Hoda Kotb has reached the upper echelons of morning TV as a co-anchor of TODAY, but her career hasn’t always been a smooth ride to the top.
In 1992, Hoda was an anchor for the CBS affiliate WWL in New Orleans. She stayed there until 1998 when she left to become a correspondent for "Dateline" in New York City.
"Sometimes you are top of your game and sometimes you're behind," she told Jenna Bush Hager on TODAY with Hoda & Jenna on Tuesday. "And I do remember when I first came to NBC, and I started working for 'Dateline,' everyone was a brilliant writer — everyone."
"When I lived in New Orleans, people used to bring their scripts to me and say, 'Can you check this? Is it OK?' And I would say, 'Well, yeah, you could work on that. You could work on that.' Well, I show up at 'Dateline' and suddenly I'm in first grade and everybody else is a senior in high school," Hoda continued. "They're like, 'No. That's not very good.'"
"And I realized that when I thought I was top of my game, I had a whole new thing to learn," she added.
Hoda said the experience made her second-guess herself. She noted that her New York colleagues also didn't find the speeches that she gave in New Orleans as funny as she thought.
"I was like, 'Oh my God, am I not funny?" she said.
But after some contemplation, Hoda learned that she was just entering a new part of her life and had to adjust to the scene.
"You realize there are more things you have to overcome and learn about where you are," Hoda said. "And I just think it's like life's a learning process. Some days, it's the first day of school. Some days, you're the senior about to get your diploma and you just got to roll with it."
Jenna agreed. "You could have said, 'OK, well, I guess I can't do this. I'm not as good as these people' — and just crawled under your desk and gone home," she said. "But you did it! Hoda, look where you are."
The pair started talking about Hoda's challenges in her career while discussing figure skater Nathan Chen's flawless performance at the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.
Chen set the world record in the men’s short program when he received a score of 113.97 points. The record was previously held by Japan's Yuzuru Hanyu, who scored 111.82 points.