Why “What Do You Do?” Is The Wrong Question: Nada Taha (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Nada Taha’s talk titled “Why “What Do You Do?” Is The Wrong Question” at TEDxNashvilleWomen conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Pyramids: A Marvel of Mystery

We’ve all pretty much decided collectively that the pyramids in Egypt are the most incredible structures in the world, right? They’re also probably the most mysterious, because it’s been thousands of years and we have yet to figure out how they built such wonders.

In my head, it went a little something like this: CEO Pharaoh was hanging out with his Pharaoh buddy, contemplating life, and he’s like, “I’m an engineer, a collector, I am the ruler of this whole empire, and I am yet not fully fulfilled.” And he’s like, “What if there’s something that I could build that could create a legacy even after I’m gone? What if there’s some sort of a structure where we could paint on the walls and I can store all my gold?”

And he’s like, “But I don’t want your run-of-the-mill, like, square structure.” He’s like, “What if, what if we made it a triangle?” And he passes his blunt back to his Pharaoh buddy, and his Pharaoh buddy is like, “Yeah, dude, triangle’s the move.”

And so they get to work. They’ve got to start network marketing to get all of these ancient Egyptians to buy in and help them build these triangles, and thus the pyramid scheme was born. Now I can make this joke because I am Egyptian and those are my ancestors. I was born in Cleopatra Hospital in Cairo, Egypt.

A New Beginning in the U.S.

That is a real place. But my parents decided to move us to the United States shortly thereafter. And they made two unintentionally interesting decisions at that point.

One, they moved us to a tiny random suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. And two, our first day in the United States was Halloween. So you can bet we were very, very confused.

As a first-generation American, I spent my entire childhood aiming to be the embodiment of the American dream. I was pressured to succeed, and how could I not? My parents had immigrated us across the entire world to give us a better life. But what ended up happening was I conflated my success with my worth. My brand became The Girl Who Got Shit Done. Now, I have a story that illustrates this, but we’re going to have to go back to 2004, all right?

High School Ambition

A time with no Kardashians, no Instagram, no Taylor Swift. I was 14 and the sophomore class president in my high school, and I decided that we needed to build school morale up. And I didn’t want to do it with your run-of-the-mill regular pep rally. I wanted something bigger and more exciting.

So I started routing tours to see which artists were coming through our city. And I found one, Ludacris. Now in the 2000s, you couldn’t turn on your TV or your radio and not hear a Ludacris song. So this was kind of a big deal, but I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even know the music industry existed. So I started cold-calling everyone, radio stations, record labels, the grocery store, literally anyone who would pick up my phone call. And anyone who did pick up my call was like, “Sweetie, that’s so cute, but it’s just impossible. It’s never going to happen.”

And so I wrote an email. And a few weeks after that, ring, ring, goes the home telephone, and it’s Ludacris’ manager. And he’s like, “We’re in.” And I was like, “Oh, man.”

Unexpected Turns

And they were in. And they came, and they performed an entire surprise concert for my high school, which absolutely helped my political campaign the following year to be student body president. But what happened after that was even crazier. A few weeks later, ring, ring, goes the home telephone again, and it’s MTV. And they want to fly me to New York to be on TRL.

Now, a lot of people are too young and don’t even know what those three letters stand for. And then the rest of us are like, “Oh, my God, freaking out.” Because if you were a teenager in the 2000s, TRL was our holy grail. Right? Yes. So I end up on TRL in my knockoff J. Lo Manolo Blahnik’s, little 14-year-old me. And that was like the beginning of me understanding who I was as a person.

I graduated high school the following year at 15, college three years after that. And by the time I was 24, I was a published sports journalist for the NBA, a pop radio music director, a digital director creating brands, and I was a co-host on what was at the time the most popular nationally syndicated country morning radio show.

A Moment of Reflection

But something interesting happened when I turned 32. I hit a wall. And now a lot of us are either familiar with this phrase or will become familiar with the phrase because it happens to all of us, and it manifests itself in different ways and at different times in all of our lives. For me, it happened during a meeting with an acting coach my agent had set me up with.

At that time in my life, I was ready for a shift. I could feel it. I was like, “Yeah, I’m ready for the next step in my career, let’s go.” And so I thought I was getting coached to be the star in the next season of “Bridgerton.” As you can imagine, that didn’t happen.

The shift that I was feeling wasn’t a reaching out. I realized it was a diving in. Yeah, you know, you know it. There was something wrong and I couldn’t figure out what it was. My wall looked like burnout. I had adrenal failure, panic attacks, hormonal deregulation. I couldn’t sleep at night. I couldn’t stay awake during the day. I was severely anxious, deeply depressed.

I got Rocky Mountain spotted fever like I was living on the Oregon Trail. I spent many years and a lot of money trying to fix this, but I still couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me and why I was no longer joyful and happy and why I was so sick. The decades I had spent succeeding, I was simultaneously abandoning myself.

I had neglected parts of me that were really important, but not tied to my work at all. What I realized was that treating yourself like a business is what makes you successful. And then I made it my actual business. There is a solution to this, by the way. Diversifying, nurturing your parts, and continuing to evolve is what the most important culture-shaping corporations do.

Discovering the Power Within

And we can do it too. All you’ve got to do is be like Taylor Swift. I’ll get there in a second, but first, we’ve got to make a stop at the University of Colorado, Boulder. One of the greatest athletes of all time is now one of the most high-profile coaches in college football.

Deion Sanders, aka Coach Prime, is giving this program that won only one game last season an identity and a brand. And let’s be real, even if you’re from Boulder, Colorado, you were not watching those football games. But this story starts way back in 1992, while little old Egyptian me was growing up in a tiny suburb outside of Atlanta, Georgia, trying to convince my classmates that no, I did not immigrate here on a camel, and no, I did not grow up in a pyramid. Deion Sanders was nearby playing for both the Atlanta Falcons and the Atlanta Braves.

