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As I'm writing this now, I have the sniffles.

Nothing dramatic. Just some periodic sharp nasal inhales - snnnnnhh - as I'm brainstorming around how to start this post. It's enough to be noticeable, but not enough to keep me from going about my mundane day as normal.

I've always been fascinated by those individuals who find a way to rise above much more serious illnesses than this and deliver a masterful performance when their body is running on 'E'.

Think of Michael Jordan's infamous "Flu Game" (which was actually food poisoning from some contaminated pizza ... that's what you get for ordering pizza in Utah) where a visibly ill MJ dropped 38 points in 44 minutes to will the Bulls to a 90-88 victory over the Jazz in Game 5 of the 1997 NBA Finals.

Or Chadwick Boseman, who was privately battling colon cancer while shooting the action-packed Black Panther (among other movies), pulling off superhero stunts while his body was failing him.

I would add one of Pava LaPere's performances to that pantheon.

Let's travel back in time to Spring '19, when she was gearing up for her TEDx talk at Johns Hopkins. Every TEDx event has a theme and the one for JHU in 2019 was Connecting the Dots. This theme seemed tailor made for Pava. All she did - as a founder and ecosystem builder - was connect dots. Pava was selected to be one of six students who would take center stage at the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy - a single red carpeted dot - and share her journey.

Never one to spend weeks on a task when an all-nighter would do, this time Pava meticulously prepared for the talk which would be the capstone on her four year endeavor to build up the JHU entrepreneurial ecosystem. She ensured every word had a purpose; every sentence a point. Pava rehearsed this talk with the intensity of someone who had a single opportunity to convey their life’s purpose in 16 minutes.

Then the day before TEDxJHU, laryngitis struck. Pava fell mute.

Anyone who knew Pava would tell you, not being able to talk - at any point in life - was one of her greatest nightmares. She spoke at a mile a minute and her brain moved even faster. This one-two jab combo was one of her greatest assets. But to not be able to emit any vocal sound the day before her opportunity to deliver the talk of her life? That must have been Pava’s own personal hell.

What would the average person do when faced with this obstacle? Perhaps record the talk at a later date and on a lesser stage and post it on social media. Or maybe throw themselves a mini pity party and mourn the missed opportunity.

Whatever the hypothetical answer, it doesn’t matter.

Pava was not your average person.

Through a series of mad scribbles and pained gestures, she convinced a doctor to give her a steroid shot directly into her vocal cords on the morning of the talk which would reduce the inflammation long enough to be able to share her story with that Johns Hopkins auditorium, and eventually, with the world.

With a slight rasp in her usual nasally voice, Pava then proceeded to deliver the greatest speech I have ever heard in-person. See below and judge for yourself.

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I found Pava afterwards at the post-event reception, giving her a big hug and kudos for crushing the talk.

"Thank you", Pava whispered back with a grimace on her face. "I got fucking laryngitis and now my throat is starting to close back up."

One her Hopkins friends standing nearby then told me the tale that I know Pava wished she could tell me herself in the moment, if not for the immense pain it took to vocalize every syllable.

After hearing Forget About Your Life Plan, I knew that I needed to find a way work together after Pava graduated. And I'm forever grateful that over the next five years, our relationship evolved from student-employee, to co-workers, to non-profit co-founders, to roommates, to two entrepreneurs committed to seeing this wild EcoMap journey all the way through. Somewhere along the way, we became best friends.

I've watched this talk a handful of times since Pava passed and I'll be forever grateful she left us this little time capsule. It truly is her at her best - finding a way to persevere in the toughest of circumstances - and coming out the other side with a hell of a story to tell. And now Forget About Your Life Plan will be a final story we can tell together.

There will only ever be one Michael Jordan (well, not literally, it's a common name, but you know what I mean). There will only ever be one Chadwick Boseman.

And there will certainly only ever be one Pava LaPere.

(I encourage you to watch the video above to get the full effect, but if you'd rather read, I'm posting the full transcript of her talk below.)

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Forget About Your Life Plan Transcript

Hi. For as long as I can remember I have wanted to be a doctor. Like many people I figured that this was a way for me to make a real and meaningful difference in this world.

So for as long as I can remember I did all of the typical pre pre-med things in high school. I was the president of the Medical Club, I was in National Honor Society, and I got into Johns Hopkins University - the place that you go to become a pre-med.

