Today my mother turns 83. Her name is Hajah Mariah Ahmad.
Alhamdulillah, she is still here.
She was a Bahasa Melayu teacher, so she never used words carelessly. Two of her sentences have stayed with me for decades.
The first: do not just teach your children, educate them. There is a difference between teaching and educating.
The second: do not order children around; invite them to do it with you. Pray together, eat together, build something together. While they are still small and young, because once they are grown, the chance is gone.
In Malay she put it better than I can in English: “Kita jangan ajar anak-anak kita, tapi didik mereka.” And: “Jangan suruh anak-anak, tetapi ajak buat bersama.”
I have spent twenty years in rooms full of business owners, and most of what I know about building people came from those two sentences. A policy tells someone what to do. A leader does it with them until they can do it alone.
And that is what made something clear to me about my own children. Whoever I become, they will copy. Not the advice I give them, the person I actually am, on ordinary days, when nobody is watching and nothing is at stake.
So the responsibility is not only to run a better company. It is to keep improving myself, because someone is watching and will grow into a version of me.
My mother did that for eighty-three years. She still prays for me, every day, without being asked, and mostly without telling me.
Whatever I have built, whatever title people use before my name, to her I am still the small boy she prays for.
That is the inheritance I want to pass on. Not the business. The habit of becoming better than yesterday.
Happy birthday, mak. I am still your small boy.
Datuk Wira