Hoda Kotb: 6 Inspirational Stories of Overcoming Adversity
Comment Now
Follow Comments
Hoda Kotb, Credit: Julie Dennis
I recently spoke to Hoda Kotb, who is the co-host of the fourth hour of NBC’s Today Show, alongside Kathie Lee Gifford. She has also been a Dateline NBC correspondent since April 1998. She has covered a wide variety of domestic and international stories across all NBC News platforms as well as numerous human-interest stories and features. She covered significant events like the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the war in Iraq. Hoda is the New York Times Bestselling author of “Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee.” She is a three-time Emmy winner also won the prestigious 2006 Peabody Award, the 2003 Gracie Award, and the 2002 Edward R. Murrow Award. You can follow her on Facebook or on Twitter @hodakotb.
Her latest book is called “Ten Years Later: Six People Who Faced Adversity and Transformed Their Lives“.In this interview, she talks about why she wrote the book, how she found the right people to interview, what she learned about overcoming adversity and more.
What made you decide to write Ten Years Later? What was your inspiration and how did the book come together?
I was batting around different ideas with John Karp, who works at my publisher, Simon Schuster, and then this concept came up in a meeting. It was the idea that you take a significant event in someone’s life, whether they win a lottery or lose a loved one or get a job or lose a job or have a baby, just big events that people have in their lives and what would happen if you fast forwarded 10 years to see what became of them.
So many times we’re at that beginning stage, where we get a bad diagnosis or a bad phone call or something and you can’t imagine yourself one day later much less 10 years later. It takes 10 years for your life to shake down, for the real lessons to come out the other side because one year later really wouldn’t have done the trick. Five years really isn’t enough time to see what really happens in someone’s life and the 10 year number just seemed like the right number.
We’d thought about what happened on 9/11 and you always wonder what happened to those survivors 10 years later and how are they functioning. Are they surviving, are they thriving, and has something changed in them? The concept just came about in that way and it’s a great book because it’s full of lessons of life. Anyone who’s got any kind of curiosity about what’s going to happen next for me and how am I ever going to get free of this, this is sort of a cool book for them.
How did you find the six people to interview for your book?
It wasn’t easy. You think it’d be simple to find six people that would have compelling stories. What’s surprising to us is it’s the kind of book where you think that each person in our book, each one of these six, could’ve written their own book. That’s how good each one of these individuals is; we kind of wondered “God, I wonder why they haven’t written their own book” because they’re that good. To track them down, we started off by using some of my stories I’ve done for Dateline because I’d been working here for longer than a decade. I wondered myself what had happened to the people who had this issue or that story and we were searching. We combed through those and then we combed through the web and some things are word of mouth. What’s funny is a lot can happen over 10 years, a lot of twists and turns that you don’t see coming and some stories peter out after a couple years and don’t come to fruition in 10.
It took months of research to find them. So many we were so close and then something happened to one of the main characters, or they couldn’t be tracked down. It’s not simple to put it all together. We were looking for people from six different scenarios. We didn’t want them all to be the same sort of story; one was a medical issue, one is an addiction issue, one is someone who has trouble with fertility, one is a combination of weight and abuse, another is just sort of a chance meeting—you’re down and out on your luck, you lose a couple of jobs, you have two kids and you think to yourself “Oh my God, what’s going to happen with my life?” The woman we have in our book turns the beat around so much that she becomes a multi-multi-millionaire. It’s a rags to riches story but rags to riches on crack kinda’ thing. It’s really great.
Which story could you relate to most out of the six?
I related to one that was a medical issue because anyone who has had any kind of a scary issue in your life, you wonder ‘how am I going to be at the end of this road?’ Sometimes you’re looking for any road out even if it’s the most difficult, pot-hole laden road that’s going to take you to the edge, as long as it’s a pathway out you want that road. I think often with an illness it’s especially scary because the weeds are thick and you can’t see your way out. You’re thinking ‘somebody tell me they made it through this’ and it’s so helpful and encouraging when you hear someone who has.
There’s a woman in our book named Dianne who had a medical issue that could have been one of the most debilitating things in her life and it turned out that she has turned the beat around and is such a ball of energy and an inspiration and she is such a great connect. Also, there’s a woman in the book who had a chance meeting. How many times have you walked down the street and who knows if the woman or man you pass on the street or stop and talk to is going to change your life. You have to have your eyes wide open because sometimes we have our heads down and we don’t see what’s in front of us.
There’s a woman in the story who’s really down on her luck. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that feeling that when things don’t go right things continue not to go right and you start to think you’ve got a black cloud over you and you think gloom and doom. She had a chance meeting, and meeting a complete stranger, on a roadside ultimately led to her pathway to becoming a very, very, very successful business woman. If you would’ve read the tea leaves before you never would’ve thought that could’ve happened. We all like that story, like maybe my turn, maybe my life would turn that corner—my magic moment’s going to happen.
What can we learn from their experiences, how to confront adversity and overcome it?
We were thinking about the six people in our book and most people who have a huge mountain to climb, who are so overwhelmed with the path ahead of them and you don’t think you have the stamina or whatever it is to make it or just the emotional strength to make it. The people who make it to the top of that mountain aren’t doing it for themselves, they’re doing it for someone else such as their kids or parents. What we found among these survivors is that they’ve survived all kinds of things, they all succeeded and they didn’t do it for themselves.
I remember distinctly one time in my life when I was having a brain lapse. I ran a marathon and as I was running it, I was in the back of the pack, and the people at the end of the race, those are the people who are really doing it with heart because we don’t have the muscles, we don’t have anything but somehow you just keep going. At the very, very end most people run, they don’t walk in the end and I was looking at the back of people’s t-shirts and one guy had ‘this is for my dad’ and had his dad’s birth date and death date. One man had ‘this is for my friends in Vietnam’ and he had some names written down and they were all running and one woman had a birth and death date that looked like a child who had passed away early.
I was reading her shirt and it had the birth and death dates and they were all running, and the only person walking was this one woman and on the back of her shirt it said ‘this one’s for me’ and I thought often when you have a huge mountain to climb, when you have something that seems almost insurmountable, it’s very difficult to do it for ourselves. It’s much easier when you have a bigger purpose, a greater reason for doing it and that’s one of the lessons from this book. A lot of people who overcame these obstacles that seemed so difficult did it not for themselves but for someone else; for the love of someone else.
Why do you think some people can’t overcome this type of adversity?
I don’t know. I know not everyone can overcome these big scary things and I think it’s because you have to have someone with pom-poms near you, someone who is rooting you on, or you have to know that ‘my kids need me—more than this’. The need my children have is much more important than what the fear I have in my own brain and it also says a lot of things are emotional, are mental. Your body can do amazing things in healing. Your body can bounce back after a tremendous amount of weight loss. You can come back after a person is abusing you repeatedly and you can stand on your own two feet but your mind is hard, it’s not always easy. Sometimes you have to take the focus off of you and put it on someone else and it’s funny what you can accomplish and how much strength you really have.
