This episode of The Jake Dunlap Show features Shama Hyder, CEO of Zen Media, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and 4x LinkedIn Top Voice in Marketing. Growing up as an immigrant to the US instilled many unique lessons in Shama.
She learned to be responsible for her siblings, helped with the family business, and soaked in learnings about the real world early in life. She shares how she started increasing her credit score as a teen and taking community college classes as a high school student.
These practical moves optimized Shama's road to entrepreneurship, allowing her to finish college and masters in just 5 years. Shama then founded her own company out of necessity and, in hindsight, all her previous setbacks turned out to be foundation blocks for a successful business career.
She shares how she got deeply involved with social media and the many creative ways she used the system to her advantage. Shama's lessons for listeners are if you have a good idea, there is always a way, and obstacles are not walls but challenges to be figured out.
QUOTES:
13:07 "I have a genuine kind of love for the underdog and for what I considered the hidden gems and, through my work, through what I do, it's so much about of is amplifying it and help them kind of navigate the rocky terrain."
20:41 "I was kind of the optimizer, like how can I optimize my way through school while making sure I helped my parents get food on the table or whatever they needed, whatever, like not just financial, but kind of emotional support being the eldest."
28:35 "I think exposing minorities and underserved communities with these kinds of opportunities is massive because you can be what you can't see and you don't know what's out there because we don't know what's out there."
39:53 "What was so exciting was that (social media) was this great equalizer. If you had good ideas, you could make it happen. I mean, remember, not only was I talking about marketing and social media and marketing and the digital age, I was walking the talk."
45:12 "When I first started and I used to do all these talks about social media, I talk about your digital footprint. But it's not your footprint anymore, it's your entire identity. And you get to determine what that looks like. So you're not stuck with who you are in the physical world. You can be a lot of things."
More About Shama
Shama moved to the US from Goa, India when she was 9 years old. She was exposed to entrepreneurship very early on as she witnessed her parents hustle to survive in a new country. One definitive characteristic of Shama is her creativity in turning setbacks into opportunities.
She hacked her way through school by taking college classes while in high school so that she entered the University of Texas as a junior. She found ways and means to get the necessary permissions to take even more classes, something which required simple curiosity and sheer willpower to do so.
Another unique tidbit about Shama is that she graduated college debt-free. By learning how to manage her finances as a teen, she was able to prioritize the future and took the necessary steps to secure it, a far cry from what her peers were concerned with at the time.
Immediately after graduation, she founded her company Zen Media and was the first person to write a book on social media. She had her pulse on the future and recognized that this is not a trend and its genesis will alter the way people do life and business in the near future.
Shama has been recognized for her marketing prowess by Forbes, Business Insider, Inc, Empact 100, and many more and has been awarded for her genius, earning her the monikers “Zen Master of Marketing” and “millennial master of the universe.”
Find out more about Shama and connect with her in the following links:
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