It’s no secret that Gen Z is struggling. They’re unemployed in the millions, feeling anxious about the future, and getting told that their shot at building a career is about to get bleaker thanks to AI. But few understand what it’s like to feel the odds are stacked against you before you even start, quite like Sir Mo Farah.
And the Olympic legend has a no-nonsense message for young people: Don’t let a bad hand stop you from playing the game. Life will knock you down, but your success is your responsibility.
“Even for myself, you would have said as a young boy, ‘he’s not gonna make, you don’t have a chance,’” Farah told Fortune. “I was child trafficked into the U.K. with my own story struggle. But I never gave up on myself.”
The former long-distance runner and four-time Olympic gold medalist was born as Hussein Abdi Kahin in what is now Somaliland. His father was killed in the Civil War when he was four, and he was separated from his family, including a twin brother, soon after. Around the age of nine, he was taken illegally to the U.K. by a woman he’d never met, given fake documents under the name “Mohamed Farah,” and then was forced to cook, clean, and change nappies while working as a family’s domestic servant in west London.
His lifeline came a few years later, when he confided in a PE teacher, and his situation improved—the teacher nurtured Farah’s talent, alerted social services, and helped him gain British citizenship. By the time Farah was 14, he was competing for England, and today he’s Britain’s most successful track athlete in Olympic Games history.
But despite his traumatic start, Farah told Fortune in an exclusive off-stage chat at Web Summit Qatar. “I never saw it as I didn’t have a fair start.” Ultimately, you don’t get to choose the playing field. What matters more, he insists, is how hard you choose to play.
“Give yourself a chance,” he advises young people who are struggling. “Just keep believing yourself, keep trying your best every day, and keep being willing to learn.”
“It’s going to be hard, but if you overcome that, then you can overcome anything.”
Gen Z: control what you can, says Mo Farah
You can’t control the economy. You can’t control the job market. But you can control your effort. And you can control your mindset. That, Farah said, is the powerful differentiator between those who feel stuck and those who keep inching forward. It won’t fix everything at once, but it’s enough to start turning your ship.
“Use my story as going, you know what? This is the only thing that I can control,” Farah added. For him, that looked like showing up to training day in, day out. For workers, that might look like applying for jobs despite already receiving countless rejections. Or reading books and upskilling.
He encouraged Gen Zers to look into even the smallest micro-moments in their life that they can influence—and start there.
“I think a lot of us say, Oh, I can’t do this job. Or I cannot control that. But there’s a lot of stuff we can control. We might not control this amount,” Farah said, while spanning his arms wide. “But you can control this small part.”
“The bit that you can control, try to control it.”
One of the few genuinely controllable aspects of life, Farah pointed out, is your emotional response. How you handle losses and how quickly you get back up after being knocked down often matter more than the setback itself.
“When things don’t go well, how do you deal with emotions? What do you do to overcome them?” he said, adding that when he was young, and a race didn’t go well, it would have been easy to numb the disappointment by “going out with the boys.”
“But that’s just temporary,” he added. You might feel better for a night. What takes more effort, but delivers far bigger rewards, is learning to regulate your emotions, confront your shortcomings, and sit with uncomfortable truths.
Farah said that it’s far more productive to turn the situation that’s making you angry into a lesson.
“What do you really need to do? So the race didn’t go well, what could you fix? It’s about learning, but really try and admit that to yourself. It’s so hard for so many people to actually admit (why they failed)—and that’s courage.”