#NALS2017: Connecting Heart To Heart With Muhammad Yazid Zulkifli

“We cannot always build our future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” – Franklin D Roosevelt

At Leaderonomics, we want to see young people wanting to make a difference. We understand that by building up the younger generation, we can all share a better future. We want to help them realise their fullest potential to make their future a better tomorrow.

For this, we recently partnered with National Aspiration and Leadership Summit (NALS) 2017, a platform to help shape future leaders by instilling awareness of current situations and views while inheriting the continuous hunger for a better Malaysia from previous leaders of varying backgrounds.

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Leaderonomics caught up with Muhammad Yazid bin Zulkifli, a final year chemical engineering student at the University of New South Wales, and one of the many Malaysian student leaders involved in organising the event on Feb 4.

We posed some questions from our Thinkonomics set, a gameplay that consists of various thinking questions based on our five Leaderonomics values:

Q&A with Yazid

1. If you had a chance to empower a certain community, which one would it be?

Well, I will be biased towards researchers and academics as I feel that they play a significant role in shaping dreams. They create technologies that make dreams a reality. They help advance civilisations. They study and research to help us further understand who we are, what we want, how to achieve them, and many more. Thus, I certainly would take the chance to not only empower researchers and academics, but to also be part of them.

2. Define a generous giver – what does it mean to give generously?

I define being generous as being someone who is ready to give something in a portion larger than the norm. I strongly believe that generosity buds from passion, at which people generously give to fulfil a passion of theirs. For example, an activist who is passionate about his cause would certainly give or spend in terms of materials, energy and time to fulfil his passion towards that cause.

3. Would you break the law to save a loved one?

Yes and no. If my loved ones are under a circumstance at which they must be saved due to them ripping of the rights of another, and the punishment or law are deemed as just towards their actions, then I would not. However, if that is not the case, then by all means, I would break the law to save them.

4. What legacy will you leave behind when you leave this world?

Well, I dream to change this world in a technological means. I want to be able to come up with new technological concepts which help aid the advancement of technology for future use. Mine will be a legacy from the science frontier. Hopefully, it’s a legacy on a large scale like the ones created by Albert Einstein or Nikola Tesla, but a Malaysian.

5. Your hope for Malaysia.

I hope that Malaysia will one day be one of the world’s leading frontier in the advancement of science and technology, where inventors and prominent researchers/academics congregate in Malaysia. I want Malaysia to be known not only for our culture, but also as one that shapes the future’s technology. And certainly, I would love to be one of those who help accomplish this aspiration.

6. Share with us what you have learnt from any of the NALS 2017 sessions.

A session which I spent most of my time in would be the one on entrepreneurship. I was not able to participate directly in the activities, but I certainly learnt something from this session, both as a committee and as an indirect participant. I learnt that experience is very important in everything you do, despite prior theoretical knowledge you have gathered.

You may think that you have prepared enough, but when you have executed an idea, you realised that you have missed out on something. The session helped me realise things I never thought I should have prepared, both as an entrepreneur and a committee member. I believe that these experiences would make me better at planning and idea execution in the near future.