THEY’VE COME TOO FAR TO SETTLE NOW. READ THEIR STORIES.
Check out the profound stories of an Opera singer, a photojournalist, and a philanthropist and how they’ve created lanes for themselves in their careers.
Morris Robinson
It’s been love at first sound for just about anyone who has met Morris Robinson. But for the former college football star, it took awhile to warm up to the idea of being a professional opera singer.
The bass soloist started studying opera in 1999, and two years later he was at Carnegie Hall. He made his Metropolitan Opera debut in 2002, and since then, he’s sung at every major opera house and with every major opera company in the country.
The Georgia native got his first drum set at age 9 and he joined the school band as a high school freshman, but he soon had a realization that pushed him to ditch the instrument. “At the first football game, I realized, if you’re in the marching band, you can’t be on the football team, and that’s where all the cool guys are,” he says.
It was his football prowess that landed the six-foot-three-inch offensive lineman a college football scholarship. By the time his senior year rolled around, Robinson was a preseason All-American and a founding member of the college’s gospel choir.
Overlooked by the professional league teams, he was working in corporate sales when he landed an audition with the Choral Arts Society of Washington. As he was singing a part from Mozart’s Requiem, the director interrupted.
“He said, ‘I can tell you right now, there’s not a voice like that in my chorus.’ And you need to be doing this.” Robinson has never looked back. “The fear of failure and the determination to be successful are the things that drove me in football.”
Now he racks up plenty of miles — and nights on the road — on an improbable musical journey. But for Robinson, there’s nothing better than the comforts of home, where his whole musical career began.
Kimberly Butler
Kimberly Butler was 19 when she first picked up a camera for a college trip to Russia. She hasn’t really put it down since. “I fell in love with photography, and that was it,” Butler says. “I followed my bliss.”
And success followed her. The world-class photographer’s career has been full of capturing action and emotion — and for Butler, the start of her own life was full of both. Butler was placed in the Ottilie Orphan Home in Queens N.Y., from grades two to four.
“Failure is not an option for me. The best thing that ever happened to me was probably that I ended up in an orphanage, because I always knew that I was special. I was different,” Butler says. “I always knew that there was something waiting for me.”
What was waiting for her turned out to be a degree at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. From there, she landed a gig at a newspaper, and after racking up some clips, she sent her work and a business card to about 500 different places. One publication called her back: Sports Illustrated. Her stint there kick-started a career that included work for TIME and People in addition to photo shoots with celebrities. She’s photographed atrocities in war-torn Chechnya and Syrian refugee camps and was once kidnapped by her own bodyguards in Chechnya — later escaping.
Through all that international travel, she’s learned the value of a safe place to stay and a room where she can unwind after a long day of shooting. It makes her job a lot easier when she’s back in the field the next day, photographing a subject. “When you’re working, your focus has to be extraordinarily sharp,” Butler says. “The more stress there is, the more calm I am.”
Ryan Seaberg
Ryan Seaberg doesn’t remember getting diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes on Christmas Eve at the age of 2. He doesn’t remember being in the ICU. He doesn’t remember his blood sugar level being 10 times higher than the average kid’s. But Seaberg will never forget the message that he’s repeated countless times in the past two decades to himself and to younger kids suffering from diabetes: “You may have diabetes, but you’re just as good as this kid who’s completely healthy.”
The 22-year-old’s life has been dotted with battles that arose from his diabetes diagnosis, stories the international football player now uses to inspire others who are facing similar difficulties. His father had to fight so Ryan would be allowed to play on the Pop Warner football team. His babysitters had to chase him around the couch to administer insulin shots. And the heckling on the high school football team was tough — they would call him “Mr. Diabetic Can’t Get Right.”
Seaberg shook off the adversity, eventually landing on the football team at Elon University, where his coach asked him to speak to a neighbor’s 11-year-old son who had just been diagnosed with diabetes. Seaberg decided to take his goodwill efforts a step further. “I started meeting with them every three or four days,” he says. “And I started going to his games, and that really affected me-how much better this kid was doing, and how much better his dad was doing.”
Soon, Seaberg started connecting with other kids, eventually opening summer sports camps for kids dealing with Type 1 diabetes. That’s led to lots of trips where Seaberg always needs reliability to protect his insulin supply. Any roadblocks on his road trips would only keep him from delivering his message of resiliency.
“A lot of kids, it takes a while for them to realize they’re not in it alone. If I can just reach that kid, when he needs it most, that’s all I really want.”
