The most inspiring conversation I’ve had this year

“Mr Fred, I've been dying to ask you this question. Leaders are supposed to read a lot, so I want to know how many books you read last year, and how many you plan to read this year?”

Me: Well last year, I read about 12 books. This year I've gotten busier so by December I will have read maybe 7 or 8 books [Fred says proudly!]. How about you? How many books have you read this year?

“Well, I’ve read 58 books in 2021. The smallest had 118 pages and the largest had 580 pages. Also, 28 of them were fiction, 12 were leadership, 10 were self development, and the rest were books written by my friends. They’re all on my Goodreads profile.”

Me: Did you say 58???? You’ve read 58 books in 2021????? I don’t believe you.

…then I proceeded to pick my jaw up off the floor. This was just one of many highlights from the fascinating call that I had with an amazing 21 year old young woman called Firdaus H Salim.?

I first noticed Firdaus after she started commenting on my LinkedIn posts. So one day I went through her profile, read some of her articles, and surprisingly discovered that she was actually a student at ALX [one of our programs in the African Leadership Group that is training talent for the ‘4th Industrial Revolution’]. I was impressed with her description of her learning experience at ALX and so I asked to schedule a call with her. The call took place 2 days ago.

On our call, I learned a lot about Firdaus' background and interests and how she discovered ALX. From our conversations I realised that although she has a non technical background, she is extremely curious and eager to learn about global advancements. Today, thanks to our technology-enabled model at ALX, she is poised to become a full stack software engineer. Our program is extremely intense. Firdaus is coding for 100 hours a week (for 12 months!), and gaining front end, back end and devops skills. It is entirely project based and non-theoretical, so she’s really getting her hands dirty as a software developer.

In addition to all this, Firdaus is a writer. You can read her reflections about how she’s learning to build software through the ALX model here.

It’s hard to explain what I learnt from Firdaus on our call. Apart from the fact that she is one of the most passionate, intelligent, and wildly confident young people I have ever come across, her zest for life is extremely infectious. She would compete with any student from Stanford, Oxford, or MIT. You can see her full profile here. Her story reminded me of just how abundant talent is in Africa. All it needs is opportunity.?

I am thrilled that Firdaus now has this opportunity to unlock her full potential. Before the pandemic, we would not have been able to help Firdaus- but today, we’re providing world class training to 1,600 software engineers just like her, thanks to support from the Mastercard Foundation. And we’re just getting started. Our ambition is to train up to 1m software engineers from Africa over the next decade.?

As if Firdaus was not impressive enough, I discovered that in the midst of her 100-hour software engineering weeks, she somehow found the time to publish a book called Of Scattered Tears. It is a beautiful anthology of poems.

“Writing this book has been easy. I love poetry and it mostly comes to me as a free-fall. It took me a few days to research, days to write, months to compile, and just minutes to publish. An awesome experience, I should say.”

I’ve heard a lot of things in my time, but the words ‘writing this book has been easy’ is not one of them!

I was deeply moved after 20 minutes on our Zoom call. Just when I thought I couldn’t be moved further, Firdaus said, ‘Oh, Mr. Fred, one more thing. I have a present for you’. Then she presented this poem to me on Zoom. The title? ‘Do Hard Things’. It brought tears to my eyes.?

As an entrepreneur, I have some really really hard days when things just don’t seem to work out as planned. But it’s moments like this that remind me to keep going. Firdaus gave me the energy boost I needed two days ago to continue doing this very hard thing of creating opportunities for millions of talented young Africans like her.

Firdaus graduates in May 2022, and with her resilience and work ethic, I have no doubt she will be a top performer at any company that hires her. And she can clearly work well remotely! So if you're looking for an amazing software engineer with incredible work ethic (did I mention she codes for 100 hours a week?), reach out and I will connect you. And we have another 1,599 like her, right now. With many more to come next year.

Ps. How many books have you read this year?