“There’s no making it,” says Nicola Coughlan. “You just have to keep going and can’t rest on your laurels.” It was at 19, Coughlan tells TIME in our most recent cover story, that she decided to pursue a career in acting. It has taken her nearly two decades to reach her current peak, delivering for Netflix the sixth most watched season of television in the streamer’s history with the most recent installment of Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton. Coughlan’s persistence and her refusal to accept the status quo represents the spirit of Next Generation Leaders, the series we launched 10 years ago in partnership with Rolex.
Coughlan and the newest 10 other Next Generation Leaders show that leading the future can often mean working to protect and preserve the past. Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke is protecting the rights of the Māori people in New Zealand (“We’re doing everything to revive our culture knowing that it could be extinct”). In the Philippines, Ann and Billie Dumaliang are fighting for land that is home not only to people, but also to hundreds of kinds of animals and plants. And Lenin Tamayo is preserving Quechua and Andean culture. Other leaders are building something new—sometimes literally, as with Maggie Grout, whose organization Thinking Huts is using 3D printing to create schools faster and with less waste generated than with traditional construction, and architect Arine Aprahamian, who is reimagining what kinds of problems her field can help solve.
It’s thrilling to look back at the individuals who have joined Next Generation Leaders across the past decade. Those recognized have come from Afghanistan, Brazil, China, India, Japan, Uganda, and everywhere in between. Each list has been the product of surveying our reporters, editors, and partners around the world to determine who is leading in the sectors that will define the future, with an emphasis on business, climate, sports, the arts, and advocacy.
And the future has indeed been theirs. Before Dua Lipa was on the cover for TIME100, she was a Next Generation Leader. Likewise climate activist Greta Thunberg, the 2019 Person of the Year. Kylian Mbappé and Simone Biles were NGL cover subjects en route to global super-stardom. In El Salvador, Nayib Bukele joined Next Generation Leaders as a young mayor; today he’s one of the world’s most closely watched politicians, recently profiled in a TIME cover story.
The list goes on, and so many seem to have embraced Coughlan’s insight: the achievements may be many for this group, but there’s no resting on their laurels.