Dr. Amel Karboul began with a specific moment: 2am on April 18, 2009, in Germany.
She had just given birth, was battling a postnatal infection, and could not sleep. In the quiet of that early morning, she picked up a business magazine and read an article about migration and belonging. Something shifted. She began thinking about her own journey, about the rooms she had found herself in and the spaces where she had not always been expected to belong.
So, she opened her laptop and wrote a letter to the editor.
The editor-in-chief read it, and the letter moved her. Months later, the German magazine published a profile on Dr. Karboul. That profile traveled further than she could have imagined. It reached the BMW Foundation in Berlin, drawing her into a world beyond her everyday reality and placing new questions before her: How do you build trust across difference? How do you put dignity into a spreadsheet?
For years, Dr. Karboul had been learning how to be excellent. Now, she was beginning to ask what excellence was actually for.
Then, a Tunisian magazine picked up the Berlin profile. It reached the Prime Minister of Tunisia, who called her personally. She had experience in change, leadership, and transformation. Would she help build the first democratic government in the Arab world?
She had two hours to decide whether to serve as Minister of Tourism.
The experience was difficult, humbling, and unlike anything she had prepared for. It taught her more about service, power, and responsibility than any other chapter of her life.
Dr. Karboul shared this story as an honest account of how life actually unfolds. None of it had been planned from that moment in Germany. One thing simply led to another, and she kept showing up.
“You cannot fully plan your life,” she told the Class of 2024. “You can only keep trying to become ready for when it asks something of you.”
Her advice resisted the neat and packaged. Stay in conversation with yourself, she urged. Ask the uncomfortable questions: What do I value? Where am I pretending? What parts of me genuinely want to serve? What injustice disturbs me enough to do something about it?
She also offered a word of caution to a room full of students who had been told, more than once, that they are leaders. Being identified as a leader too early can lead people to perform leadership rather than practice it.
Real leadership, she said, lives at the intersection of service and dignity. And when power eventually comes close, you want to have done enough inner work not to be dazzled by it.
She closed with a simple but demanding invitation. Do not wait until the path is clear. Serve before you feel ready. Be ambitious, but let that ambition reach toward depth, toward truth, and toward something that outlasts you.
And when your own 2am moment comes, may you be awake enough to answer it.
