Ambition and purpose

Episode 17, with Samar Hawa. Beirut does not have to wait for change. Samar Hawa shares the story behind Rebirth Beirut, how a simple idea of bringing light back to the city grew into an initiative built around safety, dignity, partnerships and hope, lighting more than 160 streets.

Episode 15, with Nadine Mhanna. Most people place the harp in Greece or Europe. Its story runs back thousands of years, with some of the earliest depictions found in ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

Episode 12, with Dr. Hadi Akl. Thirty-three days on Survivor. Kilimanjaro. Elbrus at minus thirty-one degrees, climbed beside his son. Dr. Hadi Akl has spent years learning the same lesson in different weather: the body can be trained, but the mind is what decides.

Episode 11, with Lisa Sofian. Lisa started with one idea and a coastline worth protecting. This conversation is about how the SWIM Initiative came to exist, and about the far less cinematic work of keeping it alive, the logistics, the persuasion, the years where progress is measured in small stubborn increments rather than headlines. We talk about what it takes to move from caring about something to being responsible for it, and about the difference between a cause and an organisation. Lisa is honest about the parts that are not inspiring: the fatigue, the bureaucratic resistance, the moments when the sea looks exactly as it did before you started. What holds it together is a specific kind of purpose, durable rather than dramatic, closer to habit than to passion. The conversation also looks at the person behind the mission, because movements are usually one person's ordinary persistence made public. It is an episode about scale starting small, and staying small for longer than anyone expects.

Episode 10, with Dr. Ramzi. Dr. Ramzi became a physician in New York. His father made that possible, and the harder story belongs to him. This conversation is about achievement across generations, how a single career is often the visible end of a long, mostly undocumented chain of other people's decisions, deprivations and gambles. We talk about migration and what it asks of the person who goes first, about ambition that is inherited rather than chosen, and about the particular weight of succeeding on someone else's sacrifice. Ramzi describes the strange doubleness of it: gratitude and pressure arriving as the same feeling, and the sense that his own achievement is only partly his own. We also talk about how easy it is to read a person's present and miss everything behind it, how where someone came from usually explains more than where they currently stand. It is a conversation about honouring the people who paid the earlier instalments, and about what you owe a story you did not live.

Episode 8, with Jihane Boustany Khoury. Some conversations do not need a frame. Jihane talks about living through what she would never have chosen, and about the unremarkable daily mechanics of continuing anyway. This episode is about resilience stripped of its motivational packaging: not a triumphant arc, but the decision to get up, again, on a day that offers no particular reason to. We talk about perseverance as practice rather than personality, about what hope looks like when it stops being a feeling and becomes something closer to discipline, and about the people and small rituals that make forward motion possible. Jihane is careful not to tidy her own story or pretend the hard parts resolved neatly. What emerges instead is a portrait of strength that most people would recognise from their own lives, quieter, more stubborn, and less photogenic than the version we are usually sold. It is a conversation about carrying something heavy without letting it decide who you are.

Episode 6, with Youmna Baladi. It started as a mother's private worry. Youmna wanted her son to encounter something the school system was not going to give him, a place to test himself outside grades, to meet ideas and adults and versions of a future he had not been shown. What began as that specific concern became a platform now shaping teenagers across Lebanon. This conversation traces that path without smoothing it out: the gaps in traditional education that prompted it, the practical work of building an environment where young people can be curious in public, and the responsibility that comes with influencing how a generation understands its own potential. We talk about what adolescents actually need, not more instruction, but permission and exposure, and about the difference between preparing teenagers for exams and preparing them for themselves. Youmna is clear that purpose here was not a plan. It was a response to something missing, followed persistently enough that other people's children now benefit from one mother's refusal to accept the default.

Episode 5, with Nada. Law gives you a title, a vocabulary, and a set of expectations that arrive before you do. Nada talks about what it actually took to build a career inside that, the discipline, the difficult decisions, the years of being measured against a standard that leaves little room for uncertainty. This conversation looks at the pressure specific to the profession: representing other people's worst moments, carrying consequences that are not abstract, and being expected to stay clear-headed while doing it. We also talk about the negotiation between duty and passion, and what happens when the two stop pointing in the same direction. Nada is direct about the human being behind the title, the doubts she does not perform in a courtroom, the toll of responsibility that cannot be delegated, and how her sense of purpose changed shape as her experience deepened. It is a conversation about resilience built slowly rather than heroically, and about finding meaning inside a role that does not often invite reflection.

Episode 4, with Nadim. Nadim makes films, which means he spends most of his time trying to convince reality to match something that so far exists only in his head. This conversation is about that gap, the years of unglamorous persistence between having a vision and having anything to show for it. We talk about creative obsession honestly: what it takes from relationships, from money, from rest, and from the version of yourself that could have chosen something steadier. Nadim describes the particular loneliness of ambition that nobody else can see yet, when there is no evidence to point to and belief has to be manufactured daily from nothing. There is also the question of what happens when the work finally arrives and does not resolve the doubt. The conversation avoids the tidy story of the artist who suffered and was vindicated. It stays with the messier truth: that persistence is mostly boring, that doubt does not go away with success, and that choosing a vision means choosing to keep paying for it.

Episode 3, with Rym. Banking rewards composure. Rym describes a working life built on structure and precision, where being unshakeable is not a personality trait so much as a professional requirement. This conversation follows what happens underneath that requirement, how control begins as a skill, becomes a habit, and eventually turns into a survival strategy that is hard to switch off. We talk about carrying responsibility for other people's stability during genuinely unstable years, and about what it does to a person when the environment stops being predictable but the expectation of composure does not. Rym is candid about the distance between professional success and how she experiences herself, and about the quiet cost of never being the one who needs reassurance. The conversation opens into a harder question: if control is what kept you safe, what does it mean to loosen it? Not as a wellness gesture, but as an actual risk. This is an episode about competence as armour, and about what armour weighs when you have been wearing it for years.