saab

Tarek Saab is a successful businessman, author, and speaker. He rose to fame as a contestant on The Apprentice and is also known for his Christian faith. He discusses topics such as business ethics, chastity, and abortion. Tarek realized that material wealth and success did not bring him happiness. He emphasizes the importance of living out one's faith and considering salvation as the ultimate goal. He believes that our careers, relationships, and hobbies should all contribute to our journey towards heaven. Tarek Saab is a 28-year-old businessman, author, and speaker. As a businessman, he is the president of a media company and co-founder of Lionheart Apparel, a men's Christian apparel line. His success in the business world led him to be recognized as one of Kipling's who's who in executives and business professionals. Tarek rose to fame as a popular contestant on the television program, The Apprentice. After being fired as the 12th contestant, he showed his resilience by returning to the show to assist the eventual winner. As an author, Tarek wrote his first book, Gut Check, confronting love, work, and manhood in your 20s. It's about young men's issues and is being released for the first time here today at our conference. As a speaker, Tarek presents to corporate and college audiences throughout the country. A devout Catholic, Tarek is also a big hit speaking to Catholic youth audiences and men's groups. He covers topics such as chastity, modesty, business ethics, pornography, abortion, and other moral issues. Today he will talk to us about his faith in the marketplace. And what I just mentioned, Tarek has an even wider range of interests and abilities. He played rugby for the Dallas Harlequins of the Super League, is very active in the pro-life movement, and is a member of MENSA. Gentlemen, please give a warm Cincinnati welcome to a truly gifted young man, Tarek Saab. Wow, a fine looking group of gentlemen. The tie was my wife's idea, I promise. Very honored to be here today. Like Coach Kelly, I'm actually from Massachusetts, and I'm the son of a Lebanese immigrant and a Portuguese woman. As a young child, we had it a little bit difficult growing up. My father worked 80 hours a week to put food on the table, and my mother was very focused on education. We lived at times in public housing projects, and she saw that as the means for me to get out of that environment. She focused very strongly on my education, and as a young man I received a scholarship to go to an elite boarding school in Marion, Massachusetts called Tabor Academy. At Tabor, I found it very difficult to really meld my past with this exorbitant wealth that I saw. Many famous people sent their children to Tabor, James Taylor and Bob Vila, and I guess not all that famous, but kind of famous people. As a young man, I was very focused on the future, and I decided that happiness for me was in making $60,000 a year, having a nice car, good home, well-paying job, secure job, the whole bit. With that in mind, I decided to pursue an electrical engineering degree, and I graduated shortly before I graduated in 2001 from the Catholic University of America. What turned out to be the tech boom, if you remember this, all the dot-coms rising and such, and there's this great demand for talent in engineering. And as fortune would have it, I received a job offer from Texas Instruments six months before I graduated in the amount of $60,000 a year with a $10,000 signing bonus, $6,000 location package, $1,000 stock option, $600 a month car plan, and a matching 401K. I took my offer letter down to the Nissan dealership on Valentine's Day of my senior year, and I bought my very first car, fully loaded, 4x4 Nissan Pathfinder, leather interior, heated seats, sunroof, six-disc in-dash CD changer, the whole works. I think I put 30,000 miles on that car doing one-mile loops around campus with the windows rolled down, blaring my music. After graduating from college, I relocated to Dallas, Texas to enter into a technical sales and marketing program. I wanted to leverage my electrical engineering degree into something that I enjoyed doing. I enjoyed interacting with people, and I viewed work very much as a competition. I wanted to succeed in business. I was focused on the future. And very quickly, I became an up-and-comer in the corporate ranks. I was getting gold stars from my boss, and my boss's boss, and my boss's boss's boss. I realized something very quickly, that sometimes God gives you everything that you think you want so that you can realize that it will never make you happy. I realized that a Nissan Pathfinder was never going to lead to my happiness. I wanted a BMW 5-series, the director's car, the man's ride. After one year in Texas, I was transferred to Silicon Valley and began taking on a number of different sales accounts for Texas Instruments. And after one year, when performance bonuses were included, my yearly salary