Yara Shahidi
speaker
547 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard 10 Apr
Yara Shahidi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Whereas coming from a place where I was like, I have my career, I was able to take, oh, I'm taking a hip hop class. I'm taking a healthcare and morality class. I'm taking this random theory class. And ultimately all of it contributed to my own growth in ways I wouldn't even be able to name when I was choosing the classes.
But I think those classes wouldn't have even been on my radar if I went in the traditional sense and said, all right, I got to make something of myself using this degree. Interesting. It gave me another level of freedom. And being like, what? What am I interested in?
Yeah. I think fear of failure, feeler of, hmm.
I think, yeah. I think that's what makes the creative industry something that I'm always kind of... Personally having to figure out how I want to engage and how do I move with confidence? Because part of why I liked school so much is that I got direct feedback every day that I was doing well. Like it's kind of a perfectionist dream.
You know, being like in an industry where it's even above you how many no's you deal with, how imperfect it is. I get grades. I get clear feedback on what I could do better next time.
Cause and effect. I put the time in. I got a great grade. I put the time in for my thesis. Summa, summa. Great. Cute. And so I think creativity presents self-doubt for me because it's so informal in how I even self-assess. What does doing well look like?
Mm-hmm.
And so many times doing well can be attached to, again, results of being like, oh, I have a show on air. Oh, I made this happen. I'm promoting this project. And for me, prompted by, you know, even my own health journey, prompted by maybe the collision of graduating, finishing the show, all these things happening at the same time, I think I've now intentionally –
been prioritizing what are experiences that I know I'm not going to be great at and how do I move through it? Because it's even random stuff. I was on the American Bake Off, the American version of the British Bake Off. Was it fun? It was so fun. That's cool. I love watching the show. And even though I'm only really a sous chef in the kitchen, I was like, yeah, I'll do it.
But truly my first priority was like, don't get upset at the fact that you don't bake professionally and you're not about to come off as a professional baker.
No, because I think for me, I definitely maybe it's just being public facing. I don't necessarily know where I got it from, but I definitely have a sense of like I do things that I know I'm good at. But it was limiting in the sense that if I'm not good at it, I just am like.
Leaning into it. Because we had even done... We had created a show. It was called Yara's Day Off. And it was on Meta. And it was where I would go with guests to do their activity, their hobby. And boy, oh, boy, was that like an immersive...
therapeutic experience that I don't even know if I took away the biggest lessons from until like a year later because it was me making a fool of myself for 12 weeks, which I had never done, of being like... I remember one time I had a guest, Alton, and he's an incredible gymnast. I cannot do a handstand. More than that, I have no desire to do a handstand. I'm a black belt in karate.
There are things that I like to do that I'm good at, but I say to the team, I'm like, hey, guys... I can't cartwheel. Don't want to cartwheel. I'm down to try other things out, but just FYI. They call action. They're like, yeah, we're going to teach you how to cartwheel. Wow.
I tell you, I went into the bathroom and shed a single tear because it was just such an embarrassing experience for me of being like, oh, I'm doing something. By the end of the learning session, I still couldn't cartwheel.
Mm-hmm.
And I think for me, that idea of not having that linear progress was really frustrating to deal with, of being like, yeah, I know you have to grow in things, but as long as I see myself growing, I'm good. It's those moments where the growth is so granular and so small that I've had to continue to move through to be like, no, you've got to wait it out.
You may not know how to cartwheel four times doing this. You may not know for the whole year. I still don't know. But my friends have signed me up to teach me next week.
I mean, again, a question I ask myself. I think some of it is the public-facing pressure of... knowing the stakes of failure at times, knowing we don't, I think especially the time that Black-ish came on air, you know, we're still one of the only, we were one of the only Black families on broadcast. And so it also meant you're kind of a part of this small group of
peep of actors that have this opportunity to be on prime time television every week for the whole world to see. And I think it just created this sense of responsibility of being like, oh, I want to be as responsible as possible. And I think, however my brain worked, I moved being responsible to being, again, as correct as possible, moving as properly as possible.
Showing 341–360 of 547 · page 18 of 28
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