recent posts

about

Master in computer engineer and passionate about self-development and technology.

  • Early Morning

    I do not know how some people used to wake up late in the day time. It is important to have enough sleep for our quality of life, on the other hand the beauty of the day is to wake up early, which helps you achieve lots of things.

    Starting the day with an early positive message will influence you for the rest of the day. The most important positive message of the day is the early morning vocal prayer, Allah said in surat “Isra’a – 17/28”

    “Establish prayer at the decline of the sun [from its meridian] until the darkness of the night and [also] the Qur’an of dawn. Indeed, the recitation of dawn is ever witnessed.”

    The Messenger of Allah (ﷺ) said, “He who offers the dawn (Fajr) prayers will come under the Protection of Allah (Riyad as-Salihin 1049, Book 8, Hadith 59). 

    This is how a blessing start of the day will boost your energy and will bolster you, it is to start with an act that Allah loves especially when it is a mandatory and a decisive prayer for testing a person’s faith how much he loves his creator.

    I heard multiple audio books about motivation and few authors talked about morning vocal positive message. I believe that those authors came to this conclusion from a profound experience while God gifted the humanity in His Holy Book and guided us how to start our day many years ago.

    I remember during university days especially at weekends I used to wake up early and I used to finish many things too early including house cleaning and tidiness, studying, shopping, cooking, etc.

    The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ (peace be upon him) said, “Allah made the early hours blessed for my Ummah.” 

    It would be great if you have time before going to work early morning to do some exercises the way you find it possible to stay healthy and active.

    In the end, forming a good habit takes around three weeks to be hardwired in your brain, if this practice lingers for weeks then it will become part of your daily routine.

    Early morning has an influence on spirituality and productivity without any shadow of a doubt. Have you ever noticed that starting early in the day will help in accomplishing your pending affairs instead of worrying about not doing it! You will be less stressful in your life God’s Willing if you preserve this habit.

    This is it for now.

    Leave a comment

  • Forming A Good Habit

    I remember when I was a child, one of my classmates who was a very distinguished student at school and one of my best friends had told me “Do you want to preserve prayers continuously without intermission? Just pray the compulsory five-times-a-day prayers regularly for 30 days and you will see the result”.

    I cannot even remember what was my age at that moment in life, probably between 11 years to 13 years old and I assume it is between the year 1988 and 1989. During these years there was no internet, no social media and only the local TV channels to watch. My classmate was always occupying number one in the class and was the best student among his peers in terms of marks, knowledge and ethics and at that young age he was well taught and well brought up. I listened to his advice and by the grace of God till this moment I am preserving prayers.

    For any practicing believer it is all about faith, the fear of God and the practice itself. It is all about building a habit and for you to gain a new habit you need to practice it for quite some time regardless what is the duration and then it will be instilled and defaulted. I wonder who taught that young boy these things and made him think always rationally, he was simply amazing.

    Habits are contagious, if you surround yourself with bad people you will start gaining wrong behaviours consciously and unconsciously. We used to say “tell me who is your friend I will tell you who you are”, as simple as this. If you accompany friends who talk always about cars you will also build an atmosphere of the same mentality. When your friends are too interested about something you will start thinking about the same thing whether you liked it or not, it comes automatically and passes to you like an infection, birds of a feather flock together.

    The Prophet Muhammad (blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: “A man will follow the way of his close friend, so let one of you look at who he takes as a close friend.”

    The rule is applicable to everything, here are some common good habits you need to take care of in your day to day life:

    Coming closer to God

    It starts with vocal prayer (early morning), which has a great impact on you psychologically for the rest of your day. When you expose yourself to vocal practice as proved it has an influence on you. Preserving daily prayer is the bond between you and God and it is the positive message of your day. It is a big subject you can explore it yourself.

      Good sleep

      Having enough sleep during the day is an important factor for driving your good general health, lack of sleep is not constructive, but destructive and it is the mistake we commit due to our lifestyle and customs we used to do. Practicing early morning vocal prayer actively and persistently requires enough sleep.

      As Brendon Burchard mentioned in his book “The 6 habits of growth” about following the rule of 3, 2, 1 sleep, which means 3 hours before sleep no food, 2 hours before sleep no work, 1 hour before sleep no screening and then sleep.

      Exercise

        After having enough sleep, find one hour of your time and push yourself to do exercises as if you dedicated this to a doctor visit. Think in this way, this is what I used to tell my colleagues, if you subscribe to a nearby GYM in your neighbourhood, the money you pay there is as if you booked an appointment with a doctor. You decide when to go taking into consideration your own circumstances, it can be before work if you do not have to drive and rush to work too early due to roads traffic or something of that kind. Besides, you can directly go after working hours or when your children go to bed. Do not bond yourself to anybody and act individually, this is for yourself.

