The One Key To Success
This is Mentoring Moments—a series of stories about triumphs and skids from successful women. Mentoring Moments is now a podcast.
Narjis Khan
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Photo by Forbes
Nabiha Syed is 31 years old and is on the front lines protecting our free speech, religion and our right to protest. She’s the Assistant General Counsel at BuzzFeed, a free speech lawyer and a women’s rights advocate.
There are many words to describe Syed, but I’ll use the word my friend used to describe her which is perfect—“badass.” She’s a Forbes Under 30 and a non-resident fellow at Stanford Law School and Yale Law School. She couldn’t figure out what she wanted to do so she kept going to some of the world’s best universities—she’s a graduate of John Hopkins University, Yale Law School and Oxford University. And she cofounded DroneU, an educational platform explaining drone integration into civilian airspace. This is Syed’s Mentoring Moment, an excerpt from our podcast, in her words (condensed and edited):
I am 25 years old. I’m at Oxford because for some unknown reason I decided to go to more law school after I finished law school in the U.S. I’m supposed to be writing this great thesis. My thesis adviser doesn’t think it’s so great. That sent me into this mid-twenties existential crisis of “Why am I studying media law? What’s so interesting about this? Why did I even pick this? I’ve chosen something so narrow. I have so many other interests.”
I remember sitting cross-legged on my bed. My dearest friend at Oxford who’s now a journalist herself, is sitting on my bed with me trying to work through what’s going on. I’m like, “I don’t even know if I want to do this. I’m sitting an ocean across from everything that I know. My friends are clerking for the Supreme Court. They’re at law firms, and I’m deciding what I should write a paper about. What am I doing here?” She looks at me and says, “You keep saying ‘Why am I doing this? What if I don’t like it? I want to be more well-rounded. There’s so much that I like.’ Sometimes you have to be well-rounded and sometimes it’s time to “get pointy.” Get pointy. You can’t be well-rounded anymore. You have to pick a thing and you have to do it.”
There was no mincing words. She just gave me that shot of clarity in the moment saying, “You need to do this now. The rest of your life will unfold. You just have to decide.” There’s something about those statements, those little snippets of advice that stay with you and become almost like memes. I must have said it 100 times to friends who are deciding where to live, where to go or what to do with their lives.
To get pointy you have to just focus on the moment you’re in. You need to ask yourself, “As I sit here in my chair or cross-legged on my bed in Oxford, what is it that I like right now? Not tomorrow, not next week, not in a month–what do I like right now? What can I not stop learning about? What can I not stop thinking about?” Then you just have to dive headfirst into it. You have to give it everything you have.
One reason for not wanting to get pointy is the fear of, “What if I change my mind in a month or a year?” If you pick up and move to a whole new city, and then you don’t like living there, guess what? In that first move, you’ll learn how to move. You’re building the skills of how you jump and how you learn. The “how” we do things is more important than the “what” even though the “what” is what gets shared on Facebook and Instagram. You have to think about how you build the “hows” of your life.
You have to just try to push your fears away, but sometimes they seep back in. I have a friend who says, “You’re afraid of this. Walk it out. What’s actually going to happen? What’s the worst? Walk me through it.” If I say, “If I move to New York, I’ll be far away from my family in California.” She’ll say, “If something happens then you’ll move to California.” Sometimes when you spell out your fear, tell the story of your fear, you realize it’s not that scary after all.
That fear of the unknown drives us to think, “I can’t get pointy because there may be something else that I can’t define that’s lurking out there.” We can’t predict the future so don’t give the unknown more power than the known thing that’s in your hands.
To hear the stories behind these notable quotes from Syed, tune-in to our podcast:
“ I’m done with waiting. Don’t wait to live out everything you want. “
“ Waiting for everything to be perfect presumes that you know what perfect is, and that it’s possible. “
“ Saying “I don’t know” is liberating. That’s when you find out all kinds of stuff. “
“When I think about free speech, part of my philosophy is making sure all voices are heard. Now, we have some voices that are drowning out voices that are really valuable. What do we do?”
