Hoda Kotb has been a fixture on network television for decades, but the Today anchor, who announced Thursday that she would leave the news anchor post early next year, almost never made it on the air.

During an appearance on SiriusXM’s Today show in 2016, Kotb said that as a recent college graduate, she thought she only needed one interview to land her first television job.

“I said, ‘Mom, can I borrow the car? I have to drive to Richmond, pick up the job and come back,'” she said. “I put on a new green suit. My hair was all blow-dried. I was ready. I had my resume with me and drove to the station.”

When Kotb walked into the station, she immediately felt at home. She looked around the station and “planned my whole life” in Richmond, sure she would get the job.

“The news director took my tape, put it in the machine, played it for a few minutes and then stopped it,” she said. “He said, ‘Oh, Hoda, you’re not ready for Richmond. I don’t know why anyone sent you here. You’re too inexperienced. You’re not good.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, I didn’t think of that.'”

As she was leaving, the news director told her that a friend of his was hiring for a position in Roanoke, Virginia, three hours away, but that she had to be there that same day before he left on a trip.

Kotb drove off and met with the other news director, but he didn’t watch her tape for more than “30 seconds” before pulling it out and telling her she wasn’t ready to go on the air yet.

“I thought to myself, ‘Who isn’t ready for Roanoke? Anyone should be able to get a job here!'” Kotb said.

But before sending her away, her interviewer said he knew a station in Memphis that was hiring and suggested she take her tape there.

“I drove all night through Tennessee,” she said. “The guy picked me up, he took the tape, put it in and said, ‘You are so not ready for Memphis.'”

The trip, which Kotb thought would only take an afternoon, soon dragged on forever.

“I drove around in that car for 10 days,” she said. “I was turned away everywhere. I was turned away everywhere in the Southeast.”

After a week and a half, Kotb said, her mother needed the car back. But on the way home, she got lost in Mississippi and passed a sign for a CBS station.

“I said, ‘I’m going to go there and get rejected,'” she said.

But the station’s news director looked at her entire tape and hired her on the spot, she said.

The job was her first door opener and the start of a career that took her to Florida, Illinois and finally New Orleans before she joined Dateline NBC in 1998. In 2007, she was hired by Today.

“You only need one person to love you,” she said. “You don’t need everyone. Sometimes you think you need every single person to think you’re good. That’s not the case. You need one person.”

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