had ballooned to $135,000 a year. I was 24 years old. I had everything that I thought that I ever wanted. I had a nice car. I traveled. I dated beautiful women and, you know, I spent money on clothes and ate out at sushi restaurants almost every night. But I still wasn't quite happy. Now, during this time, I was still calling myself a Catholic. From the time I was an altar boy at Our Lady of Purgatory Church, and the priest used to always say, the gates of Purgatory are open to anyone who wishes to come. I was generally good to people. I didn't do drugs. I wasn't having sex with random women. It felt like I had all my bases covered. I was, you know, checking the box of what I felt a good guy was all about. But it wasn't simply my empty desire for wealth that was undermining my happiness. It was much more than that. It was partially the fact that I was working 80 hours a week and devoting my life to my career. It was partially the fact that my business ethics and relationships were not fashioned by a will to please God, but to advance in my company. It was about validation. It was about the desire to prove my success against my peers and the desire for the power of managing people. This is what I was focused on. In large measure, even my masculinity was tied to my paycheck and to my rank. The unfortunate circumstance is that no amount of money and no amount of power ever provides the necessary finality to our work. Where does it end? I like to say, you'll never see a billionaire who isn't working anymore. Why are they still working? Guys like Bill Gates and Donald Trump don't fully understand true success. I like the following quote from Dr. Peter Chudnowsky. He says, in regard to the question of a final end, if we are to consider capitalism from a truly philosophical perspective, we must ask of it the most philosophical of questions. Why? What is the purpose for which all else is sacrificed? What is the purpose of continuous growth? With capitalism, there is no saturation point. I like to say that the irony for the capitalist is that the Grim Reaper is a communist. We all end up in his hands in the end. We all end up in his hands in the end. Men like Tony Robbins and Donald Trump devote volumes addressing how to achieve the means, but they never focus on the punchline. What is the end? One Saturday morning, I'm sorry, one Sunday morning, a particular gospel reading began to affect my outlook. It says, I know thy works that thou art neither cold nor hot. I wish that thou were colder hot. But because thou are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will begin to vomit thee out of my mouth. Words didn't threaten me. It simply presented a logical point of fact. The living out one's faith is either no way to live or it's the only way to live. It's either imprisonment or the only path to freedom. It offers happiness or it frustrates the pursuit. You're either all in or you're all out. I realized that my health demanded a decision and my inability to make one had left me disenchanted. I was both a religious hypocrite and an employee who was impossible to satisfy. Maybe there are some men here today who know what I'm talking about. Maybe you go to church. Maybe you don't. Maybe you're still not 100% quite sure what your life's purpose is. Maybe there are some men here who just aren't happy. There's a movie that I like a lot. It's called A Few Good Men. There's this iconic scene in the courtroom between Colonel Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, and Lieutenant Cathy, played by Tom Cruise. And Jessup says, you want answers? Cathy says, I think I'm entitled to them. Jessup says, you want answers? And Tom says, I want the truth. Jessup says, exactly. You can't handle the truth. I know that's a terrible impression, but I had to. The truth is that success in life and business begins by focusing on death. I was giving a speech recently to a group of businessmen, and I said something similar. I said, you know, success in business begins by focusing on death. There were these three gentlemen in the front row who happened to work in a mortuary, and they were like, right on, brother, right on. I had spent my young adult life focusing on the future without ever once considering the Catholic concept of a final end. What is the point of achieving all of your earthly dreams, only to fail the only test with eternal ramifications? If we don't ever consider our salvation, we are missing the whole point. In Ecclesiastes, it says, in all thy works, remember thy last end, and thou shalt never sin. Our careers are not an end. They are a means to an end. Recreation is not an end. It is a means to an end. Our relationships are not an end. They are a means to an end. God has entrusted our wives and our children to us to help them get to heaven for no other purpose but that. As we begin to discern what is and is not the right career, the right woman, the right hobby, the right