Hand-in-hand with self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy comes our troublesome old mate, perfectionism. Perfectionism is the definitional opposite of ripping off the bandaid or underthinking, and it stops as many ideas from getting off the ground as the dreaded impostor syndrome.
Having power posed and journalled myself to the point of believing Matcha Maiden was, in fact, a pretty solid idea that could surpass my initial expectations of failure, the next big hurdle I faced was the painstaking process of perfecting the idea for a potential launch. On the A-type to yay-type spectrum, this was well and truly early days for me, and my frantic colour-coding, Post-it-noting, to-do list making and excel spreadsheeting began.
At this point, the stark differences between Nic’s work habits and mine (nay, our whole personalities) came into clearer focus than ever before. Nic was naturally inclined towards spontaneity and Emma Isaac’s ‘winging it’ model of getting shit done. In contrast, my legally trained, bullet point-loving side was still dominating my psyche, and becoming increasingly honed with each year I spent in a corporate legal office. While these detail-oriented traits of mine were wonderful for the initial set-up of our business, as we sorted out a corporate structure, trademarked the business name and dealt with other administrative stuff, it proved seriously obstructive to anything beyond that (except perhaps at tax time).
While attention to detail is no doubt an excellent quality to have (and one I’m still grateful to my legal training for), obsession with detail is particularly unhelpful in the dynamic and fast-paced world of start-ups. Left to my own devices, I would have spent months, if not years, tackling branding details such as consistent font sizing and checking we were using a long dash rather than a short one uniformly across all materials. I would have agonised over things that, ultimately, as it turns out, didn’t matter at all or ended up changing very quickly after the launch and I don’t think we ever would have launched at all. I’m forever grateful to Nic for his mind-opening influence on me and his insistence on my now treasured motto, that ‘done is better than perfect’.
'Obsession with detail is particularly unhelpful in the dynamic and fast-paced world of start-ups.'
With Nic’s gentle but persistent encouragement, I eventually started to relax into the idea that a 75 per cent finished product that we could launch had far more chance of success than a product we took so long perfecting that we never launched at all. Of course, particularly in the case of consumable goods like matcha powder, there are bare minimum food safety and nutritional labelling guidelines that do have to be 100 per cent right (for good reason), so I’m not encouraging you to scrap your planning or refining. What I am encouraging you to do is remember that all you really need to launch is a minimum viable product or service. There are two main reasons I always come back to for moving on something before it’s perfect:
1. Our fast-paced world imposes time pressures on many ideas or life changes. Sit on something for too long waiting for the ‘perfect moment’, and you might miss the moment altogether. How awful would it be to have a wonderful idea for ages and then see someone else execute it first?
2. Even if you do continue to refine over and over until you genuinely believe you’ve moulded it into the perfect product or idea, what you think is perfect might not be what your target audience thinks is perfect, or what works perfectly in practice, meaning you’re likely to have to make changes anyway.
So, apart from the legals and regulatory non-negotiables, Nic’s method won and we got our business to market in three short weeks from that first humble serviette scribble to a fully operational online store. For us, ‘done’ was far less sophisticated than you would ever imagine – many new beginnings are, despite what the polished, end-product might have you to believe. With our makeshift production line and homemade website, we ran a very ad-hoc DIY operation to begin with, just enough to get the business off the ground. We did what we could with what we had between us, and barely spent more than the cash we’d outlaid for the matcha to get us to that minimum viable product.
I always come back to our very early days and think about how well that very basic, initial set-up served us to remind me that, in most cases, you really can get started on a business, project or dream with much less fuss, cash and overthinking than you might expect. Again, the glorification of busy can creep in here, leading you to plan forever and feel productive instead of actually starting. Over the past few years, these reflections have led me to add a second prong to the done-is-better-than-perfect motto. It may sound a little contradictory and even anti-yay at face value, but I’ve found this enormously helpful through our journey. Allow me to introduce you to my ‘Dream big, plan small’ approach. Dream big enough to excite you to start, but small enough so you actually can.
