The WPP publicist is the guest on this episode of the leadership podcast “Learn from Leaders. If anyone thinks that success is a matter of luck, here is one of their responses: “I work hard to remain a lucky guy.”
He is president and creative director of the Ogilvy group in Venezuela and WPP’s “country manager” for the Andean Region, but he had times when his only meal a day was a Coca Cola and a boiled egg. He studied law but never practiced, he was a freelance photojournalist and that combination, he says, has led to success in advertising. And yet today he regrets not having started much younger in it.
It is Bobby Coimbra, Brazilian without a doubt, no matter how much he loves the Venezuela where he settled, who talks with Ricardo De La Blanca in this episode of “Learning from Leaders”, the podcast that shows the experiences of great successful leaders Their path experienced difficulties like those that humanity is experiencing today with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Coimbra is no exception. “What motivates us are the ups and downs. If everything were successes, it would be a very boring life, “he says in this talk after recalling that at one time” he wrote for four newspapers and took photos for nine magazines to eat. I ate a boiled egg with Coca Cola so that I wouldn’t get hungry all day. That was my time as a journalist, where I covered everything from cocktails to revolutions ”.
Bobby Coimbra tells how his judo teacher in Paris beat him up in every class until one day he explained that he did it so that he would learn to make decisions with his head, and not with his stomach, as he had done until then. Today that teacher is one of his great friends and he was the one who brought him closer to the Buddhism of which he is a practitioner today. “It is a philosophy of life,” he says as he recounts his experience of months in a Buddhist temple in Japan.
“One of the great happiness in my life is that I have had great teachers, very deep people who led me through the paths that I took,” he says. And today he is grateful to the publicity that allows him to see the sea, with a house on the Caribbean Sea in Venezuela and another facing the Pacific in Lima, where his wife is from.
The common thread of his testimony is optimism as a guide. Both to inspire his teams and not to stay in the past, which, he says, “is for paleontologists.” For this reason, when asked about his greatest success in life, he answers: “perhaps survive with my optimism, and know how to transmit it.”
So the sentence that the title of this conversation bears is not surprising: “pessimism is an alibi for doing nothing”. “The pessimist” – he insists – “is selfish.”
And how about this phrase for those who believe that success is a matter of luck ?: “I consider myself a lucky guy and I work hard to remain a lucky guy”
Listen to this inspiring conversation here:
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