decision, we have to commit to the principle that if it doesn't get us to heaven, we should want no part. This is how we enter onto the road to happiness. As a young man in college, I would often go to the bars with my friends as a rugby player, go to the drink-ups and such, and I remember at times in college feeling so just dissatisfied, just unhappy, and I would turn to my friends and say, gosh, you know, I just feel like there's something more that I could be doing, maybe volunteer work or what have you. My friends would turn to me and they said, but bro, St. Francis says, preach the gospel and if necessary, use words. And I said, but we're not preaching here. We're at the bar. My friend said, but Jesus went to the tax collectors and he went to the prostitutes and that's who he preached to. And I said, but he wasn't getting hammered with them. So what was the turning point for me? I'm often asked if there was a single event that led me to this conclusion, the Hollywood moment, the car crash, a death in the family, some moment of epiphany where the light bulb goes off. The fact is, for me, there was no climactic moment. It was simply a slow progression of dissatisfaction, day after day, realizing that I would never fully be happy pursuing the quote-unquote American dream. It forced me through a form of intellectual puberty. You might ask, well, why focus on death and not focus on sanctifying our work by focusing on God? Instead I say, you should absolutely sanctify your work by focusing on God. But death is the account review. In business, my manager, my director would sit me down quarterly and yearly and they would set aside my metrics that I needed to achieve. It was sales growth, market share, number of new accounts, and I would maniacally focus on just those activities to ensure that I was going to be successful. As Catholics, we know our metrics. We know how we will be judged. We'll be judged by how well we follow the Ten Commandments, by how well we avoid the seven deadly sins, by how well we love God with all of our hearts and souls and our neighbors as ourselves. So, what does this mean for our lives? How do we learn to live as good Catholic men? We must follow the saints. By age 25, I received a promotion and I was transferred back to Dallas. I was traveling all over the world, China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, all over Europe. And when you travel that much, you spend a lot of time alone, a lot of time for personal introspection, a lot of time for reading, and I picked up great books, Confessions by Augustine and Imitation of Christ by Thomas Akempis, The Spiritual Combat by Schiapoli, Introduction to a Devout Life by Francis de Sales. These saintly men became my heroes. I began to follow the saints, how they did it, how they followed Christ. I began to realize that the power we seek in the form of title and material possessions isn't power in its purest form. Power is having the world at your fingertips and being able to give it up. Now, the devil is a great deceiver and he knows our faith better than we know it and he uses the Bible against us. Very often we hear today, Christianity has morphed into this sort of prosperity gospel whereby you know the measure of God's love for you by the measure of your material benefits. I remember growing up thinking I wanted to be like Saint Louis, the king of France, because he was the wealthy saint. But when I read his biography, I studied a man who opened up his home each and every night to let 120 beggars in and not only feed them with the best food, but serve them himself. He considered himself to be a servant to the people of the world. He was a man of great love and compassion. And not only feed them with the best food, but serve them himself. He considered himself to be a servant to his people. What does Christ offer the true Christian? Brace yourself. He offers us suffering. If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. Christ is the greatest witness to suffering because God is love, and there is no love without sacrifice. One of my favorite passages in the Bible is from Matthew 11, 12. He says, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and it is the violent who bear it away. I remember reading that and thinking, well, this doesn't sound very Christ-like. Christ was the pacifist, turn the other cheek. Christ did not provoke violence to an external enemy. He promoted violence against our internal perversity. When thousands of Christians were brutally slaughtered in Rome under Nero and Diocletian, it wasn't the Romans who committed the greatest violence. It was the Christians whose violence came in the form of a detachment from the world. If you remember when the movie The Passion of the Christ came out, reviewers all over said, this is the most violent, bloody film that has ever been made. But it's not the crucifixion and the scourging where the greatest violence took