Riyadh, I think you got the name of your novel’s hero wrong!

You should have called him Suleiman, not Saleh. I mean Suleiman Al Rajhi, whose story began in hardship and whose world eventually expanded until he became one of the leading businessmen, then chose to devote a great deal of what he had amassed to serving others.

I don’t know whether Suleiman crossed your mind as you wrote Fit for Life, but as I followed your protagonist’s journey, I felt I was seeing echoes of that man’s life. As if some of what we read in novels had already been lived by people among us, though life never put their names on book covers.

This comparison wasn’t prompted by similarities in their beginnings alone, nor by the idea that need can give rise to ambition—that’s a story told many times over. What caught my attention was the question your novel puts before us: What does a person do when their circumstances change and they become able to possess what they once longed for?

Poverty may test a person’s patience, but wealth tests what remains of their values.

That is precisely where Suleiman Al Rajhi came to mind.

The young man who learned the meaning of work early and moved from one modest job to another, until he built his business and financial career, did not become a figure worth reflecting on merely because he went from poverty to wealth. Many people have succeeded in accumulating money, but few have been able to give it a purpose that extends beyond their own lives.

In Al Rajhi’s experience, wealth was not the end of the journey, but the beginning of another: a journey of transforming money from private property into public benefit, and individual success into an enduring institutional legacy.

Perhaps that is what made me read the title of your novel differently.

What makes a person fit for life?

Is it enough to survive their circumstances? To achieve their dreams? To possess what they were once denied? Or does becoming fit for life begin when other people’s lives improve because of their presence?

Riyadh, in the nonprofit sector we write about and follow as it changes, we know that the distance between having money and creating impact is not short.

Money can meet a need, but an institution can build capacity. A donation may ease present pain, but a well-structured endowment can continue giving for generations yet unborn.

This is one of the most important lessons from Suleiman Al Rajhi’s experience: his giving grew from direct assistance into a network of institutions, endowments, and educational and development projects.

The question was no longer how much he gave, but how he made that giving sustainable.

Money alone was no longer the story, but the person who redefined his relationship with money.

I believe this idea is the bridge between your novel and the nonprofit sector. A novel, when it succeeds, does more than give us a story whose events we follow; it gives us a chance to reflect on our own experiences and those of others, and to question anew the ideas we have grown accustomed to accepting.

Perhaps one of the loveliest things a fictional character can do is remind a reader of a real person—not because the details of their lives are identical, but because the meaning that connects them is greater than the differences between their stories.

I don’t mean to reduce Saleh to Suleiman’s story, or to attribute an intention to you that you never stated. Every character has a world of their own, and imagination has the right to invent its destinies apart from reality.

But readers, too, have the right to see through the lens of their own experience, and to bring to the pages of a novel what they have learned from people and from life.

And I brought Suleiman Al Rajhi with me.

I carried with me the image of a man whose experience was measured not by how much he owned, but by how much room that ownership opened up for others. And with it, I carried a question I believe everyone working in development and charitable work should consider:

Do we want to create more wealthy people, or to turn personal success into something that benefits society?

This is not a question that objects to wealth; it is an invitation to discover its deeper meaning. Economic success and social achievement are not opposing paths; one can give the other the means to endure.

Riyadh, you chose a lovely name for your protagonist, and a title that raises a question bigger than the novel itself.

But allow me to disagree with you, if only out of literary affection.

You wrote about Saleh, and I saw Suleiman.

You put before me the story of a person searching for his place in life, and I remembered a person whose life grew so expansive that others came to have a share in it.

Perhaps that is what beautiful novels do to us: their authors write them with imagined characters, and then readers find between the lines people they know, dreams they have lived, and questions still waiting for answers.

Not everyone who becomes fit for life has become useful to others; but whoever makes their life a source of benefit to people has given their goodness a more lasting meaning.

That is why, Riyadh, I’ll keep saying to you with a smile:

It’s Suleiman, not Saleh!