Dream big, plan small
Dreaming big is all the rage, for good reason. Another saying I love in the ‘dream big’ vein is that unless your dreams scare you a little bit, you’re probably not aiming high enough. What this doesn’t address, though, is that those dreams might be so big that they scare you off starting at all. So while I am absolutely a huge fan of dreaming big and thinking as far beyond your current reality and limits as you can when it comes to conceiving of your idea, I also believe it’s important to scale that back to smaller, more realistic steps when implementing it. I’ve come to realise that all things in life are just a mind game, and if you can master your mind, your external circumstances matter less and less – the big trick is knowing how and when to direct your thinking one way or the other. So, when I’m dreaming I make a concerted effort to think/talk things up as much as I can, but when I’m doing, I talk them all the way back down.
The problem with thinking on a macro level is overwhelm – the enormity of bringing everything to life at once and as a whole. By breaking things down to much smaller increments and tackling them one at a time, things become much less intimidating and infinitely more achievable. When we started Matcha Maiden we didn’t try to create the business it is today all in one go; we never would have started or succeeded if we’d tried to. Instead, the main goal we set was simply to sell one single bag of matcha powder to a stranger who wasn’t already in our network.
Framing things that way stopped us wasting too much time worrying about things that weren’t yet relevant and might never have become relevant. Our small goal made it seem manageable enough to achieve. We had certainly dreamed that the idea could then take off and grow (not to where it has, but certainly further than one bag) but planned small and focused only on the immediate next step necessary to put things into motion. After all, the reality of life is that you can physically only be in one place taking one step at a time anyway (even if there is a bit of multi-tasking within that step), so why look too much further ahead and get caught up in its magnitude?
A few years later, I came back to this dream big, plan small approach when starting the Seize the Yay podcast. Though the podcast started in late 2018, I actually had registered the business name early in 2017 (see, my legal background still comes in handy). Similar to Matcha Maiden, it simply struck me one day that this phrase was the perfect way to describe my newly developed philosophy on life. Even though I wasn’t sure what format it would take, I went ahead and registered the name anyway.
By late 2018, I had developed huge dreams for my new Seize the Yay brand. I envisioned it being an overarching yay-making community with lots of different offshoots to help people shape an exciting, fulfilling life. This community would include things like an event series, an online channel and merchandise – I still hope it will. However, if I’d set out to build something that complex and broad straight off the bat, I would have been too overwhelmed by the enormity of getting it off the ground, especially with running our other two businesses.
Instead, I chose to start with a narrower, far less intimidating focus. Launching a podcast was more finite and approachable than the all-encompassing brand. Even then, though, if I’d thought of it becoming the podcast it is today, with millions of downloads and a line-up of guests I’m in awe of, I probably wouldn’t have started. Like we’d done with Matcha Maiden, I focused only on the next, immediate step. The first was figuring out how to record, edit and publish a single, audible episode to my initial listener(s). The rest was future Sarah’s problem.
I came back to my trusty ‘done is better than perfect’ approach to begin and opted for an act of commitment (like that initial purchase of matcha powder) that would force me into making it happen. Within two weeks of having the idea to start the podcast, I enlisted Nic’s help with the technical research and we bought the recording equipment and software that I still use over a year later. To give myself a hard deadline, I also approached the first guest I wanted to interview, Shark Tank investor and Survivor contestant Janine Allis, founder of Boost Juice and parent company, Retail Zoo. We were scheduled to speak at the same conference in Fiji a few weeks later so if we were going to record over there, I had to get myself into gear very quickly.
In the end, I didn’t end up recording with Janine until much later, and Rachael Finch became my first interviewee, but having that deadline had forced me to figure out where the bloody hell podcasts live and how to make one. Again, I’d jumped in headfirst to a new venture, with no knowledge or experience of podcasts or audio editing and production. But, as you now know, Google is one of my dearest friends; it can be the best of mentors in almost any endeavour you could imagine, so gradually, with Google as my ally, I was able to work out how to do one episode without too much trouble, and the rest followed from there. It’s true that I still find myself apologising to people who are qualified in these areas for not doing things the ‘proper way’, but even so I haven’t looked back.
At one point, I did start to worry a little that this ‘planning small’ approach was anti-yay in that it necessitated me to somewhat talk down my dreams, and I reverted to some serious overthinking until I realised I’m not the only one who adopts this philosophy. Cyan Ta’eed, who launched the online creative marketplace Envato with her husband, Collis, from her parents’ garage, has also been a wonderful podcast guest of mine – she has reassured me that she overthinks, too. When I talked to her, she told me how she’d been working as a freelance graphic designer and was dissatisfied with the huge percentage that creative marketplaces were taking from creatives for stock assets sold on those platforms. They started Envato to provide an alternative platform for creatives, and focused on lowering their cut per sale as they grew. Now, Envato sellers take up to 80 per cent of the proceeds from a sale as opposed to the 10 per cent Cyan once made. Since starting Envato, Cyan has started a hand-made chocolate social enterprise called Hey Tiger, and launched the website-building app, Milkshake.
