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The Profile: The carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages & the tech billionaire who hates Silicon Valley

 
This edition of The Profile features Ryan Breslow, Olena Zelenska, Hikaru Nakamura, and Francis Ngannou.

Today marks exactly 22 years since my family moved to the United States.

I’ve featured plenty of immigrant stories in this newsletter, including Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya, chef Dominique Crenn, Calendly founder Tope Awotona, clinical psychologist Edith Eger, astronaut Franklin Chang Díaz, and even my own.

But I recently came across the story of UFC heavyweight champion Francis Ngannou, and his story blew me away.

Ngannou grew up in Cameroon, and he endured a level of poverty few people can even imagine.

At age 9, Ngannou got a job digging sand mines for $1.90 per day. The work kept his body busy, but he kept his mind even busier by daydreaming of making it to America and becoming a world-famous boxer. This may sound like childhood fantasy, but Ngannou felt the reality of it in his bones.

Even though he was a dreamer, Ngannou says he was realistic about the fact that he couldn’t become a world champion by training in Cameroon. So at age 25, he sold all of his belongings and set off for Morocco, the first leg of a winding and treacherous journey to America.

Ngannou traveled a whopping 3,000 miles across the Sahara Desert — from Cameroon to Nigeria, from Nigeria to Niger, from Niger to Algeria, from Algeria to Morocco. “The biggest deal was to get from Morocco to Spain because Spain is in Europe,” he says. “That was the hardest part.”

It took him 14 months to make it from Morocco to Spain, an endeavor Ngannou describes as “a hell of a journey.” That’s because he attempted to float on a raft full of people to a Spanish island off the coast of Morocco where he could call the Red Cross and seek asylum. But authorities had pulled him out of the water six separate times, and either dropped him back in the middle of the Moroccan desert or temporarily locked him in a Moroccan jail.

In 2013, Ngannou finally made it to Spain, and spent time at an immigration detention center, but he didn’t care — asylum was all but guaranteed. In his search for a boxing gym, he ended up in Paris where he slept in the stairwell of a covered parking lot. “The parking lot was so nice,” he said. “I didn’t even feel homeless.”

He eventually found a gym, got into MMA by accident, signed with the UFC, moved to the United States, and became the world heavyweight champion in a sport he didn’t even know existed nine years ago.

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Πηγή: theprofile.substack.com