You see, I had my life entirely mapped out. A blueprint for how I was going to make a change in the world. But in the summer before coming to Hopkins, I was watching news coverage of the war in Syria and there was a video of a car bombing that killed 30 people, most of them children, and I remember feeling absolutely devastated. Not just at the massive human tragedy, but because that video forced me - somebody whose life and safety have always been reasonably guaranteed - to reckon with the fact that despite the fact that we all inhabit the same world we live in entirely different ones.

So that started me on this more of an investigation into everything that is wrong with the world -and boy is there a lot. You know there are millions of people suffering every day from preventable - or rather should be preventable - problems like needless violence, environmental devastation, severe racism, hatred, inequality, and not just in countries half a world away, but in our very own cities.

These weren't failings of medicine, they were failings of society.

Another thing I realized in my investigation is that if you really wanted to the what made big change in the world what really got something moving in a certain direction, you had to follow the money. So I decided that if I wanted to make change on a largest scale I should go into business. I should have probably done my research, because Hopkins doesn't actually offer a business degree.

So when I got to campus I did the next best thing.

I joined the business fraternity, which ended up being one of the best decisions of my life. And I became a computer science major, which was not. But one day in an intermediate programming class I sat next to that kid Anthony and over the summer he had started a group chat for people who were interested in entrepreneurship, and I figured that entrepreneurship was a type of business, so I might as well join. We called that little chat “The Crazy Ones”, yes, after that Apple quote, and over summer we had imagined a Hopkins where any student could build out any idea that they had. That they could pursue any passion regardless of the form that might take. But sitting there in that classroom, we realized that there were actually remarkably few resources for students who wanted to turn their ideas into reality outside of the classroom or lab.

There was no entrepreneurship club, no makerspace, no incubator, and so we decided that we had two options. We could either accept that Hopkins didn't have an entrepreneurial ecosystem or we could be the ones to build it. The only problem being that we actually had no clue what we were doing.

You see, universities will pay people tens of thousands of dollars to come in and set up entrepreneurship programs and we were just a group of freshmen who barely had an idea what we were even building. So we googled everything, we called other universities, we talked to anybody who we could force to listen to us. And slowly but surely, and making more mistakes than I care to admit, we built a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem at the Johns Hopkins University. That became TCO Labs - my first nonprofit - built alongside Brooke, Anthony, and a dozen other talented individuals. So after about a year of helping students independently, we decided that it would be smart to start a formal program to teach students how to build startups, small businesses, and nonprofits - an incubator - but we hadn't really planned for this and since we had a small team suddenly it became my responsibility to teach students how to build ventures.

And let me just frame how ridiculous this was.

You see that very year, I had won a grant from the university - ten thousand dollars - to build out an idea that I had for a software company. And as soon as I got that money, I was mortified because I realized that I actually had no plan for how to turn an idea into an actual company so after four months of floundering around and spending five hundred dollars on purchasing URLs, I returned the money to the university.

I had absolutely utterly failed and now it was my job to teach other students how to not do that.

See, there wasn't a single day that impostor syndrome didn't linger over everything that I did. You know what possibly made me qualified to tackle this problem but eventually I realized that sometimes the only qualification you have to build something is the fact that you are the one who's willing to build it.

So that became The Hatchery, the incubator portion of TCO Labs, and through my work there I realized that there were a ton of people, not just at Hopkins, but elsewhere who wanted to build out solutions to these big problems that our world faces but they simply did know how. And so I became obsessed with this idea of helping as many people as possible become entrepreneurs. I feel like this needs a little bit of explanation, because when I say entrepreneur, I do not mean the tech bros in hoodies building the next Uber for puppies. Entrepreneurs are an incredibly diverse bunch. It is everybody from the small business owners supporting their local economy to the doctor introducing life-changing medical devices onto the market. But what unites them all is a desire to bring something new into the world.

You see, entrepreneurs are the ones who look around and decide that they are dissatisfied with the way that things are and that they are going to attempt to change it by bringing about something different, and different is what we need.

There's this famous misquote by Albert Einstein that says, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But that's what we do as a society. We go into the same careers, we seek out the same prestigious titles at the same big firms, we follow the same path as all of our peers, and then we are surprised when the world doesn't change. And I realized that crawling up the corporate ladder at some big company or selling my soul to the highest bidder on Wall Street was not actually going to make a difference.