place. It was in the Garden of Gethsemane when Jesus rejected the devil and his taunts to turn away from the cross. How many times have we as flawed men been confronted with a similar choice to sin or to be holy, to pray or to entertain ourselves, to accept Christ or to reject him? This is what I call the battle of the ordinary, the battle of everyday temptation. I confronted this battle of the ordinary in a manner that was rather extraordinary, you might say, through my experience on television on The Apprentice. People often ask me as I travel around the country, why would a guy like you want to be on a show whose tagline is money, money, money? I tell them, well, I didn't. I actually didn't own a TV at the time. I had never seen the show. The producers for The Apprentice came to Texas Instruments, held an open casting call in the Human Resources Department, sent out an email to everyone saying, look, if you get on the show, we'll pay your salary while you're gone. We'll keep your job and your benefits if you ever want to come back. It sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I tried out for the show on a whim, not thinking much of it until several months later, I found myself in a production facility in Hollywood staring at 12 Hollywood producers, Donald Trump, Donald Trump's hair, and recognized that here I had this great opportunity to be on television, but I had this moment of introspection thinking, is this something that I really wanted? I don't care who you are. If you have a camera in your face 24 hours a day, you're bound to say something stupid. I rationalized my participation by saying that fame is a mighty, mighty tool and how few use it for good. The apprentice challenged me in a number of ways that attacked my pride, attacked my ego. It's very easy to get a big head when you're well-known and 10 million people watch you on TV every day. I began having dozens of those Tom Cruise moments, signing autographs and taking pictures, picking up tabloids and magazines and supermarkets to discover that 67% of women in New York City believe Orlando Bloom is better-looking than me. But through it all, I held firm. My fellow contestants were drunk on the false promise that happiness was to be found in fame and when the fame was taken away or the shows didn't go exactly as they had hoped, they became depressed, they became dejected, they didn't have the faith, they didn't know the truth, that happiness will never be found out there, it starts in here. At the turn of the 20th century, a newspaper in Los Angeles asked many of the most famous writers of the day to answer an essay format a single question, what is wrong with the world today? And G.K. Chesterton, the famous Catholic writer, wrote back a one-word response, me, I'm what's wrong with the world today. We cannot think like I did that going to mass once per week makes us Catholic or donating money to the Salvation Army Santa is enough to save our souls. This requires a total commitment from how we approach business to what we watch on TV, to what we listen to, to dealing with issues of lust, to the way in which we treat our wives and our mothers, it's a total commitment. I was reading a medical journal not long ago and I was blown away to discover that scientists tell us that the DNA of a pig and the DNA of a human are 99% identical. I remember thinking, well gosh, that's kind of crazy. One percent difference in DNA, you have me or you have Wilbur. But it just goes to show you how a one percent change, when you don't have a 100% commitment, how it can change everything, it can change everything. When I started my business Lionheart Apparel, Christian clothing line, after The Apprentice, we were confronted very early on with a very basic decision. For anyone who is in the apparel industry, you know that everybody sources their products out of China. I've been to China, I've been in China on Easter Sunday when I couldn't go to mass. It's a country with forced abortions and religious oppression. Now I was confronted with one ethical decision. How do I support that communist economy and still call myself pro-life and Catholic at the same time? It affects the bottom line, but I will not allow it to affect my soul. When I was younger, I don't know that I would have always made that decision. In my early 20s, I allowed myself to become desensitized to the nudity and rampant objectivity of the world around me. I was a man of my word, I was a man of my word, I was a man of my word. I allowed myself to become desensitized to the nudity and rampant objectification of women in media. The Hooters ads and the Maxim covers, the Victoria's Secret commercials and the Shakira videos, the Miller Lite ads and Abercrombie and Fitch, and on and on and on. These brands weren't relegated to shady truck stops. They were intertwined within the very fabric of American culture. I supported this movement by indulging in the entertainment