What are you going to do with it?

Mohamed Alabbar on success, gratitude and the question that changes everything once life has given you more than you ever dreamed of.

When I was a young boy growing up in Dubai, my dream was not to own towers or hotels or private planes. My dream was much simpler than people would imagine today. I remember thinking that if one day I could afford a bicycle, life would be good. That was enough.

We were a very simple family. We lived in what my stepfather, a fisherman who later became a truck driver, could provide for us. My mother raised thirteen children with incredible strength and dignity. I was the eldest. There was no running water in our home for most of my childhood. Every morning, a man on a donkey would deliver it. That was simply how life was. There was no luxury around us, but there was warmth and closeness and a feeling that life itself was still beautiful, even without material things.

I think those early years never really leave you, no matter where life takes you later.

I worked night shifts as a customs officer at Dubai airport during my final years at school. I would finish a shift at six in the morning and go straight to class. The people there sometimes let me sleep for an hour or two before the bell. I was seventeen. I was not thinking about Burj Khalifa. I was thinking about getting through the day.

Then came a scholarship to Seattle. Then the Central Bank. Then Singapore, where I spent seven years running an investment company before realising my children could no longer speak Arabic and deciding to move everybody home. Then Sheikh Mohammed, who opened doors I could not have imagined existed, and taught me to think without fear.

And somewhere along the way, the question changed.

In the beginning, naturally, you are trying to survive. You want security. You want to prove yourself. You want to build something. That is human nature and there is nothing wrong with it. But once life gives you more than you ever imagined possible, another question begins to appear.

What are you going to do with it?

For me, that question became much bigger than business.

I was walking through Belgrade not long ago, through a part of the city we have spent years transforming along the Sava riverfront, and what I saw were families out in the evening, children on bicycles, people sitting by the river having coffee, small businesses opening their doors. Property values in the area had increased by around 400 percent. That means ordinary families who had lived there all their lives had quietly become significantly wealthier simply because someone believed their neighbourhood deserved to be beautiful.

“I hoped for a bicycle and somehow life gave me opportunities I could never have imagined. So I ask myself constantly: what are you going to do with it?”

That is the real return on investment. Not the financial result, which was also strong, but that image. The children on bicycles. I grew up wanting a bicycle. I know what it means to a child to have one.

Of course business must make profit. I believe strongly in capitalism and entrepreneurship and growth. But profit alone is too small an ambition for anyone fortunate enough to build something genuinely successful. Success at that level carries a responsibility: to create dignity, opportunity and optimism in the places where you operate.

At this stage of my life, I think less about ownership and more about contribution. Less about scale and more about impact. Less about what we build and more about how people feel once we have built it.

In the end, the most meaningful success is not measured by numbers. It is measured by the opportunities you create, the people you lift up, the communities you help shape and the sense of progress you leave behind for the people who come after you.

I hoped for a bicycle. Life gave me far more than that. The least I can do is make sure some of it comes back.

Beyond Profit is a twelve-part series published exclusively on The Buzz in which Mohamed Alabbar, founder of Emaar and Noon, family man, and one of the Arab world’s most influential business leaders, shares personal reflections on leadership, legacy and what it really means to build something worthwhile. The series moves beyond towers and financial results to explore the values, experiences and hard-won lessons of a man who grew up with nothing, has spent a lifetime building cities, businesses and opportunities across more than twenty countries, and is now thinking harder than most about the kind of future we are all building together: human, technological and everything in between. A new instalment publishes each month.