Seven years ago, I left a stable, well-defined career path to pursue something far less certain: work that I could not yet describe in a job title. I have come to call that stretch of time The Moroccan Butterfly, not because I planned a transformation, but because I only recognized it as one looking back.
The shift started in 2015, when I left IBM after five years in consulting, project management, and sales leadership. The work had taught me real discipline, but it was not pulling at me the way newer questions were: what would it look like to put that same discipline toward youth empowerment, social entrepreneurship, and civic engagement instead of sales targets? I did not have a plan when I left. I had a direction, and very little else.
The years that followed were less about grand strategy and more about small, recurring commitments. In 2016, I started a personal pledge to donate blood 100 times over my lifetime, a quiet way of tying a recurring personal discipline to something that mattered beyond me. In December 2017, on my 30th birthday, I spent the day with a group of orphans instead of the usual celebration, an idea that came less from planning and more from wanting that particular day to mean something to people other than myself. Neither of these initiatives was newsworthy. Both of them shaped how I thought about consistency long before I had a word like continuity for it.
In July 2018, that direction took a more concrete form with the founding of CitizenUp, a civic-tech platform connecting volunteers with the organizations that needed them. It was the first time I built something instead of just contributing to something already built, and it taught me how different those two things actually are.
Recognition followed in pieces, never all at once: selection as a US Professional Fellow on Civic Engagement later that year, a place on the Top 100 Arab Startups list and a Best Digital Content Solution award from the World Summit Awards in 2019, an Atlas Corps fellowship that took me to California from 2019 to 2021, and later a Sharjah Government Communication Award recognizing the work in 2022. None of these milestones changed the work itself. What they did was open rooms I would not otherwise have been in, and put me in conversation with people doing similar work in very different contexts, as a Global Shaper with the World Economic Forum since 2017, and later as a judge for Africa’s Business Heroes.
Underneath all of it sat a less visible habit: treating learning itself as part of the job, not a break from it. Training as a certified executive coach with Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centered Coaching methodology came from the same instinct that sent me into fellowships and unfamiliar rooms, the conviction that the version of me capable of helping others tomorrow has to keep being built today.
If there is a single thread through these seven years, it is this: none of the meaningful turns came from a five-year plan. They came from saying yes to a direction before the path was fully visible, then doing the unglamorous, repeated work needed to make that direction real. The Moroccan Butterfly did not end with a finished transformation. It became the foundation Impactedia is now built on, the next chapter of the same direction, with more structure and less guesswork than the version that started in 2015.
