This Is Our Mission

Welcome to The Art of The Impossible, a weekly newsletter where I unearth five pieces of content which I hope will both inspire and embolden you.

PODCAST

Bari Weiss Interviews Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch has become the first black woman to lead the UK’s Conservative Party, the oldest party in British politics, and has a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering.

In this interview with Baris Weiss, Kemi discusses her childhood from being born in UK in 1980, growing up in Nigeria, drawing inspiration from her grandmother who made money through trading (despite not being able to read and write), learning from the mistakes made by her country (including dictatorship) which led to her family’s declining wealth, why we must all work hard (society and country) to ensure we keep what we have that is good and the importance of education.

Watch the full, fascinating, interview here.

QUOTE

The best thing you can do is learn from those mistakes so that you continue to get better. That's the management style or leadership style I believe in, which is push people to their limit such that they can become better than they thought they could be. That certainly has helped me.

Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD and Time’s CEO of the Year

INTERVIEW

The great Douglas Adams - what a brilliant mind! An interview from 1993 where he discussed his career, including a focus on The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy, growing up with and around illness, inspiration taken from David Attenborough, connectedness and promise of computers.

Watch this wonderful interview here.

BOOK

Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

With Stories of Your Life and Others, his masterful debut collection, multiple-award-winning author Ted Chiang deftly blends human emotion and scientific rationalism in eight remarkably varied stories. From a soaring Babylonian tower that connects a flat Earth to the firmament above, to a world where angelic visitations are a wondrous and terrifying part of everyday life; from a neural modification that eliminates the appeal of physical beauty, to an alien language that challenges our very perception of time and reality, Chiang’s unique imagination invites us to question our understanding of the universe and our place in it.

Buy the book here.

FILM

“We have the most to prove…. This is our mission.”

Almost a full century after the end of World War II, new stories about the quiet heroism of everyday individuals continue to come to light and in this film - The Six Triple Eight - Tyler Perry is highlighting one such story by telling the story of the war’s only Women’s Army Corps unit of colour, which stars Kerry Washington.

The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion contributed to the war effort in a unique way: by sorting through a three-year backlog of mail (17 million pieces) that hadn’t been delivered to American soldiers far from home. In the face of discrimination and a vast, unfamiliar country divided by global conflict, these 855 women brought hope to the front lines.

“A lot of people do not want us to succeed,” Washington says as Captain Charity Adams in the film’s new teaser. “We have the most to prove.”

Out next week (Dec 20th) on Neflix - trailer here.

Thank you so much for reading the newsletter and for listening to the podcast, and if you enjoy them, please do share with your network - my goal is to have these stories reach as many as possible so that others can be inspired too. And if you have two minutes, please do leave a review for the podcast - it would mean the world to me and helps others to find it too.

Have a lovely weekend.

Danielle