In fact, on October 11th of that year, he became the first athlete to ever shoot up to play in two different teams, in two different sports, on the very same day. Now you can bet he caught some flak for this. I mean, I’m sure he got a lot of those phone calls that were like, “Sweetie, it’s just never going to happen, that’s impossible.” I’m very familiar with those.

But Deion Sanders decided that his brand was not staying in his lane, and he created a whole business from it. Somewhere along the way, we’ve been programmed to believe that because we already do X, we can’t pursue Y, a jack of all trades, master of none.

Taylor Swift and the Redefinition of Brand

We can’t talk about football at all or bring up the word anymore without talking about our girl Taylor Swift. She has built a brand unlike any other, and most recently, she has cracked the code for the young female demographic of the NFL. Now a lot of people inappropriately joke about her relationship, but she’s the one laughing all the way to the bank and into the history books.

Her stories that she’s crafted into songs have won her 12 Grammy awards and made her a billionaire. Not to mention, a bunch of us spent money on a movie ticket to go to the movie theater and watch a film of a recording of a concert we also spent money to go see in real life. She did this by treating herself like a business.

Taylor has mastered the art of bringing together all of her fragments into one brand, and that brand is simultaneously so relatable as the fangirl girl next door who awkwardly dances at award shows, but also so respectable as one of the best, most genius minds in business.

Embracing Our Multifaceted Selves

Now I’d like us all to remove whatever definition of brand we have from our brains for just a second. We have diluted that word, and I would like to reclaim it. Every single one of us has a story to tell, which means we all have a brand. A brand is basically just like a personality. It’s the culmination of the things you see or the feelings that are evoked or the experiences that you tie to a product or a person.

The truth is, your story is your brand, and your brand is the business. How many times have you ever asked or been asked, what do you do? I hate that question, because we’re not actually asking each other, what do you do? We’re asking, what do you do that pays you the most money, or what do you do that makes you relevant enough for me to talk to you right now?

What I learned is that a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none mentality has been ingrained in us. They said, “Focus on one thing or you’ll never succeed,” but they left a big part of that quote out, because the actual quote in its entirety, attributed to Shakespeare, I’m going to blow your mind, is, “A jack-of-all-trades is a master-of-none, but better than a master-of-one.”

Which means that as humans, we are innately meant to diversify. We are meant to do more than one thing. We’re meant to be specialists and generalists. We’re meant to tap into our passions and merge them with our practical skills. You may have a degree in marketing, and you also like to paint. Draw on some Nikes and sell them online, or do it for yourself. Do it for your own fun and curiosity to feed your own soul.

The companies that we buy into, the ones that shape culture, do more than one thing. And sometimes that thing doesn’t even affect their bottom line. And sometimes the main thing that we come to them for isn’t what’s actually the most successful. For example, it’s estimated that Michael Jordan made double his entire NBA career earnings in just last year alone off of his Air Jordan brand.

Who’s to say that this part of you that you may have ignored or didn’t pay attention to for a while couldn’t be your most fruitful in a few years if you just gave it the time and attention to nurture and foster? Who’s to say the wall that you hit at 32 or the sport you have to retire from has to be the end of a career and not the beginning of one?

I really believe that as humans, we are meant to focus on the things we crave to connect to. The things that excite us, the things that we’re obsessed with, we can’t wait to get home to do, the things that we text our best friend in all caps about, the things that we value, the things that we feel in our heads, our hearts, our souls. And then we are supposed to allow those things to become the foundation of our brands.

Whether you are the barista or Mrs. Starbucks herself, the ethos of who you are trickles down into the very work you do every single day. And that energy when you’re invigorated as you walk into that room to do that work may make you a lot of money, but it’s also going to help you affect a lot of people. We sign our kids up for everything. We give them a safe space to hone in on their passions, to figure out what they like and don’t like.

But for some reason, we don’t give ourselves that same space and we stifle our curiosities as adults. We rally behind the moguls and the multi-hyphenates. We cheered when Rihanna went from singing about an umbrella to building multi-million dollar lingerie and makeup lines. And we rap along when Jay-Z says, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”

But why do we give celebrities this freedom that we don’t afford ourselves? They’re complex and dynamic, but so are we. I feel like when we tap into those things that we really want to connect to, that’s when we hit the gold mine. That’s the same conclusion I came to as a creative director, a music director, and a talent. The connection is the gold mine. It’s why Taylor Swift doesn’t just sell albums and tickets. She sells stories and eras.

This past March, I took a trip back to the homeland. I made my first trip back to Egypt as an adult because I was desperately searching for some answers. And I thought maybe if I went, I could get some. I stood in front of the pyramids for hours, waiting for that magical moment when my ancestor was going to pop out and be like, “Poof, your anxiety’s gone and here’s some joy.”

Yeah, that didn’t happen either. And there’s proof in the puddle of tears of mine that are in the Delta Lounge right now from a panic attack I had at the airport a few weeks ago. Going home didn’t magically make me whole. It just made me realize that there are still parts of myself that I have left uncolored for a very long time.

And I may be standing here giving a talk, but I’m still figuring it out. I’m still in the trenches, and honestly, I am just getting started. What I hope that we can all ask ourselves at some point, and that point may not be right now, but at some point, what is your era’s tour? What is your second sport? What is that part of you that you’ve neglected that could use a little bit more color to paint a more vibrant life?

I believe that we all have the permission and the ability to pursue all of our passions all at once. And if we gave ourselves that space, maybe one day we would be CEO Pharaoh, hanging out with our Pharaoh buddy, dreaming up some triangle or something, and trying to make a legacy that lasts a lifetime.