Lining up the first client

50:43 Ultraman, and the end of chasing

53:10 Stopped convincing, started finding

57:17 How he defines success now

58:30 Values versus the calendar

1:00:31 Surah al-Kahf at Şemsi Paşa

1:03:45 Niyyah, and what he actually thinks about

1:04:18 Hadith Jibril, and ihsan in a medal