Profiles in Grit

Profiles in Grit: How Entrepreneurs Triumph Over Trauma profiles eleven survivors of genocide, war, natural disaster, disease and other devastating experiences who recovered from trauma and rebuilt their lives by becoming successful entrepreneurs. 

To collect these dramatic stories, Steve Mariotti traveled to Cambodia's killing fields to meet with Khmer Rouge survivors. 

He collaborated with Teletime filmmakers Harold and Nan Klein to interview survivors of the Nazi Holocaust, and the Armenian genocide in Azerbaijan. They interviewed Vietnamese "boat people," a Colombian sex-trafficking victim, a former drug dealer who spent a year in solitary confinement in a New Jersey Prison, a fashion designer diagnosed with breast cancer on the eve of her wedding, and other survivors of extreme trauma. 

All the entrepreneurs in Profiles in Grit nearly lost their lives. 

Some lost their families. Nonetheless, each discovered the power of the entrepreneurial mindset. They decided to see opportunity everywhere, and chose to be optimistic and confident. They rebuilt their lives and created thriving businesses out of nothing but grit and determination. In their riveting stories, we discover that starting a business--however small--encourages a powerful shift in consciousness from haunted victim to proud survivor. 

Steve Mariotti learned this as a young special education teacher in the notorious Fort Apache section of New York's South Bronx in the early 1980s. 

There, he discovered that whenever he connected his lessons to business, even his most disadvantaged and disruptive students got excited about learning. Their self-esteem improved dramatically as they started their own businesses. They began to use entrepreneurship to chart their own pathways out of poverty. In 1987, Mariotti founded the non-profit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). Today, NFTE has served more than one million low-income teens from Chicago to China with life-changing entrepreneurship education.

 

Interviews with Profiles In Grit entrepreneurs appear in the powerful documentary film Trauma to Triumph: The Rise of the Entrepreneur (Teletime Video). 

Steve Mariotti is a renowned advocate for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship education, and the founder and former president of the global nonprofit Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE). He is the author of numerous textbooks and trade books, including his multi-award-winning memoir Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement. 

Debra Devi is the award-winning author of The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to Zuzu, and the co-author of multiple books with Steve Mariotti, including Goodbye Homeboy: How My Students Drove Me Crazy and Inspired a Movement...