Today I got to experience first hand one of the tough people of that idiom - at a first live TED hour held in Berlin by NPR Berlin, one of my favourite radio stations. (Yes, they're broadcasting in Berlin, and can be listened to on my normal radio in my bathroom.)

It's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson and she was one of the main reasons I went. She was basically the voice of NPR during the Arab Spring, in its Cairo instalment. I remember being amazed at the scenes she described and was obviously part of, and her matter-of-fact reporting, while at the same time not hiding she was not unmoved.

She told us today that she was meant to go on a sort of quiet assignment in Egypt after a tumultuous stint in Afghanistan, where she spent a long time reporting, managing a bureau in Kabul and surviving being shot at. She also showed us the tiny battered recorder she uses, always, about five times smaller than her mike.

Soraya isn't the best free speaker, perhaps. But that made the message of toughness and dedication all the more clear: She's someone who goes where other people don't dare go, and tells us what it's like there, and what people are saying & doing, and what's really going on. Her reporting was always from very good to gripping.

Tough people don't need to look good on TV or when standing at an open mike in a gathering of suits. Their focus is elsewhere.

Thankgod they're around when the thousandfold rest of us need them!