How I Learned That Life Was Hard

Takara Small has spent her career in the business of telling other people's stories. As a technology journalist — at Fortune, CTV, CBC, Metro Morning, the BBC, and beyond — she asks the questions. Today, she's the one being asked. What she shares is honest, warm, and quietly powerful: a conversation about growing up between cities and classrooms, navigating spaces that weren't built with her in mind, and the understanding — hard-won — that the room doesn't get to decide if you belong. You do.

Dr. Tanya Harrison has spent her career working on Mars rovers, and she'll be the first to tell you that what got her there had less to do with being brilliant at school than with being relentlessly curious and willing to figure things out sideways. In this conversation, she takes us back to being the kid in three band classes a day who hand-wrote Star Trek sheet music because nobody told her she shouldn't. She talks about navigating a physical disability, learning to self-promote as a scientist (a skill she had to watch others struggle without, too), and the learning strategy that has served her throughout: always see the whole before you try to understand the parts. She makes a quietly radical argument for centering curiosity and the lineage of human knowledge at the heart of education, rather than facts and scores. And in her closing answer, she turns the conversation toward something she is genuinely still figuring out: how to be a person in the world beyond the identity of a planetary scientist. A generous, wry, and clear-eyed conversation.

Esie Mensah is one of the most sought-after choreographers and directors in Canada, with work spanning Soulpepper, Crow's Theatre, the Stratford Festival, and stages far beyond our borders. But her path to that work was full of closed doors, redirects, and moments where the conventional script said stop. In this conversation, she takes us back to growing up in Hamilton, dancing her way through school without anyone calling it a career, and eventually leaving McMaster University to pursue what she knew in her body long before she could say it out loud. What she discovered along the way was a kind of learning that reaches far beyond any classroom: a connection to her Ghanaian and Ewe ancestors that taught her who she was, and a quiet understanding that the no's were never the end of the story. This is an episode for anyone who has ever felt like they were going in circles, and wondered whether the circle itself might be the point.

We are very good, as a culture, at celebrating where people end up. We are much less honest about how they actually got there. “How I Learned That” is a podcast for parents who lie awake wondering if their child is going to be okay, and for the teenagers who can already feel that they don't quite fit the mold school was built for. It is a show that believes both of them deserve better than the stories we usually tell about learning and success. Host Dr. Deena Kara Shaffer is one of Canada's leading learning strategists. Her work lives underneath the subjects, courses, and years, in the how of learning. In each episode, she sits down with someone who has done something remarkable and asks the questions that rarely get asked: what was your relationship with school? What is the hardest thing you have ever had to learn, and how did you learn it? Was there a moment when you finally understood how you learn, and what did it change? Every guest brings a different answer, and every answer holds an offering of truth: you are far more capable of learning than any institution ever told you. “How I Learned That” is not a show about exceptional people who made it despite the odds. It is a show about ordinary, extraordinary human beings who figured out how to learn, and what happened when they did. Short episodes, generous conversations, real people, and the real stories underneath their lives.