If life seems to be a series of difficult episodes, gracefully acknowledge each setback and always get ready to pick yourself back up and work through your problem. Once you truly understand the problem and accept it - then life is no longer difficult. Nombeko Mpako not only teaches art, but also survival techniques based on personal life experiences, and surmounting formidable challenges. If you surmount a challenge or difficult situation, you're not just getting over it. You're outdoing yourself, exceeding expectations, and overcoming the task at hand. From early life as a sickly young girl of eight, through to her mid-teens, and missing out on several years of schooling, to picking herself up and then having a near death experience as an adult, none of these things stopped Nombeko from achieving academic goals; first as an artist and then as a teaching professor. An added impulse was to use the creation process of artworks as a therapeutic endeavour. Nombeko felt a need to not only tell her life story as life's lessons to others, but also to reflect on her life circumstances as a form of self-acceptance, embracing every aspect of her life, good and bad.