When she talked to me about starting small, Cyan said, ‘What I found works for me over time is to really broadly visualise what [my dream] could look like and what fun it could be … but right now all we’re trying to do is get from here to here.’ Throughout her career, Cyan explains that she has simply followed what she’s been interested in; she’s considered each new venture as an act of making or creating as opposed to starting a business. Importantly, she says that this ‘dream big, plan small’ way of thinking has freed her up a lot, explaining that there are certain ways of thinking that can be intimidating or unhelpful to you when you’re getting started. Nic actually joined Envato as a customer in its very first year, and I’ve never seen him fangirl anybody before this interview.
Don’t be fooled by Envato’s humble beginnings, though – this mentality has clearly worked well for Cyan in growing her businesses to great success. Envato has grown to over 650 employees and earned creatives over USD$900 million since 2006, dramatically changing the landscape in her industry. Cyan personally has become one of Australia’s richest women through the business’ rapid expansion. And her Hey Tiger chocolate is on its own exciting growth trajectory – it’s THE most delicious and innovative chocolate, and it also supports community development projects in West Africa.
Despite this amazing success story, my inner lawyer feels the need to pop a disclaimer in here (even though the following probably doesn’t need to be spelled out): by encouraging you to plan small and focus on each next step as it presents itself, I don’t mean that you should ignore or fail to prepare for any further steps you need to take. I just mean you shouldn’t get so carried away with planning those future steps that they interfere with your focus on the vital step you should be dealing with right now. An age-old adage attributed to many thought leaders, particularly Benjamin Franklin, that absolutely rings true here is, ‘Fail to plan and you plan to fail’. It is, of course, important to have considered all the steps you might need to take and have some idea of what they might look like, even if they are way down the track or unlikely.
Admittedly, Nic and I never had an official business plan, but after the first business hurdles we encountered (like running out of our product immediately), we did start to think at least a few bags of matcha ahead – about what might be needed at the next stage of growth. It was great to briefly consider that we might eventually ship globally or expand into other products one day, even if we didn’t invest time in that kind of research or infrastructure at the expense of simply fulfilling the orders we had and keeping things afloat. We didn’t need to prioritise preparing for those things at the beginning stages, especially given our time and funding for this side hustle was limited to begin with. It all comes back to a minimum viable product and taking the immediate next steps required to bring that to life. This is why you hear so many stories of businesses started for peanuts in parents’ garages. You simply don’t NEED to start at the end!
Conception of a virgin
An example of dreaming big and planning small that I loved discovering is that of Virgin Atlantic, the brainchild of the ultimate entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson. He shared many wonderful stories during our time on Necker Island, and if I thought starting a matcha tea business online was overwhelming, I can’t comprehend the mental gymnastics that would have been required to get a new airline off the ground, not least as an industry outsider. Think about it for more than a few minutes and you can see how easy it would be to crumble at the prospect of buying all the planes, hiring all the staff, getting all the licensing approvals and the million and one other things it takes to transport people across the world safely and efficiently. Even though he was already quite the businessman at the time, this seems impossibly daunting.
I was delighted to learn that the very first expression of Virgin Atlantic was Sir Richard’s spontaneous response to being stuck on the tarmac trying to leave Puerto Rico for the British Virgin Islands. His flight was grounded, and he had already been away from his girlfriend (now-wife), Joan, for weeks, and was absolutely fed up. Right there and then, he decided to charter a private plane. He figured out how much it would cost if the expenses were pooled between other travellers, then popped the resulting sum up on a chalkboard advertising Virgin Atlantic’s first flight. He was not so much dreaming big, planning small as much as not really pre-planning at all!
