How media expert Evan Shapiro reclaimed his career

Evan Shapīro was on top of the world, until he wasn't — that's how it is in the what-have-you-done-for-me-lately, bean-counting world of network television. "People love you for that first couple of months when you enter corporate America as a disruptor — until they don't really love you anymore."

The problem, at least on the surface, was money. He was spending too much of it for the suits' satisfaction, and they stopped believing there would be any particular ROI. Very publicly fired on his 50th birthday from a dream job — head of NBCUniversal's Seeso streaming service — Shapiro was embarrassed. At having failed, of feeling as though he had let down his wife — his "partner in many ways."?

Contemplating things on his rooftop, Shapiro thought it as the end of his career. But, instead, he had a "come to Jesus moment."

"Okay, big guy, what are your superpowers?," he asked himself, staring down the street below. "What is it that you think you're so wonderful at that makes you so special?" It took Shapiro "a lot of minutes" to find the answer. But it finally hit him. "I was able to figure out that my superpower is the stuff that I create."

How did he get here? Raised by a single mom, Shapiro was a latchkey kid. Like many of us given that kind of agency at such a young age, he "sometimes" did his homework. "But mostly I watched TV,? and that's really when I fell in love with television," he told Catalyst, "and it became very clear that some version of it was what I wanted to do."

It was a serious medical issue, however, that helped Shapiro get perspective on what even a dramatic professional setback means in the grand scheme of things.?

"What I've learned in retrospect, having now been diagnosed for cancer, is that I had never really experienced any challenges in my life — that life as a kid from New Jersey and as a cisgendered Jewish guy in media, hasn't really been too challenging."

How do you rank and compartmentalize the challenges in your personal and professional lives?

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