Slow and steady growth beats the quick win in a career

The age of quick wins

Muzamil opens with the mood he sees online. Everyone wants to be a millionaire in six months, build a startup with a 100 million dollar valuation, or grow instantly at a new company. LinkedIn is full of people who quit their jobs and now earn huge sums. YouTube is full of “how to become a millionaire” videos, all saying it is easy.

He wants to argue the opposite. “Slow and steady long-term growth is the best move for your professional career,” he says. The episode is aimed at the anxious viewer who wants to become successful fast and make the family proud.

His central image is a tree. A strong tree first spreads its roots. Once rooted, it grows quickly, and its roots are so deep that it is hard to shake. Compare that with a creeper. It grows fast, but if you pull it, “it is out in two minutes.”

He also explains why resilience matters now. The economy goes up and down, and he expects the coming years to be even more turbulent.

Skill mastery makes you hard to replace

The first point is skill mastery. If you stay in one field, your experience grows and that experience has a price. If you keep switching jobs for an extra 10,000 or 15,000 rupees, or take scattered short freelance projects, you never go deep.

At the start, Muzamil says, lakhs of people can do the same work. As expertise grows, the number of experts shrinks, and demand for them stays high. That brings better pay and job security.

“The real reward in your career will always come after 5, 10, 15 years, when you become irreplaceable in a company,” he says. The risk of staying shallow shows up later. When your salary rises and you have a family and many expenses, a company can replace you with a fresh graduate who will do the same work for far less. If you need 5 lakh rupees and a graduate will do your job for 1 lakh, the company has little reason to keep you.

Relationships over LinkedIn numbers

The second point is the network. Muzamil meets many people who count their connections: 5,000 on LinkedIn, 10,000 people they know, every event attended. But when he asks how many of those people would call them in a hard moment or give honest advice, the answer is usually none.

At high levels, he says, hiring runs on recommendations. A manager you worked with for five, six or eight years may become a CEO somewhere else and bring a hand-picked team. They choose people they trust. A stranger with a great CV is a risk for a big role.

So sometimes it is worth swallowing a bitter pill: lower pay or a simpler role, if you have a great mentor. If you do leave, leave well. Explain your reasons with respect and ask to keep the mentor relationship. “Focus on meaningful connections in your life, not just LinkedIn connections,” he says.

The call-centre lesson

The third point is the growth mindset. Muzamil says many young people switch jobs for a raise that changes nothing essential. The extra money buys a new phone. He accepts that some people face real hardship, and he does not say earning money is wrong. In a developing country, money brings comfort. His point is to earn it smartly.

A person with a growth mindset picks the role with the most learning: a demanding manager, cutting-edge work, a new factory being built. That experience can be turned into money later.

His example comes from his own batch. Many computer science graduates left IT jobs for call-centre jobs that paid about three times more at entry level, roughly 1.5 lakh rupees against 50,000. Eight to ten years later, he says, the call-centre workers are still in call centres, and even as managers they earn around 2 to 2.5 lakh. The IT graduates from his batch are all outside Pakistan now. Many have European nationality, and their children get free education. “They changed their lives,” he says.

He sees a pattern. Employers with little growth to offer pay more at the start to lure people in, and that choice can wreck a career.

Calculated risk, taken at the right time

Some viewers will say they switch jobs or freelance because they like risk. Muzamil agrees that risk is good. He thinks Pakistanis take too little of it. But the risk should be strategic and calculated.

Fresh graduates often tell him they want to become entrepreneurs with no money and no family support. His advice is to get a job, save, build experience and credibility, and then take time off to try. The loss will be smaller, and the pressure from family about marriage and income will be lower. “Long-term growth does not mean you do not take risks,” he says. “It means you take risks at the right moment, after calculating them.”

Money follows value and impact

His last point is purpose. You spend a third of your life working, so there should be a reason behind it. He applies the same logic to investing. If someone offers you a plot file and promises that 4 lakh rupees will return 1 lakh a month, a person chasing only money gets scammed. A person who wants productive investment might choose an apartment instead, with a lower return and much lower risk. In stocks, he suggests finding good companies, investing, and forgetting about them, instead of day trading.

“Money will always come as the conversion of your impact,” he says. Once you see your job as creating value and solving problems, you start asking whether you can help 100 people at once, or 1,000. If you only ask how much one task pays, you will keep helping one person at a time and expect that person to pay ten times more because you have ten years of experience.

Nothing is that easy

Muzamil closes with a warning. “If it is too good to be true, it is more often than not never true.” The people selling courses and six-month success stories usually hide years of failure before the breakthrough, he says, because the short story sells their course and wins their views.

He shares his own experience. Over the last five to eight years, he has been tempted by easy-looking deals and job offers in what he calls shady businesses, even when the whole country seemed to praise them. Each time he stayed away, he says, those ventures ran into trouble, because short-term schemes collapse. Some people called him foolish. In the long run, he says, God gave him respect.

He ends with a wider point about society. In his view, too many Pakistanis are in the mood to grab what they can, as if wealth were a zero-sum game. “Until we become a high-trust, collaborative society, neither you nor I, nor our society, nor our country can become rich.” A career, he reminds viewers, is a marathon. Run it without burning out.