Great teachers and mentors can transform the lives of their students in many ways. In 2013, a teacher transformed the life of a student named Musharaf Asghar, a.k.a. Mushy. Then a 16-year-old, Mushy was a student at Thornbill Community Academy in Yorkshire. He had his oral test coming up which he needed to pass with a C grade to get admission to the college. But his stammer made it next to impossible for him to pass this test. That’s when his teacher Matthew Burton jumped in and employed an out-of-the-box speech therapy technique to aid him. In the end, when Mushy delivered his last school speech, the audience was swimming in floods of tears, reported The Guardian.
At this time, Mushy was preparing for his General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exams. He was particularly worried about clearing his English oral exam, which had a 20 percent share in his overall grades. Seeing him struggle so much, Burton asked him to practice speaking while listening to music, the same speech method used by Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) with King George VI (Colin Firth) in the 2010 Academy Award-winning movie “The King’s Speech.”
He handed Mushy his iPhone and a pair of headphones, asking him to read aloud from the poem “The Moment” by Margaret Atwood, which he picked at random. After days of training this way, Mushy got his C. At the end of his school session, he was invited to deliver a thank-you speech, which was recorded for the Channel 4 documentary series, "Educating Yorkshire."
Image Source: (L-R) Matthew Burton, Michael Steer, Jonny Mitchell, and Musharaf Asghar pose with their Best Documentary Series award for 'Educating Yorkshire' during the National Television Awards 2014. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images)
The episode shows Mushy standing at the podium, dressed in a green sweater with white headphones clipped around his head, as he delivers his speech and his fellow students and teachers listen teary-eyed. Although he stuttered in places, most of the speech was fairly smooth.
His speech attracted tremendous attention from social media, even prominent personalities. Ed Balls, a British politician who himself experienced stammering, wrote on X, "Stammer no obstacle," referring to Mushy. Comedian Jack Whitehall called Mushy a "hero" whereas British magician Dynamo tweeted a note saying, "Well done bro!"
Sometime after the documentary, Mushy told The Guardian, "I thought Mr. Burton was a genius until he lent me ‘The King's Speech' afterward, and then I realized he just copied that other man!" He revealed that stammering had been a problem for him ever since he could remember, probably since when he was five years old. This led to him experiencing a lot of bullying during his school days, he recalled.
His parents supported his decision to participate in Educating Yorkshire, but his mom was worried. "She said to me, 'Sometimes you can't even get your words out in front of us! How are you going to manage on TV?'" But he proved that he could indeed do it. He said he hoped “it gives other people with a stammer the confidence to have a go at public speaking."
At 17 years old, Mushy was studying for a science B.Tech at a university in Huddersfield. "I want to be a teacher eventually," he said, "Mr. Burton, Mr. Mitchell, Mrs. Crowther, Mrs. Marsden, Mrs. Lee; they've all helped me so much. They listened to me when I needed them. They gave me help when I needed it. They helped me overcome my speaking problem. They're amazing." His dream came true. In 2022, at 25, he graduated from Huddersfield University with a degree in Broadcast Journalism, per BBC.
On his 27th birthday in 2023, he shared an update on X with his followers, sharing how time had passed and how he was always grateful to his teachers who had shaped him into who he is today.
Mushy is one of those people whose journey of success is laid bare in front of the entire world to get inspired and empowered in their own lives. Currently, Mushy is a keynote motivational speaker around the Kirklees area. He delivers talks on mental health, leadership, management, bullying, and inspiring advice for youth. “If you really put your mind to it, you really can achieve anything,” he said, speaking to The Mirror.
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Robin Williams performs for military men and women as part of a United Service Organization (USO) show on board Camp Phoenix in December 2007
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Will your current friends still be with you after seven years?
Professor shares how many years a friendship must last before it'll become lifelong
Think of your best friend. How long have you known them? Growing up, children make friends and say they’ll be best friends forever. That’s where “BFF” came from, for crying out loud. But is the concept of the lifelong friend real? If so, how many years of friendship will have to bloom before a friendship goes the distance? Well, a Dutch study may have the answer to that last question.
Sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst and his team in the Netherlands did extensive research on friendships and made some interesting findings in his surveys and studies. Mollenhorst found that over half of your friendships will “shed” within seven years. However, the relationships that go past the seven-year mark tend to last. This led to the prevailing theory that most friendships lasting more than seven years would endure throughout a person’s lifetime.
In Mollenhorst’s findings, lifelong friendships seem to come down to one thing: reciprocal effort. The primary reason so many friendships form and fade within seven-year cycles has much to do with a person’s ages and life stages. A lot of people lose touch with elementary and high school friends because so many leave home to attend college. Work friends change when someone gets promoted or finds a better job in a different state. Some friends get married and have children, reducing one-on-one time together, and thus a friendship fades. It’s easy to lose friends, but naturally harder to keep them when you’re no longer in proximity.
Some people on Reddit even wonder if lifelong friendships are actually real or just a romanticized thought nowadays. However, older commenters showed that lifelong friendship is still possible:
“I met my friend on the first day of kindergarten. Maybe not the very first day, but within the first week. We were texting each other stupid memes just yesterday. This year we’ll both celebrate our 58th birthdays.”
“My oldest friend and I met when she was just 5 and I was 9. Next-door neighbors. We're now both over 60 and still talk weekly and visit at least twice a year.”
“I’m 55. I’ve just spent a weekend with friends I met 24 and 32 years ago respectively. I’m also still in touch with my penpal in the States. I was 15 when we started writing to each other.”
“My friends (3 of them) go back to my college days in my 20’s that I still talk to a minimum of once a week. I'm in my early 60s now.”
“We ebb and flow. Sometimes many years will pass as we go through different things and phases. Nobody gets buttsore if we aren’t in touch all the time. In our 50s we don’t try and argue or be petty like we did before. But I love them. I don’t need a weekly lunch to know that. I could make a call right now if I needed something. Same with them.”
Maintaining a friendship for life is never guaranteed, but there are ways, psychotherapists say, that can make a friendship last. It’s not easy, but for a friendship to last, both participants need to make room for patience and place greater weight on their similarities than on the differences that may develop over time. Along with that, it’s helpful to be tolerant of large distances and gaps of time between visits, too. It’s not easy, and it requires both people involved to be equally invested to keep the friendship alive and from becoming stagnant.
As tough as it sounds, it is still possible. You may be a fortunate person who can name several friends you’ve kept for over seven years or over seventy years. But if you’re not, every new friendship you make has the same chance and potential of being lifelong.