Amir’s Lifelong Journey
by Megharief
Genre: General Fiction / Business
ISBN: 9798891326248
Print Length: 286 pages
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas
From zero to hero, Amir has lived it all, and his story demonstrates how success is to be achieved, both professionally and spiritually.
In Amir’s Lifelong Journey, retired businessperson Dokali Megharief reveals the most desired and necessary traits that a leader in management should possess. In recounting the rags-to-riches story of the fictional Amir, the book combines poetry, philosophy, and self-help to teach as well as to inspire.
We first find Amir as an older man in his seventies aboard his yacht, named MyVision, in the calm waters of the Mediterranean. Leaning on the railing and gazing at the endless horizon where the sky meets the sea, he contemplates his past and future. Gradually, Amir’s history is revealed.
He grew up poor in a small coastal village in the Middle East, his father a fisherman and his mother a seamstress. He started working at fourteen years old and had a mind for innovation: during a water crisis he came up with a system for supplying the village with water from rainfalls. His first business was a local trading company which later turned into a global logistics company. By his forties he was president of two oil companies, and he disrupted the automobile industry through electric vehicles. He had an eye for real estate too, creating affordable and environmentally sustainable housing for neglected communities.
We are presented at great length with Amir’s attitude toward life and business. Above all is relentless hard work combined with honesty. Trust is also paramount, and employees are to be treated as family and to be led by example. Goals are to be one’s guide, leading from one peak to the next. Amir’s love for life is accompanied by the will to spread happiness, which has been helped in our hero’s case by his boundless empathy. After deep contemplation, Amir, whose “philanthropy was a river that flowed into the drought-stricken lands of despair,” decides to donate most of his wealth to charity and to give the reins of his empire over to his mentees.
Amir, with his influence over a vast empire as well as his great powers of introspection, reminds us of a kind of Marcus Aurelius, though Amir is definitely an enormously more virtuous man than the Roman emperor. The book’s philosophy is simple, indeed stereotyped, but that’s the price of painting a completely positive picture, exclusively using the brush of hope. The relentlessly alliterative chapter titles can be heard as mantras of this philosophy, for example the “currents of connection” and the “anchors of altruism.” The attitude is best represented, however, in the poems making up the back half of the book, written in all too neat and sensible rhyming couplets.
It should be noted that the book is bursting with AI-generated images and that AI was also used in “compiling and linguistic editing of the narrative.” Perhaps AI is to blame for the book’s repetitiveness, which can sometimes be tiring. This is to be the first in a series of books about Amir’s story but it is hard to see how, since it seems like a perfectly self-contained work for its own purposes.
Amir’s Lifelong Journey succeeds in showing everyone to dream and aim high. And it illustrates, through uncomplicated and effective language, that individualism and compassion are not mutually exclusive. It is a motivating tale of self-development and reflection, both for the proverbial everyman as well as for the prospective leaders among us.
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