Reviewer: Theresa Ranft
Let me start my talk by asking everyone in this hall a question:
'Have you ever lost hope in life?
Have you ever experienced the hopelessness feeling?
A painful feeling that might cause you severe mental health problems,
a painful feeling that might lead you to drugs or alcohol addiction?'
Hopefully, the answer is 'No'
and hopefully you will never experience such feeling.
In this exact moment that I am speaking to you
millions are losing hope and millions have already lost it,
especially those who live in war zones.
When people lose hope, they lose their motivation,
they lose their persistence,
they give up their goals and dreams
and they lose their energy.
And the main reason why they do so
is because they believe they are unable to change their reality
and influence the factors surrounding them.
Well, I'll try today to change this misconception.
By the way, I am from this place - Syria,
a place that almost everyone on this earth has heard about
because of the on-going war.
But today I'm not going to tell you stories
about how Syrian kids are freezing in camps,
how half of my country has been destroyed,
and how half of my people have been displaced.
Today I'm going to tell you a different kind of story;
a story that has something similar to Yusra Mardini and Rami Anis,
the two Syrians who made it to the Olympics last year;
a story that has something similar to Abdul Rahman Alashraf,
the Syrian guy who won the European Youth Award
for inventing an application
that allows smartphones to communicate offline.
And my story is very humble compared to those stories,
and to several other stories of people who challenged the war
to achieve their goals and dreams.
And it's not a unique story as well.
In fact, it's the story of thousands
whom I'm trying to be their voice here today,
to hopefully regenerate the hope inside those who have lost it.
My story started in 2012.
After seeing my country being destroyed and the economy collapsing,
after seeing my people killing each other,
after seeing the hate, vandalism and crime
spreading massively in my country,
I lost hope.
I lost my motivation and persistence,
I gave up my goals and dreams and I lost all of my energy.
And as an ambitious person,
I was dying not from the war that was surrounding me,
I was dying from the hopelessness feeling,
a feeling like there is a knife stabbed in my heart and I cannot take it out;
a feeling, if I were to describe it in two words,
I would say 'dying slowly'.
This situation continued for six months until I reached rock bottom
where I was ready to do anything to alleviate my suffering.
And on one specific day in 2012,
the day that I will never forget in my life,
I decided to take the most important decision ever -
I decided to move out of the hopelessness zone.
On that day, the situation in Syria changed dramatically
and a brutal battle started in my city.
And I still remember every single moment of that day.
I still remember looking at my neighbourhood from my flat,
seeing people panicking, stores closing,
and soldiers spreading all over the place putting checkpoints.
I still remember seeing the fear inside people's eyes
from not knowing what tomorrow will bring.
I still remember myself sitting on my couch, hopelessly, no electricity,
only the candle and my cigarette light I used to smoke at that time;
and everything I was hearing
was the non-stop intensive bullets and missiles
five kilometres away from me.
I was sitting with all this pain inside me,
reviewing my life, my dreams, my goals, how all of them are fading away.
And I said to myself,
'This should be the end.
Today I might die as a collateral damage
if this battle five kilometres away reaches my neighbourhood.
But if for any reason I survive that day,
tomorrow is going to be a new day in my life; a new start'.
Eventually, I survived that day and the battle didn't reach my area.
No hopelessness anymore, no negativity anymore,
no sit and do nothing anymore.
This is what I decided on that day.
Here I would like to share the first message
with people who have lost hope or who might lose hope in the future:
please know what triggers your inner power.
Hopelessness is something inside you.
It's caused by external factors but it comes from inside,
and the solution comes from inside as well.
Don’t count on anyone to get you out of there,
just get rid of all negativity
and understand what triggers your inner power.
For me, it was seeing my dreams and goals fading away in front of my eyes
that triggered me to do something to change my reality.
For you, it might be your wife, your kids, your husband, goals or dreams,
any of these things.
And if you don’t have any of these things, then do it for yourself,
do it for the sake of not living with this painful feeling.
My goal was very simple:
to study a master's degree in one the best universities in the UK.
For some, studying a master's degree
is like climbing ten metres over the mountain.