        Healthy food

        In reality, when you eat more you need to burn more, it is like a fuel in your body. Practically, the body burns fat when you do not exercise, but when you eat a lot and start feeding the body with more fuel then exercises are needed to burn it out.

        Ironically, when you eat less, you will not need to burn out more calories. Nonetheless, practicing and exercising is too important for your mental and physical health.

        Sharpening the saw (knowledge seeking)

        Put a book next to your bed if you have collection of books including the Holly Book, let it be your habit to read few pages before going to sleep better than screening and playing with your mobile unnecessarily and without objectives. The biggest mistake people do here especially on YouTube when they turn on the suggestions feature and they start sliding and exploring videos from one to another and watch whatever comes in front of their way. Better to switch the suggestions feature off and choose only the topic you find useful, but again no screening as much as you can and try to follow the rule as shared earlier.

        Dedicate a short time during the day when you can learn new stuffs like watching a course in udemy.com to grow with your knowledge. Try to fill your brain with good things unfortunately otherwise it will be filled with garbage in these days.

        We can keep on speaking about this subject till morning, but this is it for now.

          Leave a comment

        1. Today’s Challenge

          When you look at the surrounding IT technologies you feel that it evolves rapidly and it sounds too challenging for IT gurus to cope with the latest updates. There is a big gap between what people study at the universities and what we see in the market.

          There are more specializations available in the market contrary to what we used to see in the past, there were limited specialties taught at the universities such as computer engineering, computer science, software engineering, industrial automation, etc. Today students focus more on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, data science, cloud computing and so on.

          To keep track of cloud computing people keep on attending courses and pass exams to become certified at this field, but the cloud computing environment keeps changing almost every month if not every week. If you decide to go for passing Microsoft exams what will you prepare for will retire after some time and new release will be launched as a replacement containing all of the new changes and updates.

          It is not something static, but dynamic and keeps changing, it is not accountancy where fundamentals are permanent. The technology and innovation emerge day by day and IT experts find it too difficult to keep following up the updates no matter how much you are passionate about technology after certain period of time a day will come when you will no more be able to do the same due to various reasons few of them are the age, commitment, family and personal affairs and so and so forth.

          This is the situation in today’s market. The qualification obtained in the past such as computer engineering fits in different fields that it taught us low-level programming (i.e. assembly language) and high-level programming (i.e. pascal and C++), computer architecture and design, fundamentals of networking and others. Things were completely different while in today’s time the rhythm varies and looks faster. Few companies dominated the market for so many years for examples Microsoft kept controlling the end-users platform and continued to sell its operating systems with every computer selling. Today this spanned to online services where everything became centralized or hosted for you. If you used to do Microsoft Exchange administration on premise, it does not sound a good idea to do the same when Office 365 is in place providing exchange online for you without the need to have a dedicated server at work for achieving this goal. They take this headache on your behalf while you focus only on the provisioned service, no more infrastructure concern from this angle.

          For you as an IT guru you should know that you are like a football player with a limited age. Footballers quit the game between the average age of 34 and 36 years old. Thus, footballers are obliged to start thinking either to begin coaching or to go for other businesses.

          Likewise, IT gurus or specialists after the age of 35 should be prepared to do a balance between what they had learned during their careers and the survival plan later on. After this age the majority of people focus more on managerial stuffs by learning new skills for instance obtaining university degrees (i.e. PhD), which may become the reason of commencing a new academic career that can last for several more years ahead.

          This is an avoidable part of life every person must comprehend and be prepared for, but keep in mind that nothing works out without a plan.

          A plan is needed to achieve something, nothing will work out just like that. Put your plan and stay focused and do not let anybody let you down, note down your thoughts and ideas, attend courses, seminars, consult with people, and set targets or goals. Be careful of falling in a comfort zone, if you are too casual about your life you will end up a casualty.

          As someone said, do not let people’s opinion about you become your reality, always work for the best and count on God.

          For you to keep the momentum going on a fuel is needed. Motivation is one of the key player that can let the momentum move forward. When the going gets tough, the tough keeps going. Besides, maintaining your good health is your top priority without diving deep in this subject.

          Let us learn together how can we achieve this, propose your thoughts and ideas and share your experiences.