that promotes it, as though my Catholic faith in some way granted me immunity from accountability. I would fail in business, too. The third commandment teaches us to keep holy the Sabbath day. And as a young man, I remember thinking that all that meant was I needed to go to church on Sunday. But how many Sundays did I spend 12, 14 hours working, get ahead in my career, get a jump on the next guy? How many Sundays? How many of us use Sunday to catch up on business work or yard work or housework or homework when we could have gotten it done on Saturday? How many of us put our jobs before God? Before you can hope to live out your faith in the working world, you've got to love your faith more than the working world. As I say all this, I know what you're thinking, because I used to think the same thing. This is a little extreme. You want me to get rid of my television? You want me to quit my job? You want me to move to Montana and live like a hermit? No. I simply invite you to consider the state of all of our souls. We are challenged to become God-fearing men, even if that affects the bottom line. As Christ teaches us, the road to heaven is narrow, and few, and few there are who know the way. Few find it. You may be thinking, I just can't do that. It's too difficult to break. I can't make that change. When our mind goes in that direction, we have got to focus on death. If we're not focused on getting to heaven, we're wasting our time. You may be thinking that your past is so horrible, there's nothing you can do to fix it, and you would be very, very wrong. Some of our greatest saints were once the biggest sinners. Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Mary Magdalene. Making changes is a lot like going to the gym. When we go to the gym, we go with the intention of doing violence against ourselves. And it hurts. You see those t-shirts? No pain, no gain. And when we leave the gym for the first time, the pain stays with our bodies. It takes time for our bodies to change. It takes a while before we begin to see the results, and when those results come, we feel healthier. We feel happier. We have better stamina. I'm a very flawed man, and in my own struggles, I have sought to emulate the saints. I've listened to our Blessed Mother. I've learned for the first time, I've learned to find the time to pray the rosary daily with my wife, and what that has done for our marriage. I have learned how to do penance for myself and for others. Something as simple as turning the radio off, instead of listening to music on the way to work, and driving in silence and prayer. Skipping breakfast in the morning and feeling the pangs of hunger, enjoying that subtle, but powerful joy that comes from listening to the rosary daily. Skipping breakfast in the morning and feeling the pangs of hunger, enjoying that suffering, to Christ's suffering on the cross. To pray, not only for myself and my children, but to pray for anyone in my past who I may have led into sin. Most of all, I've learned the importance of humility, recognizing that there is no fig leaf big enough to hide my sins from God. And no sin big enough that God can't forgive for those who are ready to take up their cross and follow Him. In the external struggle, I think Chesterton says it best, it's not that we don't have enough scoundrels to curse, it's that we don't have enough good men to curse them. In Shakespeare's Henry V, the title character tells his army, and from this day to the ending of the world, but we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers, for he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother. I want to leave you with three key points. Number one, cut the umbilical cord to your addictions, whether that's an addiction to sports, TV, internet, video games, or something more drastic, an addiction to alcohol or pornography. Cut the umbilical cord and begin to educate yourself. We are not children, we are men. Let's put away the things of the child. Number two, keep your death at the forefront of your mind in all aspects of your life, from business to relationships to recreation. If you died today, what would you have to show for your life? It won't matter how much you have achieved if you fail at the only thing that matters, making it to heaven. And lastly, pick a saint to emulate, maybe a confirmation saint or a name saint, or if you don't have one, just pick one, one that you can relate to. Seek to be like him, pray for his intercession, pray and make sacrifices like the saints. Before I end, I want to reiterate how honored I am to be here today to speak to all you gentlemen. I'm going to be at the conference all day. I look forward to meeting as many of you as I can and speaking with you. Remember, the future we need to focus on is an eternal one. We know the truth, we know the truth is the truth. The only question that matters is, can you handle the truth? Thank you and God bless you.