Pursue your dreams. What when it's just about surviving

 

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

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Five life lessons learned; the importance of relearning

When asked about his talent, his awards, his performances, he stopped looked the interviewer in the eye and simply said: “I just wanna work, man!”

Society sets a series of de facto rules. Who get’s to make their way draws currency from its bank. It’s a loan with varying interest. Other side, it’s an application which more often will be denied. So you build your own imaginary reserve. And slowly, inexorably work to a plan that seems ad hoc, but there’s meaning, because like the actor: “You just wanna work”.

We listen to stories because they give us something to anchor. Sometimes these stories are stars lighting up a hidden destiny.

I once had a meeting with the foreign affairs editor of the BBC in the BBC canteen. After perusing my CV for a moment, he asked somewhat confused: “So, what is it you do?”

You see my CV reflected a myriad of interests, which could either suggests the convention of a lack of focus, or an interest in many things. I grew up working in my active imagination. I was a foreign correpondent, a firefighter, an at one time a milkman, then I wanted to become an artist, but my father wanted a doctor. I got so far as Chemistry and maths.

These aspirations; I didn’t quite make firefighter and milkman, I lasted two days before my parents told the milkman a child of nine going out on milk runs, was well, not right. But if I have learned one thing, you’ll either conform to what people want, or you’ll forever chase lights with moments of fulfilment.

I do these, not because of anything than I just wanna work. So since my encounter with the BBC head, I chase them lights, often hoping and have taken people with me.

1. Give yourself different experiences. I once dived with British and Turkish navy divers into a world war one wreck off the coast of Turkey. Thirty metres down, I was trapped by a thermocline and ran out of air. I don’t advocate that, but in the process somebody from the BBC was interested to hear my thoughts.

1. Collaborate, share your gifts. It won’t always be accepted, but that’s not the point: I imagined with a friend what it would be to shine a light on the incredible array of people who are talented. We created the leaders’ list, sixty of the UK’s leading BAME producers.

1. Humility is the key to people giving you their success. My friendship with a senior tv figure would result in an invitation to a dinner, and whilst eating, a tower of a man appeared. We stood. I said hello, shook his hand, and like many was and still am mesmerised by him. It was President Nelson Mandela.

1. Search for them stories: I’ve loved stories from the time my mum would rerun Doris Day’s Calamity Jane. That love has fuelled me towards coding, a different form of journalism storytelling, and photojournalism which my peers have recognised through international awards. But, I just wanted to work.

1. Live life with the certainties that uncertainties is but a rock in your path. I recall my foster parents, my boarding school, my parents and mum who recently passed. She was a figure of hope. We shape our world by the way we let society frame those conventions. Each journey can finish like you want it to, when your imaginary reserves materialises as they will. It all starts with that simple commitment; I just wanna work.