There is something Steve Harvey has been saying lately that I think is worth hearing beyond the celebrity story. Harvey has spoken about confli
LOS ANGELES – MAY 13: Steve Harvey at the Steve Harvey Hollywood Walk of Fame Star Ceremony at the W Hollywood Hotel on May 13, 2013 in Los Angeles, CA
There is something Steve Harvey has been saying lately that I think is worth hearing beyond the celebrity story.
Harvey has spoken about conflict he experienced with a powerful television executive and what he believes happened to his career afterward. His account is his perspective, and we should say that plainly. We weren’t in those rooms.
But Steve Harvey was not new to show business when trouble came.
By then, he had spent decades in an industry that is notoriously difficult to enter and perhaps even harder to remain in. A few people get one television show. Fewer have one hit. Far fewer keep an audience through changing tastes, changing executives, changing networks, changing technology, failure, success, controversy, age and the simple human fact that audiences eventually move on.
Harvey had already learned how to keep moving. He had been a stand-up comedian. An actor. A television host. A radio host. An author. He had learned how to interview people, entertain live audiences, carry a television format and build a relationship with listeners who couldn’t even see his face.
Those weren’t merely jobs. They were skills.
And there is a Survivor lesson hiding in there.
Build Things People Cannot Easily Take From You
We talk a lot about financial independence, and we should. Money gives people choices.
But money isn’t the only thing worth accumulating.
Learn things.
Learn how to sew because you’ve always wanted to. Take the photography class. Become frighteningly good at gardening. Study another language. Learn bookkeeping. Read history deeply enough that you begin making connections other people miss. Learn how websites work. Take the certification. Finish the degree if that is what you want.
And please don’t believe everything has to become a side hustle. You are allowed to learn something without immediately figuring out how to sell it.
A hobby can deepen into knowledge. Knowledge can become competence. Competence can become confidence. Sometimes, years later, that strange little thing you learned because you were curious becomes precisely what you need.
A Degree Is More Than a Receipt for Employment
We have become so focused on the financial return of education that sometimes we speak about a degree as though its only purpose is to produce a salary. Education can certainly improve employment opportunities. Cost matters. Debt matters. Nobody should pretend otherwise.
But education can also change the furniture in your mind.
You learn how to research. How to question a source. How to organize information. How to finish something difficult. How to encounter ideas you had never considered. How to discover what you don’t know.
Some education happens at universities. Some happens in trade schools, community colleges, libraries, apprenticeships, kitchens, gardens, studios, workshops and beside an elder who has been doing something beautifully for forty years.
Keep learning.
Don’t Build Your Whole Life Around One Gatekeeper
This may be the part of Harvey’s story that stays with me.
You cannot guarantee that people will use power fairly.
You cannot guarantee that people will use power in the way that you hoped they would.
You cannot guarantee that the supervisor will recognize your contribution. You cannot guarantee that the company won’t reorganize. You cannot guarantee that somebody won’t dislike you, underestimate you, retaliate against you or simply decide that they want something different.
You cannot build a life around controlling those possibilities.
You can build yourself.
That doesn’t mean becoming so independent that you never need another human being. We need one another. It means cultivating enough inside and around yourself that somebody else’s decision does not automatically become the final sentence of your story.
Your knowledge can travel.
Your skills can travel.
Your curiosity can travel.
Your reputation can travel.
Your relationships can travel.
And sometimes your audience can travel with you too.
You Don’t Have to Set Yourself on Fire to Prove You Are Brave
There is another lesson in Harvey’s perspective that I appreciate. Not every battle has to be fought publicly.
Not every disagreement requires maximum volume. You don’t have to join every fight somebody asks you to join. You don’t have to speak as though you witnessed something you didn’t witness. You can care about another person and still exercise your own judgment about what you know, what you don’t know and what you are willing to risk.
That isn’t permission to remain silent when conscience requires courage.
It is permission to use discernment. Survivors especially deserve that permission.
Many of us have already lived through situations where somebody else wanted control of our emotions, our responses, our loyalties or our choices. Healing should not deliver us into another world where we must constantly demonstrate our goodness by responding exactly as somebody else demands.
You get to think. You get to gather information. You get to decide.
Build More Doors
Maybe you don’t need another hustle. Maybe you need another skill.
Maybe you need to return to the hobby you abandoned twenty years ago. Maybe you need to finish that certificate. Maybe there are books sitting beside your bed because some part of you has been trying to tell you where your curiosity wants to go next.
Follow it. We cannot make ourselves invulnerable. Life doesn’t offer that bargain.
But we can become more difficult to corner.
Build knowledge nobody can fire you from. Develop abilities that don’t disappear when a company closes. Keep interests that remind you that your usefulness is larger than your job title. Nurture relationships that exist beyond the institution that introduced you.
And every once in a while, look around at your life and ask yourself:
If somebody closed this door tomorrow, what would still belong to me?
Start building there.
Backstory:
Steve Harvey is now publicly alleging that former NBC executive Paul Telegdy retaliated against him after Harvey refused to move Celebrity Family Feud from ABC to NBC. According to Harvey, NBC originally passed on the show. ABC took the chance, it became successful, and Telegdy later wanted Harvey to bring it to NBC. Harvey refused because, as he tells it, ABC had believed in the program when NBC did not. Harvey says Telegdy threatened his television career, and Harvey interpreted the hostility he experienced as racial.
Then, in 2019, two major pieces of Harvey’s NBC relationship disappeared almost together: his daytime show Steve was canceled, and he was replaced by Melissa McCarthy as host of Little Big Shots. At the time, NBC publicly described Little Big Shots as getting a creative “refresh.” Contemporary reporting also showed that Harvey’s talk show was still drawing roughly 1.8 million viewers and ranked fifth among syndicated talk shows.
He had already built multiple pillars outside NBC.
Family Feud was enormous. Harvey had taken over in 2010 when the syndicated show was struggling, and its ratings subsequently surged. Longtime executive producer Gaby Johnston literally described Harvey as the show’s “secret sauce.”
Then there was radio. The Steve Harvey Morning Show gave him an audience relationship that didn’t depend upon NBC. His official biography says the nationally syndicated program now airs on more than 100 stations and reaches more than six million weekly listeners.
He was also an author. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man became a bestseller and spawned a successful film franchise. He had stand-up, books, radio, Family Feud, Celebrity Family Feud, producing relationships and, most importantly, an audience that knew his name independently of whichever network happened to employ him.
And after NBC? He simply found another door. By 2020 he had launched Steve on Watch through Facebook Watch while continuing Family Feud and other work.
Harvey had television + radio + books + live performance + intellectual property + direct audience recognition. When one pillar got kicked out from underneath him, the house didn’t collapse.
That is basically the media version of don’t let anybody else own your only door.