In one of his many insightful books, Finding My Virginity, Sir Richard says that many experts will tell you that it can take upwards of a year to get a business going, from the initial planning phase and market research to implementation and launch. He then goes on to say that he has always disregarded this rule and advises anyone following it to ‘pull their finger out’. I was very reassured to read that the best ideas don’t always need to be supported by detailed financial projections and extensive business plans (none of ours have involved anything similar). The third chapter of the book is appropriately titled, ‘Building a Business from the Back of a Beer Mat’. In it, he describes how the plan for Virgin Australia started on the back of a beer mat and was fleshed out from there in just a day. This made us feel better about the Matcha Maiden serviette meeting.
Smaller beginnings can make for exceptionally wonderful outcomes because they allow you to just start and grow into things as you go. Aussie success story, Carolyn Creswell, started Carman’s Kitchen by buying a tiny at-home muesli business for just A$1000 from a couple she worked for. She has since grown Carman’s into a multi-million-dollar empire. Melanie Gleeson, founder of one of my favourite health havens, Endota Spa, started the now-national network of heavenly day spas with just one single venue in Mornington, Victoria, using A$5000 on a credit card and the help of her family. Endota Spa now employs close to 1000 people and about 90 per cent of those are women. There are countless people whose businesses have far surpassed their initial plans or ideas for them. By starting small, they’ve given their idea the time and energy needed to flourish.
Slow and steady
The other thing about dreaming big and planning small is that it not only helps you to conceptualise your first steps in terms of confidence, it also helps you logistically grow into your business or idea. I won’t deny that there’s a very fine line between an appropriate level of preparation and winging it, and this can be difficult to discern, but if you overprepare in the early days, striving for the ‘perfect’ set-up, you could sink your idea before it can grow its wings.
If we’d started off ordering the volumes of bags and labels we do now (even though the unit price is much cheaper) and using the packing facility we now use, our initial outlays would have been so big we wouldn’t have had any money for anything else and wouldn’t have gone much further. While it’s been wonderful to be able to access better economies of scale as we’ve gotten bigger, and start to see better pricing and other conveniences appear, there’s such a thing as scaling up too hard, too fast.
Taking things slower when it came to growing our business worked to our advantage in so many ways. Our initial goals were so conservative that we grew into each stage of business as we were ready, and this gave us time to review, consolidate and refine as we went along. We focused simply on what we needed to get done at that specific stage rather than pre-empting what would be perfect down the track. This meant asking ourselves what we needed to fulfil the orders we currently had without worrying too much about what the future of the business might require.
'While it’s been wonderful to be able to access better economies of scale as we’ve gotten bigger, and start to see better pricing and other conveniences appear, there’s such a thing as scaling up too hard, too fast.'
This slow and steady approach also allowed us to discover what our target market wanted. Even if you can afford extensive market research from the outset (which we definitely could not), you can never really predict how your target audience is going to react to your offering, or if they’ll agree with what you perceive to be the ideal.
The concept of perfect has no meaning in a vacuum – only real-life feedback can guide you as to what will work and what won’t. And the only way you can get that dialogue going is by biting the bullet and putting your idea out there for review. This is why the ‘soft launch’ has been increasingly popular; it allows you to test the real mechanisms of your business, but still with the opportunity for some tweaks and refinements before an official launch. And even if it turns out you have ticked most of the boxes early on, our modern society is changing constantly and, in some industries, every single day, so perfect isn’t a static goalpost anyway.
Since that very first bag of matcha we sold, we have changed our bags, labels, logo, colours, website, tagline, packers, etc. – multiple times in some cases. One of the only things that hasn’t changed is our tea farm. But we would never have arrived at the version of the product we’re at now without going through each of those iterations and testing them against the scrutiny and demands of real customers. You can probably see the point I’m trying to make here, but in case your perfectionism is as stubborn as mine was and you need the point hammered home a little more, another beautiful quote that I find useful is this one from American author and motivational speaker, Hilary Hinton ‘Zig’ Ziglar: ‘You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.’
The best part of getting started is that, in so many cases, you’ll soon discover that you were in fact ready and/or great when you started, you just didn’t feel that you were at the time. How many times have you heard an ultimately successful person looking back and saying, ‘I was completely confident it would be exactly this successful’? And so, we come full circle, back to the previous chapter on the perils of self-doubt and how erroneous our self-(under)estimations often turn out to be. Perhaps Zig Ziglar’s quote should be tweaked to, ‘You don’t have to feel great to start …’ By starting, you give yourself the chance to find out whether you were or not and do something about it, rather than never knowing just how great you could be.
