Here are my five biggest career lessons.

The number one thing that I have learned is,  it's important to figure out your purpose  

early on, and ensure that it is  a critical part of what you do.

For me, it's embedded into where I've come from.  I grew up in Pakistan, you know, belonged to a  

middle-class family that really valued education  and economic opportunity for girls and women,  

and that was certainly not the norm around  me. I was very aware of how privileged I was,  

and what happens if you don't have that privilege.  I was very aware of the fact that this is exactly  

how I wanted to create some change in the world,  provide more of that educational and economic  

opportunity to more people, especially to those  people that have traditionally been left out of  

that kind of privilege. And so that's been the  red thread throughout my career. And here's why  

it's important. There are inevitably going to be  moments where things will be hard, where you'll be  

working with somebody you don't want to work with,  where you are burning the midnight oil to get  

something done, where you have you're overwhelmed,  because there's simply too much work to do, and  

that's where it matters. You have to be able to  connect it back to that fundamental purpose, that  

fundamental mission, those fundamental values, and  remind yourself, here's why this matters to me.

It took me a while to figure this out, but I  work best in the mornings. So whenever I've got  

difficult tasks, strategy documents to write or,  you know, long reports to edit, or some kind of  

complex problem, I'll often do that thinking and  some of that solo work very early in the mornings.  

Second is using music for concentration. I play  a lot of classical music when I'm doing some of  

those long assignments, that long set of work. And  third is around exercise. I know that it's always  

going to work best if I've taken a bit of time to  connect with my body, get some physical exercise,  

and then get back to some of the work that many  of us do in front of screens for very long hours.

This third lesson is something that I picked up  in my second master's degree, and probably one  

of the most practical things that I've learned  in academics. Getting off the dance floor and  

onto the balcony. Now, you'll often find yourself  in meetings where things are getting very heated,  

where everybody is going down a specific rabbit  hole, where a conversation is going very off  

track. And you'll have this huge temptation to  also get on the dance floor, to also present  

your viewpoint, to join that argument, to get into  that conversation. And it's incredibly important,  

I think, especially as a leader, and not just  as a manager and a decision maker, to step back,  

to be able to look at the bigger picture,  to understand what are the real underlying  

dynamics behind this conversation, and to start  naming it for people to help others do the same,  

to ask the right questions and say, what is it  that we're actually trying to solve for here?

My fourth lesson is surrounding yourself with  people who've got the right mix of skills and  

values. And when I'm saying skills, it's important  to have the hard skills, the technical skills,  

the right knowledge, the right capacity. It's also  important to have the soft skills people who are,  

for example, good at relationship management,  people who've got good active listening skills.  

All of that is incredibly important, but the  passion piece, the values piece, matter a lot,  

especially for an organization such as the World  Economic Forum, where we are working on some of  

the most intractable challenges in the world,  from education to climate change to technology  

governance. People have to be able to connect to  some fundamental, personal reason why it is that  

what they're working on matters to them, and  I think you can never go wrong with that mix.

There is going to be a moment where you're  facing some level of imposter syndrome,  

where you're wondering, how did you get to this  particular role? Are you really the best person  

for this role? How should you be responding? How  should you be acting? And I certainly had this  

moment. I mean, I've always had a lot of faith  in my abilities mixed with an appropriate level  

of trepidation about if this something I can  actually do. But about three years ago, when  

I was appointed to the World Economic Forum's  managing board at the age of 37, it became  

pretty ingrained within me that clearly I was  only here for bringing some youth diversity,  

some gender diversity, some racial diversity  and some religious diversity. And it became  

very much ingrained into my thinking at the  time. And what it did was I held my voice back,  

I spoke up only on the issues that I thought  I was supposed to speak about, and not on the  

issues where I actually did have opinions, ideas  and thoughts, and instead held myself back. There  

wasn't necessarily a sort of an 'aha' moment, when  I suddenly realized that this is what I'm doing.  

I was speaking to a lot of external mentors, and  especially some of my female mentors said to me,  

I think you're going through a phase of  imposter syndrome, and I didn't quite  

believe it. And it's only once I understood  that fully, embraced it, named the problem,  

that I was then able to move forward and say, I'm  here for a reason. I've got a seat at the table,  

and this is the moment to use your voice to try to  move things forward to make a difference, and also  

give myself the freedom to make some mistakes.