Inspiring leaders

As the room filled up with bright young faces, a girl with a huge smile walked up to the podium to introduce me to the audience. “I am very excited about today’s session,” said Zainub Riaz who was one of the organisers, her voice booming through the microphone. And so began the Young Leader’s Conference (YLC), a six-day residential conference where people from all around Pakistan attend workshops and inspiring talks to learn leadership skills from the world of business, development, academia and culture. Essentially, the place to be if you want to start off young with world domination.

Having successfully launched my company, Gullak, designing graphic t-shirts barely a year ago, I had been invited to talk on entrepreneurial leadership. As a mentor at the YLC, there was a considerable amount of ‘inspiring’ to be done. Gullak is not a conventional company and I was not sure how my story of humble beginnings would fare with this young crowd. Starting off as a freelance graphic designer and animator in 2006, the journey to success was like a roller coaster ride with rusty safety bars.

As I started my presentation, I realised the crowd wasn’t so tough after all. A bribe of free T-shirts and I was an instant hit. The kids were eager to learn and were generous with their responses. Among the starry-eyed teenagers was a girl from Lahore who shared her story of struggling to follow her dreams in the face of adversity from family and society in general. The fact that she had found the courage to talk about her trials and tribulations after hearing about my experience, made my efforts seem worth while. I had gone in thinking if I could inspire just one person enough for them believe in him/herself, my job was done. But by the end of the session – with the kind of energy and eagerness shows by all – we all felt unstoppable, that we could achieve anything we put our minds to and broke into cartwheels across the hall.  OK, so we didn’t actually do that, but in that moment, we believed we could.

The talk ended with photographs and lots of autograph requests. A guitar was sorely missed as I felt like the official YLC rock star. During lunch I ran into the very talented Kashif Rashid from K-Bridals and his lovely wife who wondered what all the commotion in my section of the conference was about. Apparently I had gotten the ‘good crowd’ of the day. Little did they know, it was the free t-shirts that had done the trick (and of course my very shiny hair).

The best thing about forums like the YLC, besides providing exposure and opportunity to ambitious young individuals, is its diversity. This eclectic mix of languages and cultures helps transcend stereotypes, making for more well-rounded individuals and better leaders for tomorrow. If only there was an Old Leaders Conference that did the same!

Ammara Gul Aga is an award-winning animator and CEO of Gullak. She has been working as a freelance graphic designer and experimental filmmaker since 2006.

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