Pursue your dreams, follow your passions, but what if you're just trying to survive? There's no sugar coating that as a business meme framed by inspiring words, "you've got this", because the cause and effect is so individualistic, so personal.
Imagine this. You grow up in foster care. Then get whisked away to Ghana at a time when its riven with coups and hardships. On your return to the UK almost a decade later you have no idea how you'll earn a living especially one demanded by your father, which causes a long rift.
Now you're stuck, so you turn your hand to journalism but what do you know, and few will hire you because, well, there's the obvious and then several unwritten codes that frame journalism. But you catch a break here and there.
At some point you think I'll re-imagine what journalism will or should be by building it. A mad daft idea, but you do. Astonishingly this wins one of the most coveted global prizes in journalism innovation, the Knight Batten Award. Former Pulitzer prize winners who are judging say what you've done, "foreshadows the future of the web." What?
TEN POINT PLANT NOT
There's no ten point plan for this happening, because this instinct was born out of survival and necessity. It comes from the "hustle and flow" of absence. You've never missed what you've never had, but strive for any positive experience, which is why packaged solutions like "follow your passion" don't feel connecting.
At some point the "hustle and flow" self will meet with your absence self, now older, on a dusty crossroad for an untimely chat. We were all once invincible, high performing people you tell the other, but now you seek to rebalance. The trick, which can often be missed, is to know when the balance between your two selves requires shifting your perspective, says my meditation teacher.
In the last couple of months, I've taken up "conscious connected breathing". Twenty to forty minutes of deep belly breathing. Breathing? Yes Breathing! I scuba dive, so I have some experience in slow breathing, but I was told if you have any memories of trauma, stress, anything, be prepared for an experience like no other. Many people openly become saddened, even weep, and then a feeling of deep calm descends upon them.
The story of the boy who became a journalist was a latent memory, yet has resurfaced because this year is the anniversary of that crazy mad time which led to me standing in front of an audience at the National Press Club in Washington DC. One judge Mark Hinojosa, part of Kansas City Star team that won a Pulitzer for local reporting, became a friend. We laughed so much when we spoke. I'm reminded of him and his untimely passing.
Mark loved to teach as do I. Remembering a future of journalism and how to hold onto surviving. Thanks to Jon and Rob for helping make this.
Click here http://www.viewmagazine.tv/futurejournalism.html