We couldn’t go much further into the territory of starting before you’re ready without a nod to this terribly clichéd, but tried and tested approach to the early stages of any new venture. As much as this slogan is bandied around in jest, I have previously and continue to adopt it in all seriousness as a trusted strategy when feeling out of my depth and entering a new environment.
Turns out, much to my relief, many of my peers, role models and friends have also employed this approach on their own way to yay. There are, of course, contexts (such as in a book like this or most of the time in real life) where showing your vulnerability and uncertainty is important and valuable for your audience. In others, however – a job interview or a boardroom pitch – letting vulnerable feelings dominate might do you and your dreams a disservice. Even if, deep down, your inner peanut gallery is drowning in doubts and fears about what you’re embarking on, there’s something to be said for crafting a way of presenting yourself that gives you the confidence to start, and to be taken seriously, and holding onto it for dear life until your reality can catch up.
Of course, I don’t mean that you should go faking your whole résumé and then stumble your way through life figuring out how to live up to it. (Although, full disclosure, I do know of more than one great success story that started that way and I definitely embellished a bit in my uni years.) For me, fake it ’til you make it is more of a gentle tool to combat the inevitable inner doubt while I’m in the ‘total noob’ stage of any activity. It allows me to press on long enough that I can become more competent and thereby confident.
It would be such a terrible shame to be talked out of the opportunity of a lifetime – and talked out of it by your own mind, for that matter – simply because it wasn’t familiar or easily digested. Projecting confidence and affecting a mindset of optimism in the face of unfamiliarity sets up your internal environment to develop those feelings authentically in the long run. There is lots of scientific data on the power of body language and behaviours on your reality (again, I urge you to watch Amy Cuddy’s TED talk). In any case, you’re not pretending to be anyone else so much as helping yourself survive until you can realise who you already were.
A few months after launching Matcha Maiden, we started to see demand for our product from wholesalers and fully stepped into faking it ’til we made it (doesn’t quite have the same ring in past tense). While we were unreservedly voicing our doubts and fears to each other and our loved ones in private, Nic and I presented as the picture of professionalism and confidence whenever we went out to pitch Matcha Maiden to new stockists, distributors or other potential partners.
Pitching is definitely one of those occasions where any internal hesitations or concerns for imperfection need not make an appearance. Thanks to Nic’s agency, one area where we weren’t completely unqualified was our creative infrastructure. Our website was highly sophisticated and immaculate, as were our 300 gsm business cards (if you aren’t familiar, that’s an impressively and unnecessarily thick cardstock). Our suite of marketing materials was perfectly coordinated – ‘suite’ belying the barely-two-person DIY operation we were running between full-time work in the dead of night.
From our prolific and polished social media, we gave the impression of an organised, corporate situation with a seamless, multi-person production line that was pushing drastic volumes and ‘selling out’ regularly as demand ‘overwhelmed’ us. And yet, if you only have two units of stock to begin with (an over-exaggeration but let’s go with it), selling both of those units would be considered a ‘sell-out’, would it not?
Because matcha wasn’t the ubiquitous ingredient it has now become, Nic and I also held a lot of tastings at the start mostly at yoga studios or other wellness hubs to attract new potential customers. I always have a giggle remembering how surprised people who knew of the business were to see me in an apron behind a table running the tastings myself, as if I had much more important ‘CEO’ things to be doing. Little did they know that the staff they probably assumed I was filling in for didn’t exist and couldn’t have been afforded in any case. I was the one running around the market, picking up ingredients, blending them myself and decanting them into jugs from the nearest two-dollar shop. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve trawled thrift shops in cities all over the world to find appropriate jugs for this purpose before dashing to an event to set up a very professional-looking marketing stall with nobody any the wiser. Many loyal customers who have since heard the story of our beginnings have been astounded to line up their timelines and realise just how much of a newborn Matcha Maiden was when they first encountered it – believing it to be a large-scale operation from the beginning.
Behind the scenes, you could see how far we were from being the best candidates for the business we have ended up running today. Nic had a headstart on me as an entrepeneur, having run businesses before, but neither of us had prior experience in the world of manufacturing or importing. We didn’t even know what FMCG stood for (fast-moving consumer goods by the way. You’re welcome!). You could say we didn’t have a clue to share between us, but the ‘winging it’ method we spoke of earlier gave us a crash course in the majority of what we needed to know, while the faking it (mostly) melted away over time.