But for me, it was like climbing Everest,
climbing Everest with no climbing equipment
and in the middle of a storm.
For me to study a master's degree in the UK,
I needed to learn a new language from scratch,
I needed to save every pound of my salary for ten years,
or to have a scholarship.
I needed to learn how to write essays, motivation letters, personal statements,
filling applications,
all of these things which I didn’t know at that time.
And here I would like to share with you my second message for today:
know which mountain you want to climb
and understand the needed equipment to climb it.
In other words, know your goals.
It might sound as a cliché, 'know your goals', doesn't it?
Then why don’t a lot of people know what their goal in life is?
Not having a very clear goal in life is like sailing without a destination.
Do you want to sail without a destination?
I don’t think so.
And most importantly, know how to achieve it,
know its requirements.
So after I understood my goal and its requirements
I started pursuing them day and night.
I started waking up at 5 o’clock in the morning
when nobody interrupts me, to study English.
And I struggled to learn the language.
I struggled because, in my country, we don’t exercise English
neither in our daily life,
nor in the professional field, nor in the academic field.
And it was so difficult to study a language without exercising it.
It was like learning how to drive theoretically and not practically.
But that was fine.
Three years of hard working I managed to achieve my target in IELTS.
In fact, the difficult part was in the second requirement:
the funding.
It's impossible to save every pound of my salary for ten years,
and a scholarship was not an option for me at that time
because almost all scholarships require a high GPA in the undergrad --
which I didn't have.
And I cannot go back in time and change my undergraduate grades,
and I needed to figure out something to solve this big obstacle,
to move this big rock out of my way.
And I said to myself,
'If I can’t go back in time and change my undergraduate grades,
then I will go forward'.
And I decided to enrol in a part-time master degree in Syria
just to improve my academic history.
And I struggled again.
I struggled to balance my life.
I had a wife, a kid, a full-time job, learning English and doing master's.
But I managed to achieve my target again - a GPA of 3.2.
I managed to do so by exploiting every single moment of my day,
especially the daily time that I used to spend while stopping at checkpoints.
I managed to exploit this time through reading academic articles
and learning English vocabularies.
So it took me three consecutive years of hard working, not to achieve my goal
but just to be eligible to submit an application and enter the competition
along with thousands of candidates,
to a scholarship with an acceptance rate
of less than 4%.
Here I would like to share two important messages.
The first one: if you don’t have the equipment to climb your mountain,
that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
They are out there somewhere
and you just need to work hard to get them.
And the second message: know what keeps you climbing.
Achieving your goal might be a daunting task that might take you years.
It depends on what your goal is and what you already have to achieve it.
And you need to have a very strong motivation
to put this continuous effort over a long period of time.
For me, it was my unlimited will to secure a better future
for my wife, for my kid and for myself.
Everyone should have something that motivates them.
Please discover it, you will really need it.
So, as I said previously, I was trying to climb in the middle of a storm.
And what I meant is the conditions that were surrounding me
while trying to achieve my goal.
I used to live in a place where you only see electricity nine hours per day,
a place where sometimes I needed to wear four or five layers of clothes
to survive the cold winter,
not because I couldn't afford fuel but because it was unavailable in my city.
So imagine 40 degrees in the summer, no air conditioning,
and zero degrees in the winter with no heating.
I used to live in a place
where the sound of mortars, bullets, jet fighters and missiles
don’t stop.
You hear them on a daily basis.
And personally, I survived death more than ten times from mortars.
And all of these deadly events have happened to me in a 50-metre radius.
The economy was collapsing; I lost 80% of my salary.
So imagine losing 80% of your salary while having the same level of expenses.
My university was located in an unstable area,
so the journey to my university
was one of those journeys that might have a bad ending.
And it was located near a military base.
So imagine sitting in a lecture theatre or meeting your supervisor
and every now and then you hear missiles launching
or you feel the building shaking.
And lastly, unfortunately, the closest people to me, the closest,
didn’t support me during this journey.
So imagine climbing your mountain in such a storm,
imagine achieving your goal and studying in such conditions.
