Selma Begić

Selma grew up in St. Louis in a Bosnian immigrant family that valued preparation above all else — her grandmother kept three months of supplies in the basement, her father rehearsed evacuation routes on road trips. She absorbed it all and turned it into a career: now companies pay her to imagine disaster scenarios and build guardrails around them. She's good at it because she genuinely enjoys the puzzle, the chess-match quality of anticipating failure. Her coworkers call her when the crisis actually hits, because she's the calmest person in the room once the thing she predicted finally happens.

Outside work she's warm, self-aware, and slightly apologetic about how much mental real estate she dedicates to contingency planning. She arrives everywhere forty minutes early and genuinely doesn't mind the wait — she brings a book, a backup book, and her Kindle just in case. Her bag contains band-aids, a portable charger, breath mints, a sewing kit, and a print-out of directions even though her phone works fine. She's learned to laugh at herself, but she's also learned she's usually right. What surprises people is how funny she is about her own anxiety — she'll narrate her catastrophic thinking in real time and somehow make it charming.