{"id":34695,"date":"2018-04-09T18:21:33","date_gmt":"2018-04-09T17:21:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/essentiallypop.com\/epop\/?p=34695"},"modified":"2018-04-09T18:33:06","modified_gmt":"2018-04-09T17:33:06","slug":"faisal-shafique-shows-success-is-about-determination-to-succeed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/essentiallypop.com\/epop\/2018\/04\/faisal-shafique-shows-success-is-about-determination-to-succeed\/","title":{"rendered":"Faisal Shafique Shows That Success Is As Much About Determination To Succeed As Anything Else"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Born in Pakistan, Faisal Shafique moved to the US at the age of 15 with his parents, and even though he couldn’t at that point speak English, he didn’t let that stop him, and instead through hard work and study developed the communication skills which have allowed him to get where he is today.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Faisal was expected to follow in the path of many others in his family, and become a doctor. After graduating high school in 2010, he attended a community college, while working with his uncle at a clinic, at the same time improving his communication skills by way of taking phone calls. However, in 2013, he left his job in order to help his parents with their petrol station.<\/p>\n

One of his colleagues at the clinic put him onto Instagram, and suggested that it might be the next big thing in social media. It got Faisal thinking, and after a short while he devised the idea of posting interesting facts on his page. He kept working at the family petrol station, and studied for his Associate Degree, but little by little he began investing money in Instagram.<\/p>\n

Faisal is a very early example of what we now know as an “influencer”: someone with a large social media following who is viewed as having some sort of influence. Unlike now, where there is an app for everything, in those early days, it wasn’t known how to raise followers quickly. Faisal did his research, and found a few small pages which sold shout outs on eBay, and so he decided to reach out to them. He paid people to post his content, in order to grow his followers.<\/p>\n

It was an expensive venture. Often Faisal would spend his entire pay cheque, and max out his credit cards. His parents objected strongly, but he had more than a hunch that this was an opportunity he didn’t want to get away from him. He continued creating content and sharing it other pages, similar to his own in size, so that after a while he no longer had to spend money on growing his site.<\/p>\n