All of the previous were like heavy rocks, raindrops, winds,
hitting my persistence and determination while trying to achieve my goal.
And bear in mind that this is the situation of millions,
and it was considered a heaven compared to other people.
During this journey, I failed eight times
and received those 'unfortunately' emails eight times.
And I was so close to giving up.
Here I would like to share with you my last message for today.
No matter what circumstances you are living,
it's up to you to overcome your difficulties,
it's up to you to stand on your feet after each failure.
Failure is a normal part of the journey
and don't blame the world when you fail,
because when you're doing so
you’re just giving yourself a very good reason to quit.
Failure should be like a break in the journey, a short break,
where you take a breath and analyse how things could be done better.
I still remember when I failed the eighth time.
And I said to myself, 'That's it.
I'm not going to waste my time any more on these things'.
Then I asked myself a question.
'Do you want to go back to the hopelessness swamp?
Do you want to lose everything you've done so far?
Do you don’t want to live as a loser in this life?'
And I decided to take this one step further,
and I decided to apply for the ninth time,
and I discovered that I was about to surrender
one step of achieving my goal.
One step.
If I hadn’t taken that one step,
I wouldn’t have stood today here in front of you
On the ninth try, I've done it.
I received this 'congratulations' email.
One of the best moments of my life
was seeing the four-year efforts translated into an outcome,
a moment that washed away all the suffering immediately.
And here is me along with my colleagues
receiving one of the most competitive scholarships in the world -
Chevening Scholarship.
A scholarship provided by the UK government
to highly-qualified international students.
Last year, more than 41,000 candidates applied to this scholarship.
So I won my scholarship and I arrived in Scotland,
super excited to achieve my goal, super happy.
And I thought, 'That's it, no storms anymore.
Now I can focus on achieving my goal'.
But I was wrong.
Living away from my family who live in a war zone
caused me several waves of severe depression.
In a certain period, my kid was refusing to speak to me over Skype,
refusing to speak to me over the phone,
simply because he could not understand why his dad is not here anymore,
why his dad is not playing with him anymore,
not hugging him anymore.
So imagine how that impacted me.
But I know he will understand when he grows up.
With the support that I received from the University of Glasgow,
my professors, my friends and the wonderful Glaswegian people;
with my determination to make my family proud of me
and to show that we can achieve no matter what,
I managed to overcome this difficult period,
and I achieved a distinction as well.
Because as I said previously
it's up to you to overcome your difficulties.
If you want, you can.
So, my talk has almost reached its end
and I would like to end it by sharing with you my own vision.
Developing people.
In this world, not everyone is privileged like you and me
to build strong capabilities and to have a strong education.
Inspired by Syrian societies,
societies that promote transferring the knowledge,
societies like I Give, Institute of Human Resource Management, and My Doctor,
inspired by those non-profit societies,
I want to become a social entrepreneur who facilitates transferring the knowledge
between those who have it
and those who need it and cannot afford it.
I want to help people continue their education,
and I have already started working on achieving this vision
through participating in establishing the Syrian Network in Glasgow.
A network of qualified people that one of its main aims
is to help Syrians continue their education.
So five years ago I was sinking in the hopelessness swamp,
and today I am standing here in front of you,
a person with two master's degrees with distinctions,
preparing for my third one.
I'm standing here as a part of a global network
of 46,000 Chevening alumni
who work together to solve the world's problems.
And in the future, I will stand here again,
but then as a social entrepreneur
who helps others achieve their goals and dreams.
And all of that not because I was lucky,
but because I refused to surrender.
And I urge you,
and I urge everyone who has lost hope
or who might lose it in the future:
don't surrender.
I know that you've gone through a very difficult time,
believe me, I can feel you.
But please understand something -
we need you.
We need the doctor, the entrepreneur, the psychologist, the lawyer, journalist,
that you have dreamt of being.
We need you to stand on your feet and help others to do so.
We need the smile that was stolen from your face.
We need you here on this stage, not in the hopelessness swamp.
Please keep climbing and don't surrender.
Please. Thank you.
(Applause)