We never went so far as to outright deceive anyone as to our qualifications, instead, we adopted a more conservative ‘underpromise and overdeliver’ approach when it came to actual operations or commitments. It was that perception of competence that gained the attention of major retailers globally. Before long, we were stocked in retailers across the United States such as Urban Outfitters, and we’d locked in our national distributors in Australia – a relationship that continues today. This gave us the customer trust and momentum we needed to grow the business into the venture that our branding and (hopefully) flawless professional demeanours made it appear it already was.
Similarly, my relatively new Seize the Yay brand has only recently taken on enough of a life of its own to be called a ‘business’. In our captions or emails I still almost always defer to ‘we’, ‘us’ and ‘our’, even though it’s just little old me chugging along at this new side hustle while the matcha missions take up most of our time. Like I said, there’s a fine line between faking it ’til you make it and outright deceiving people. But these small things help instil the confidence I need to bother continuing to the point where I will have a team behind me.
'This gave us the customer trust and momentum we needed to grow the business into the venture that our branding and (hopefully) flawless professional demeanours made it appear it already was.'
Be 100 per cent ready to figure things out
In my corporate lawyer life, this same fake it ’til you make it approach applied too, and I slowly learned that sometimes you just have to put yourself forward for something, even if you don’t necessarily feel 100 per cent ready. Many times when I did this, I probably wouldn’t have ever felt 100 per cent ready anyway.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the books I turned to regularly in the early years of my professional life in law was Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer at Facebook. In her book, Sheryl discusses confidence and applying for corporate promotions using a fascinating Hewlett-Packard internal study. The findings of this struck me quite bluntly; so much so they have stayed with me since then – the study found that women would only apply for advertised jobs if they met 100 per cent of the criteria listed, whereas men would apply if they felt they met 60 per cent of the criteria. Sheryl points out, quite rightly, that this has a huge ripple effect on women’s representation in corporate settings, and says that women need to adopt a mindset shift that takes them from thinking they can’t do something to seeing what they want, and thinking, I’ll learn by doing it.
Leaving gender aside, this lesson is invaluable: sometimes you do have to bite the bullet and learn as you go, lest you lose the opportunity to others who may act first. Nic and I might have only been 60 per cent ready (or less) in a practical sense to start Matcha Maiden and build it to thrive, but if we had waited until we felt closer to 100 per cent, we could have missed the opportunity to be first to market and test that market for real-time feedback to improve. It all comes back to having the confidence to start. Seeing someone else jump in to fill the gap first would have probably discouraged us from starting at all, and we never would have known the magic we were capable of creating. You might only have 60 per cent of the ingredients to start something, but you’re 100 per cent ready to figure everything else out as you go.
We too easily underestimate our own abilities to learn and adapt and forget that many of our skills that seem specific are, in fact, transferable. One of the main areas that holds us back that continues to come up in Seize the Yay podcast conversations is how qualified you feel to be doing what you’re doing. I know in my case, while I have since discovered that my many years of legal training are quite transferable to business, not having any experience or entrepreneurial training initially felt like a huge obstacle. Before launching Matcha Maiden, I even considered doing an MBA to prepare myself, and that would have taken at least a year, if not several, preventing us from taking advantage of the perfect timing we ended up launching into.
'You might only have 60 per cent of the ingredients to start something, but you’re 100 per cent ready to figure everything else out as you go.'
Though I am grateful for the years of schooling I had, I always come back to the many examples that show me that formal study is not a necessary ingredient for success, whether in the area you want to move towards or just a technical qualification in general. There are countless famous examples of college-dropouts-turned-success-stories in industries you might think would require degrees. You might be surprised to hear these include people such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In business at least, and many other industries, there is so much you can learn by doing, especially in a climate where things are changing so rapidly and drastically that even those with current qualifications will soon find them outdated.
And so, you can see how much getting anything done is just a mind game with yourself. Whenever I’m asked about my tips for success, after I remind myself that I am qualified to answer that question, I always come back to having learned how to better direct my mind and trick it out of its destructive tendencies. I cannot even tell you the number of times I’ve faked it ’til I maked it (sounds way better, right?), or how many times I know I’ll continue to do so in the future. Consider this strategy a little security blanket for you to hold onto as you take those first shaky steps out of the nurturing clutches of your comfort zone.