7 Career Lessons Hoda Kotb Learned After Facing Setbacks 》

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel to have a successful career. Instead, you can simply look to other successful people and learn their secrets.

That approach has worked out quite well for Hoda Kotb. Once, she was a college grad with no real career prospects. But thanks to a lifetime of learning from others, Kotb is now a co-anchor of NBC’s Today and one of the most famous faces in the world!

Fortunately, Kotb is not keeping the secrets of success to herself. In a recent E! News interview, she offered seven solid lessons that can help anyone achieve real career success.

1. Trust your intuition and drown out the ‘outside voices’

In a perfect world, your college professors will be supportive of your dreams. But Kotb had a professor that tried to kill her journalistic ambitions early on.

“I actually had a college professor who basically said, ‘Look, it’s a very competitive field and I’m just gonna try to save you some heartache. There’s a lot of people there and I just don’t know that you’d be one of the people who would make it in that industry.’ I remember it so vividly because it was like a knife in my heart.”

But she did not listen to this advice. Along the way, she realized the importance of listening to herself rather than the discouraging words of others.

“I just thought to myself, ‘I really like this and I want to try it and there are a lot of people who are going to say no, so it’s like you either trust your inside voice or all the outside voices.’”

2. Don’t give up in the face of rejection

When you imagine applying for a job, what do you see? Most of us think about applying to jobs from our computer while sitting in our comfy pajamas at home.

But Kotb recalls driving across the country, going from news station to news station in search of the job she wanted, facing rejection at every stop. She started in Virginia, drove as far as Florida’s panhandle, and ended up in Mississippi.

She eventually saw her sign . . . literally. When she was lost, a billboard told her about the Greenville station where news director Stan Sandroni would offer her a job. This taught her that she didn’t need the world to believe in her: she just needed one good “cheerleader” in her corner.

“I still remember thinking, ‘One cheerleader in life. That’s it. Everybody else can say you’re not good,'” Kotb said. “And I had enough people tell me I wasn’t after all those rejections on the job search, and even after all that, he hired me. I’m still to this day stunned.”

3. Learn from your peers

Kotb did not rest on her laurels or develop an ego once she landed the job. Instead, she was very honest with herself that she had much to learn from her fellow reporters.

“I was a real student of my fellow reporters because I knew that everybody was better, so anyone was your teacher,” she told E!. “I would watch and learn… When I felt like I had learned a lot or enough, I thought, ‘Well, maybe now is a good time to look for something new and different.’

Obviously, Kotb learned her lessons well. And eventually, she’d be able to take what she has learned and become a famous reporter.

4. Chase your dreams, not your paycheck

Over the years, Kotb had reporting jobs in various states, including Mississippi, Illinois, Florida, and New Orleans. In 1998, she had an opportunity to join NBC’s Dateline. But it was an opportunity that would come at a very literal cost.

“I took a pay cut to come to NBC,” she dished. “I took less because I thought, ‘Wow, could I do this job? Do I have what it takes? Or am I going to end up going back to New Orleans and basically asking politely for my job back if I could?’ So I think I took that job to come here and work at Dateline kind of for the adventure of it.”

Kotb realized that even though this would be a pay cut, it might lead to bigger things on the horizon. In this way, she learned that chasing your dreams may be more important than just chasing a paycheck.

5. Take risks instead of playing it safe

Coming to NBC was not a decision that Kotb made lightly. But she soon realized she would regret turning the opportunity down in a big way. “You know what’s going to happen if you stay safely. If you jump, you’re not sure. It may be amazing and it may be horrifying, but you don’t know,” she said.

“When I was standing on the edge when that job came at NBC, it was like ripping my heart out. But I knew that if I didn’t do it, I would wake up every single morning and think, ‘I wonder if I had taken that Dateline job…’ And I couldn’t wake up like that every day, so I took it and I took the pay cut.”

Kotb gives us a lesson here that goes beyond careers and into all of the actions we take in our lives. It is better to take a risk that you may end up temporarily regretting than to avoid a risk and regret that decision for the rest of your life.

6. Never take a job for the money

Believe it or not, Kotb still has some lessons to teach us regarding money. And she gives some unique insight into the classic advice that money doesn’t buy happiness.

“I never did anything or took a job for the money,” she said with clear pride. “I always thought if you take a job for the money, whatever your job is, you’re only going to be happy every other Thursday on payday and then you go back to a job you don’t really love that much. I didn’t choose the profession for that reason and I think if you do, you’re probably making a mistake because you’ll probably be dissatisfied ultimately.”

The ability to make profound advice sound simple is part of what makes Kotb so great. She takes the old, navel-gazing question of whether money can buy happiness and asks us whether we want to be happy only “on payday” or happy every day.

Put that way, the answer is quite simple!

7. Ask for what you want

Despite making it to the top, Kotb still faced criticism. While filing in on the third hour of NBC’s Today, a producer told her she was “boring.” But she was able to take that criticism and use it to take action.

She ended up marching directly to NBCUniversal executive Jeff Zucker and pitching the show that would become Kathie Lee & Hoda.

“I was actually doing something I never do. I was going and asking for a job,” she shared. “I’m always the one who just works and wants to be noticed. ‘I wonder why they didn’t pick me.’ Maybe because you didn’t raise your hand.”

To hear Kotb tell it, career success may be as simple as raising your hand and asking for the opportunities you want. In many ways, this echoes her advice about possible regrets. You may ask for something and be denied.

But isn’t that better than never asking and never even taking a chance on your dreams?