You see, big business has its hands so tied by profit and politics that it can be nearly impossible to make meaningful change from within those systems. And so that's when it hit me - if we wanted to make change in the world, we needed to make more entrepreneurs. And I wasn't kidding myself, I knew that building out one entrepreneurial ecosystem at one elite institution wasn't going to make much of a difference. So over the next two years, I worked a lot in Baltimore's innovation ecosystem and I noticed that there were still systemic barriers that kept talented people from building out their ideas. Resources were still stratified based on class, race, and geography, which often meant that the people who were experiencing these problems the ones who were the best suited to build out solutions were unable to do so.

And so I started two more ventures to do my small part at addressing this issue.

One was Innovate Maryland (Innov8MD), a nonprofit that supports young entrepreneurs across the state and works to keep talented graduates within the city. And then leaving my nonprofit safety net, EcoMap Technologies, a company that uses automation to map out entrepreneurial ecosystems, making it easy for any entrepreneur to find the resources that they need to build a venture.

My goal became to reduce the barriers to entry to becoming an entrepreneur because somebody should not need to go to a top ten institution, or any institution for that matter to be an entrepreneur. And so part of that is building productive entrepreneurial ecosystems, the type that make it easy to introduce solutions to big problems. But n order to build productive ecosystems, we need to build equitable ecosystems, ensuring that everybody regardless of their demographics has equal access to not only the capital, but also to the connections and education that are needed to build out successful ventures. Part of that is building robust and productive entrepreneurial ecosystems, but the other part of that equation is convincing more people to become entrepreneurs. And this is the hard part because that requires convincing people that it's not so scary, and I think a big part of that fear is just a fear of the unknown.

See, unlike becoming a doctor, there is no set path to becoming an entrepreneur. And I'm no psychologist, I don't necessarily know how to eliminate fear of uncertainty, but I think it starts with us entrepreneurs being honest about our experiences.

So let me start with the good stuff.

Being a student entrepreneur has been pretty damn fun. I spoke at my first conference when I was 21 years old, and let's just say I was the only person getting ID'd at that open bar. I start my mornings meeting with the Department of Commerce or venture capitalists and I know what it is like to sit at a table with powerful people and know that my voice is being heard. I get to wake up every morning absolutely loving what I do and knowing that I am making a difference, at least in the lives of some students, and I get to give talks like this.

But I would be absolutely lying if I told you that it was always that sexy. In reality, it rarely is. You know, I have left final exams having only filled out half the test because I forgot that I had a meeting downtown. I almost got TCO Labs’ nonprofit status revoked because I forgot to submit paperwork because I had a midterm that week. You see, when it comes to this whole “student entrepreneur equation” I have been constantly inadequate on one side or the other. And that took a lot of getting used to.

So did the sleep deprivation in my junior year. In a desire to have it all - you know, three ventures straight A's, and a modicum of a social life - I slept only four nights every week. I learned how to stay awake in class by sitting in the front row with my foot beneath me so that the pain of it falling asleep was enough to prevent me from doing the same. And I've had four panic attacks - one walking to a meeting, one in the middle of a meeting, but the two that I remember most I was sitting at my desk, sobbing, heaving, barely able to breathe, but still typing out emails because I had work that needed to get done.

You see, in reality entrepreneurship is this stressful emotional painful endeavor. So why have I made it my life goal to put as many people through this as possible?

Because we have to be honest with ourselves … we are hurtling towards an unsustainable future that none of us want and we need more entrepreneurs than ever to turn that around. We need millions of passionate people working relentlessly to build new and better solutions. We need people to make drastic change and this type of change isn't easy. Because unlike what I thought in high school, there is actually no blueprint for how you make a difference. And having a plan is nice - it makes us feel like we have some amount of control in this crazy world - but plans change often drastically, and so instead of worrying about whether or not we have every facet of our lives planned out, maybe we should just start planning for change. Planning for things not to go the way that we expected. Planning to abandon our original goals for the sake of new opportunities. And yes, planning to fail, because failure isn't an end, it's just a slightly different beginning.

See, instead of leaving Hopkins with a Medical School acceptance letter, I'm leaving it with three ventures. I hope these ventures make a difference by empowering the entrepreneurs who are working on these hard problems in our society.

And while my ventures are indeed my babies, none of them were planned. So don't worry right now if you don't have a plan, and don't worry if you suddenly find that your well-crafted life plan collapses in front of you. Survey all of the new opportunities that you have, slowly connect the dots, and you'll find your own way towards making a change.

Thank you.