Jimmy Wong

AI Jimmy

From Brain Surgery to Published Book Author

Today, I discovered Hiroko Nishimura’s amazing story of overcoming adversity, while I was researching LinkedIn Learning instructors.

When she was 22-years-old in college studying Special Education, her roommate found her collapsed on the bathroom floor having a seizure. At the hospital, she was diagnosed as having a brain tumor. Doctors operated on her brain with a craniotomy, then stapled her skull back together.

Her doctors and family had a bleak outlook for her future ability to care for herself independently.

She had to relearn to walk. She lost some of her English and Japanese language abilities. She had short-term memory issues.

So what does she do?

She packed her bags and moved to New York City to start a new life. Moxie!

On her own, she started work as a babysitter. She then became an IT helpdesk engineer at an MSP while learning on the job.

She still had lingering effects from her brain surgery. She also had Executive Dysfunction Disorder and ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). She needed to take chemotherapy drugs for painful rheumatoid arthritis. She had several other medical conditions with long names.

However, she found ways to cope while building her career.

She heard that a friend got AWS cloud computing certification which helped him get a great new job. She wanted the same. Despite her health conditions, she studied and passed the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam.

However, during her studies, she had found that the AWS beginner training material was too hard for newbies like her to understand.

The existing training materials were written by experts. But the materials were for people who already had some basic knowledge of IT infrastructure. What was missing was AWS training material for people with zero prior IT background at all.

What did Hiroko Nishimura do?

While still studying for the exam, she started documenting her own newbie learning journey and shared it online with others in her new awsnewbies.com website. Other newbies found her material very helpful as she was able to communicate the complex concepts in an easy way.

She solved her own need, and helped others along the way.

She found her groove to communicate complex topics for audiences to understand. With this new confidence, she left her IT engineering job to become a technical writer. Audiences followed her to learn AWS.

Then she was discovered by LinkedIn Learning.

A content manager from LinkedIn Learning reached out to invite her to create AWS courses for beginners. Hiroko Nishimura eventually created eight training courses for LinkedIn Learning. She gets monthly royalty payments from the thousands of learners watching her online course.

She also managed to get a book deal from Manning Publications to publish her AWS For Non-Engineers book. Despite her ADHD, she finished writing her book. She gets royalty payments from her book as well.

Hiroko Nishimura writes:

While there are obviously no income guarantees, the monthly checks I receive from LinkedIn Learning allowed me to quit my full-time job and try out freelance consulting. I’m in full remission from rheumatoid arthritis as of 2021, wrote and published a book, and had 2 babies! Because LinkedIn Learning deals with the marketing and platform operations, I can sit back, relax, and focus on life!

I just discovered Hiroko Nishimura today, and I’m impressed with all that she has accomplished. I would love to publish a book and teach via LinkedIn Learning myself too.

Her accomplishments were even more remarkable after I learned her back story about her health conditions. I’ve seen her and some other people with ADHD with incredible energy to accomplish a lot in the online “creator” world.

For her, she’s using her ADHD as part of her identity, and possibly even as a strength.

Her ADHD puts her in common with all these famous accomplished people:

Emma Watson
Albert Einstein
Michael Jordan
Britney Spears
Leonardo da Vinci
Sir Richard Branson

These people also had immense creativity and immense bodies of work, while reported to have ADHD.

For Hiroko Nishimura, these were some of her unique strengths:

Her recent AWS learning experience gave her familiarity to teach other beginners.
Her Special Education teacher training helped her make complex things easy to understand.
Her ADHD and brain injury helped her find a “dream career” path.

You can read more about her story on her blog:

Each of us has unique strengths and experiences. Sometimes the strengths come from adversities and life challenges like what Hiroko Nishimura faced. We find purpose and fulfillment in our lives when we apply our unique strengths to help other people who need our exact help.

I hope the story of Hiroko Nishimura has inspired you as much as it has inspired me. What do you think of her example? Please reply back with other examples of people who have inspired you.

Jimmy

Jimmy Wong

Coach, speaker, and entrepreneur enabling people to thrive in the age of AI. Data science leader with 12 years experience at the LinkedIn company and 27 years in the industry. Visit aijimmy.com