LEBANESE WOMEN DID IT AGAIN! MAYA KANAAN AWARDED BY PARIS’ SALON DU CHOCOLAT
In a nation where bad news is the rule and good news is the exception, one cannot help but start noticing a very interesting pattern.
While most (not to generalize) Bad News seem to be emanating from men (i.e. Minister vs Public Worker – The Smackdown), a growing number of Good News are coming from inspirational Lebanese Women.
In fact, we witnessed just recently 3 Lebanese Women make it to BBC’s top 100 list , Ms. Andraos as dean of Columbia University school of Architecture, and of course Ms. Alamuddin over shadowing George Clooney’s fame with her 5 Star LinkedIn CV.
Today, a new similar success story is making its way to the “grand public”; Maya Maalouf Kanaan, Lebanese chocolatier, has just been honored with the “L’espoir Etranger” award by the infamous Paris’ Salon du Chocolat.
Maya, San Francisco MBA graduate and former Marketing Teacher at the Lebanese American University, is the only Lebanese to have ever been awarded at this big annual event , and her boutique “M de Noir” is already on the columns of international and local newspapers such as Le Figaro and L’Orient Le Jour.
In her first interview after the awards ceremony, Maya spoke to Blog of the Boss about this big achievement:
When I decided to drop everything and work in chocolate, many people could not understand it. They couldn’t grasp someone leaving almost 2 decades of a career in Marketing, a well-seen position as a university instructor in a prominent university, to wear an apron and smudge my hands with chocolate all day everyday.
Today, I am doing what I love and I am lucky to have been praised for it. My 2 cents from my experience:
If you work very hard, and at the end of the day you are exhausted, you can’t feel your legs or neck or arms… but you are happy and complete; then you are in the right job. Even if following your dreams means more sacrifices on different levels, do it, because life is too short to waste on what we are supposed to do, or what we are used to do, or what others expect us to do, and not what we actually LOVE to do.
Always remember that there is no right age to follow one’s dream. I was 38 when I pursued my calling. For many, I was too old to start a new life, a new career. It is never too late no matter how old you are. As long as you have the energy and the will, whether you are 40 or 60 or 80, just go for it.
Finally a special word to women. The praise that I heard at the Salon du Chocolat in Paris and that was really dear to my heart, was that I was a Lebanese woman breaking through in a men’s world. Do not be scared to play on men’s turf, when women do excel, they beat men by far.
Thumbs up from Blog of the Boss to Maya and a call for action to our Lebanese society.
If this pattern proves to be correct and women are indeed the tank of oxygen that our country is surviving on, shouldn’t we all provide them with a fair system that can rank better than 8th worse in the world in terms of Gender Equality?
To congratulate Maya or for more details about “M De Noir”, click here to visit their Facebook page.