I will be posting (hopefully) short previews of what’s cooking in my world in coming weeks. I will however, give you a hint: Redesign, reworking, rethinking Mazaydar.com

You are responsible for your own experience.

In my short (and still going) time in entrepreneurship, I have learned this lesson many times. When I was starting this journey, I always asked other successful entrepreneurs (offline & online) about their experiences. The best advice I ever got was similar to this statement.

Soon I realized that this is true for everything in life. If my experience was similar to yours, or yours similar to mine, than what would be the fun in that? I am glad the way my life experience has been so far. It has been a challenge, fun, sad, happy, exciting, nervous, long nights, sleepless nights and much more.

In my opinion, one of the mistakes that we make as humans is to look up to someone as our “role model”. While the concept of “role model” is good, what it can potentially lead to can be dangerous.

We look at successful startups and we try to convince ourselves that we if we replicate their success story than we will be automatically end up with the same success. This isn’t true at all. Its their experience that made them what they are. You can’t replicate that. You can’t replicate the experience Bill Gates had while building Microsoft, you can replicate the experience Steve Jobs had while building Apple.

So stop trying to recreate experiences, build your own. Enjoy what life throws at you and make the best out of it.

There are a gazillion problems out there that need your skill-set, your time, your efforts and your ideas. Go out there, solve them, help others. That is what your life experience would be.

And I did end up meeting some really great people!

This is part 1 of the series of posts. This post is going to cover all about my experience in Islamabad.

First off before landing in Islamabad, during my transit from Abu Dabhi, I met a really nice young fellow (not that I am really old or anything) Naveed Zafar. Naveed is an IT/network professional based out of UK and was going back to Islamabad to visit his family. We had a nice exchange of ideas and thoughts around what can be done in Pakistan. Thanks for the talk Naveed, it really help me forget the first 14 hours of my flight from Toronto to Abu Dabhi.

Next, I met up with Owaeis Kiyani, a very energetic and young entrepreneur from Islamabad/Rawalpindi. Owaeis had me curious about his next startup called GidMid. So I asked him to tell me a bit about it, he wants to keep it off the record. So I won’t go into details but it all sounded very interesting. We also talked about his journey into entrepreneurship so far and the experiences he had as a freelance developer and even helping his friends and family in getting into the freelance business. Thanks for the lunch Owaeis.

Then after a day’s break and eating as much as I possibly could. I ended up scheduling a meeting with Aamir Attaa the founder/editor of ProPakistani.com – a technology related news website. I had very long and interesting conversation with Aamir regarding his views on online journalism, media, marketing, advertising and technology in Pakistan. I can confidently say that what Aamir is doing with ProPakistani is simply an outstanding effort and example of how to leverage the power of web to generate value for yourself. He is a great person, with very well thought out ideas and if I was running a newspaper in Pakistan, I would certainly hire him as a consultant to get the online presence setup that our newspaper industry seriously lacks.

I wanted to meetup with Osama Hashmi from Green&White but he wasn’t feeling well, so I had to settle with a phone call. I hope you are feeling better now and I wish you a speedy recovery.

I have missed out on meeting a few other good people from Islamabad and Rawalpindi who had contacted me to meetup with them, but unfortunately, due to short time-span of my stay I couldn’t meetup with all of you. InshaAllah that would be done in my next trip, which would be a longer.

To all those whom I met (and didn’t meet): keep up the hard work, encourage people around you to take action and create value.

InshaAllah (God willingly) I will be starting my tour from Islamabad/Rawalpindi, then going for a few days in Lahore and then to Karachi.

So if you are interested then email me at hello[-at-]obaidahmed.com

Please note that my tentative dates for this trip is from Nov 9th till Nov 24th. So keep these dates in mind when emailing me and also please do provide me with your contact phone number, as I might not have internet connection as soon as I land.

Hope to see you soon!

What do you think? Green side or Red side?

My thoughts will follow in a separate thread.

Even though you may be onto something but your startup idea probably sucks. See the thing is, we get so excited about our idea that we decide to keep it close to our chest, so no one else can run away with it and beat us to the punch.

Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you. There are at least 10 other people in this world who thought of exactly (or better) the same idea that you are guarding. It is a well known fact that it is the execution of the idea that matters and not the idea itself.

So my advice to all you out there is to talk about your idea, talking with others will help you refine your idea, gather feedback and fine tune it for the launch.

So go out there and make that idea a reality. Talk to people, fix it, refine it and relaunch.

I am not interested in “waiting” for your “big idea” to be rolled out after 2 years. This world wants instant results. So build that first iteration with just one feature.

That’s what we did for Mazaydar.

So how does UFone tell us all about this awesome feature?

Finding your dream job is now, just an SMS away. U-Job Alerts now gives you access to thousands of job announcements as posted on Pakistan’s Leading Job Portal, ROZEE.PK.

Hmm.. “dream job” an “SMS” away. Yes that’s what I want, I want you to spam with me SMS alerts for every single job that is posted on Rozee.pk — like you couldn’t just spam my inbox so I can look through them when I had a few minutes and apply for them with a proper resume.

To me this is a prime example of a product shoved into a space where it doesn’t belong. It is uterly useless and someone at UFone should be held responsible for making this decision.

I am not even going to bother explaining why is it a bad idea from an employer’s point of view, let alone candidate’s point of view. But if you are looking for job, my personal recommendation to you would be NOT to use UJob to apply for a job. I know I won’t hire you if you applied through the mobile.

I am excited about this release for two reasons:

1. It is a cricket game. Looks awesome and with P2P features, I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

2. It is made by a Pakistani company. I don’t even know of any other game that has been developed and released from Pakistani company.

It will be interesting to see how successful does this get. I am not sure if they are releasing any console versions of the game, so if the guys from Mindstorm Studio read this post, can you please comment on this?

I love my country, I don’t need to prove it to anyone by my twitter stream. Actually I agree with Imran that no one cares how much you love your country. I think what is important to do this August 14th, is to make an aim. Yes we all love to make aims in life. So let’s make an aim that whatever we are trying to do to improve Pakistan — whether it is by starting a company, launching a new product, cleaning our neighbourhoods, helping others in whatever way possible — whatever it is, let’s keep on doing it.

Show your love for your country by your actions, not by tweets alone.

While I applaud Farhan for what he is doing, I really do think that his talent and skills can be put to better use rather than creating these avatars. We have bigger fishes to catch, we have bigger problems to solve. Let’s use our talent for productive activities.