          Leave a comment

        2. Good Words

          Good Words

        3. Good Words

          Unto Him (God) ascend all good words, and the righteous deed does He (God) exalt (surah Fatir 35:10 Quran). 1

          It is so important in any environment to know that the spoken language must be motivational to lift up the spirit and to charge the atmosphere with positive energy and to avoid being toxic. It sounds so wonderful when you find your colleagues doing their work from the depth of their hearts and willing to participate more and coming to work with passion, power, smile and trust.

          Transparency at work is one of the keys that any leadership should start with because any employee or subordinate will work with peace in mind if they know that there are no hidden agenda or when they are confident enough that rules are clear and fair. Keeping in mind that we remain humans not angels, we cannot be ideal or infallible, we do commit mistakes every some time, this is part of our nature and this is how we learn. We do not talk about whether these mistakes are considered sins or not. We discuss here in general that we do learn from mistakes and this is how we build our experience. It is essential to admit the mistakes and without doing so and realizing that there is a mistake we will not grow with our personality and experience, but only the ego will build up more by time.

          People with their nature love to hear good words no matter if it is a compliment, praise or a word of appreciation it will always keep a positive impact. What if this word of appreciation was followed by a reward especially when a real achievement was accomplished, you cannot imagine the traces of influence it would leave behind.

          It is not advisable to use the language of threat and intimidation, the language of punishment and suspect, it is not a good approach neither it does speed up the achievements and innovations. It is God who said ‘My Mercy has preceded My Anger’. 2 The language of reward before the punishment spreads motivational feeling, we do agree that people should be held accountable this is because accountability does push people to be more careful, responsible and that consequences are always there if x or y job was not performed well, but in the end this must not become the primary and the ultimate goal, it will kill effectiveness and efficiency, it will dry up the general feelings of the team work among the peers.

          Disciplinary works out when there is accountability, there are people who are too casual about their life and they will end up a casualty, they are too apathetic and this can be seen from the way how they handle their day to day tasks, poor follow up, weak communication, lack of participation, moody, unreliable who must be always reminded. If the the motivational language and spoken good words did not work out with them, then the following stage is to jump into holding them accountable and this is what we used to say “The last resort is cauterization, which is disliked”.

          People may argue here by saying “give me and I will give you” instead of “give him and he will give you”, we do rationalize differently and it does also depend on the environment criticality, there are work environments that do not bear to have faults and there are profitable businesses built in this way, if you do not perform well we will kick you out and will bring somebody else as simple as this. Believe it or not, motivation helps in bringing more profits to the companies if it is used wisely and in balance.

          For example, employees at work must feel more engaged, not underappreciated, the presence of incentives do really help in preserving the employees from quitting their jobs and resigning. The balance between work and personal obligations must be considered in any work environment.

          There are studies online prove that highly engaged people increases profitability and reduces absenteeism and that they are less likely to resign. People who are prone to stress are less productive, but if they receive more recognition they will work harder and companies will be benefited from this, it will increase profits.

          In reality, many cases people do not quit their jobs, but their bosses. In one hand it sounds funny, on the other hand it is so sad to find people stressing out up to this extent. You name it, wellness and health conditions, we want to see people healthy not depressed undergoing medication, in the end people are the core of the society and it has to be healthy.

          I do believe that leadership in any company must be educated on motivation strategies and goals and the importance of doing so and the revenue and crops they will gain out of this.

          Being in balance is something valuable, not soft nor too strict, depending on the situation controlling the emotions and deploying more wisdom. It is not easy, but with this journey we learn a lot on how to be more patient, wise and seeking to understand then to be understood, listening with an intention to understand not with an intention to talk.

          1. Surat Fatir, versr 10, The Holy Quran ↩︎
          2. Sahih al-Bukhari 7453 Book 97, Hadith 79 ↩︎

        4. The Beginning of Journey

          The Beginning of Journey

          Welcome to my blog! It is 9th of March 2025 12:06 AM and now I have started my blog where I can post my thoughts of various topics. The blog will become rich and useful with the passage of time.

          In the past I developed my own website by myself, but it took me long time to take care of it technically, but it was a bad idea. The best approach is to go for an online ready-made blog and not to waste time on technical stuffs, but to focus only on the content.

          Building a website from the scratch will need continuous updates, patching and so on. Thus, I decided to change the course of action and share ideas and thoughts without struggling technically on how will this appear.

          The blog will contain technical articles, thoughts and ideas about certain personal studies and reading. For you to know more about me I will leave my LinkedIn profile for your reference.

          Feel free to leave your comments or suggestions.

          The Author,

          Fadi Alzebdeh