The struggle is real, as millennial like to say.
There’s nothing quite as beautiful (or as much of a struggle) like being in a position to create something: whether it’s a physical item, a job for which you hire someone, a piece of art, or, in my recent case, an event at the Jersey Shore.
This morning I had the pleasure of coming across an TEDx talk by CNN International’s Zain Asher.
People can now see the payoff of her lifestyle, and she rolled back the curtains to expose her struggles. Some were catastrophic, like the death of her father in a terrible car crash.
Some were deliberate, like when her mother purposely enrolled her in different types of school, in order to be able to relate to people in all levels of society. By turns, Zain attended school in Nigeria, in a poor neighborhood in South London, in a private school. Her mother’s end goal was for her to eventually attend Oxford.
Her other struggles were a mixture of “life happens” and “make life happen.” She wanted to pursue her journalistic goal, but with a British accent, her initial stabs at getting a gig in American local news was a bust.
To make her long story short, she kept pushing and pestering people for months until she could get an audience. Eventually she got hired on the spot…and the rest is history.
One of the things that caught my attention is her advice to not compete for what’s already there, but to create something new. Be helpful to others as desired, but also leave room to collaborate together and build something new. Last weekend we did that. And I’m mighty proud of what we did together.
Read more about it here.