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Crossroads and Choices
One of the most important character traits anyone can have is courage: the courage to find your hidden strength and let it lead you, to make difficult choices and see them through.There are countless stories of ordinary people who had the courage to change the course of their lives. I think immediately of my grandmother Rosalia Maria Morreale, who left behind everything that was familiar in her native Italy to start a new life in America. There's Andy Grove, who at age 20 escaped from Hungary in the wake of the 1956 revolution and went on to co-found Intel Corporation. Or Francis Ford Coppola, who had a grand vision to produce movies but was broke, so he mortgaged everything on a dream.
In my new column, I'll bring you the stories of both famous and not-so-famous people who found themselves at a crossroads, with a choice to make -- and the courage to make it. We often hear that the cards are stacked against ordinary people in a rich man's world. But we all have the power to win.
I have a story, too, only mine is about taking a stand.
By the time I was 23, I had been working at CNN Business News for five years. I was producing a live show, and I had one of the greatest Rolodexes on Wall Street. But I missed being at the scene, getting to the people who made the headlines and knowing how they did it.
I put together a tape of myself reporting on-camera, shopped it around to the major news organizations -- and began broadcasting in 1993 at CNBC. Two years later, we were starting a new show and I went to Dick Grasso, then head of the New York Stock Exchange, to ask if we could do something never done before -- report, live, right there on the trading floor.
Grasso liked the idea and gave us the go-ahead. We worked out the challenges of filming in such a tight space, with traders running around and shouting orders. It turned out that the NYSE was very much an old boys club. And the boys didn't want a female broadcaster elbowing into the huddle with a camera.
No question, it was an intimidating experience. Some brokers would physically bump into me while I was on-camera. I tried to keep my cool -- and my balance -- as I was literally getting run down.
But I loved it because I was delivering news in its purest, most immediate form. I used to stand in front of IBM's trading post, so I was there the day in 2000 after IBM reported its third-quarter earnings. IBM management had made cautious comments about the business, and its shares had fallen before the market opened. IBM is an industry leader and a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so I knew the market was going to be down big on this news.
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