Yay is a staircase, not an elevator
You’ve built and moulded your village, and they are helping you shed the self-doubt and bypass comparison. You’re ready to set off on your perfectly imperfect way to yay. You may have picked up this book because you’ve already had your light-bulb moment and been struck by your burning passion or idea, or you may have picked it up because you want to start seizing your yay, but don’t yet know what that looks like. My natural tendency is to race to the end to find out what happens and get it all over and done with. I want to find what makes me yay, focus everything on that and live happily ever after. I like to know how things are going to turn out before I get started so I can map everything out and orientate myself in the chronology of my adventure. Unfortunately, that tends not to be how things go in life, nor in your journey to seizing your yay. Fortunately, however, even if things don’t work out how you expect them to, they often work out better.
'You may have picked up this book because you’ve already had your light-bulb moment and been struck by your burning passion or idea, or you may have picked it up because you want to start seizing your yay, but don’t yet know what that looks like.'
Thanks to the incredibly interesting and diverse stories I’ve heard through interviewing guests for my podcast, I’ve learned that people encounter so many diversions and unexpected steps in their journeys to their goals. Those diversions are ultimately what get them to the top of their staircase, even if that staircase isn’t the one they initially set out to climb. We are often introduced to people’s stories after they’ve figured it all out, so it’s harder to imagine them losing direction or momentum along the way. However, many of the people you might view as being an overnight success have instead been many tumultuous years in the making, with countless iterations, detours and stops along the way.
At this point, I’d like to take a minute to distinguish between direction and speed. With the glorification of busy and the constant pressure in our society to achieve and progress, we’re always in a rush to get to the next best thing. And sometimes, we get so distracted with keeping up our pace that we lose sight of our direction altogether. I often think of my past self as a little hamster running furiously on a wheel, clocking up lots of miles but not necessarily getting any closer to anywhere worth going.
‘Busy’ does not necessarily mean productive, nor does it have a direction unless you guide it in one. What’s more important is to find your direction first, and it’s okay if you move towards that slowly, step by step, even if you don’t know what’s going to come next. Seizing your yay is an act of patience and open-mindedness. When I was a lawyer, I remember stressing endlessly about climbing the corporate ladder and smashing through goals without ever stopping to ask myself if I really cared about them. I realise now that my legal career wasn’t the ladder I was supposed to climb, but simply the first of many steps towards the ‘me’ that I have become. It provided a formidable basis for the career I now have, even though it didn’t end up being my forever job.
A way I like to describe my law years is that, without knowing it, I was simply biding my time until the great ‘reveYAYtion’ of 2014. At the time, I didn’t feel like I had any direction, but, with hindsight, I can see what a crucial step those years were: teaching me so many lessons and skills I’d need for what came next. Almost everyone I have interviewed on the podcast (or spoken to in life generally) has been in the position you are in at some point or another and it is a necessary feeling in order to spark the kind of questioning and self-investigation that leads to a fulfilling and yay-driven life. Very few among us know, with conviction, what path we are destined for when we first choose our careers, although rare exceptions do exist. What I want to impress on you here is that the point isn’t just to stumble on your yay one day and then you’re done, ready to live out the rest of your days that way. Yay is a journey, not a destination, filled with many steps and twists along the way that must be experienced and worked through to get you to where you’re meant to be.
I probably knew quite early on that my legal career didn’t light my fire and that it wasn’t something I would likely stay in for the long term. As you’ve learned, I’ve always been equal parts uber nerd and creative dreamer, so while the academically inclined part of my brain thoroughly enjoyed my work as a lawyer, my creative tendencies were getting no love. The problem was, however, that I didn’t necessarily know what alternative would best unite those two parts of me – or if such a job even existed. Consequently, I ended up feeling disheartened and directionless.
The reality is that there are bills to pay and life costs money, so in most cases, we do need to have a job, even if our work doesn’t ignite that fiery passion within us. Looking back now, I can see that I was simply too green and young anyway to have started the business that we ended up starting years later. I wasn’t yet mature enough to be able to make it succeed in the way we have been able to now – I needed time to learn about the world, to grow into myself and to get used to making adult decisions with real-life consequences. Hence, I truly was just biding my time until the circumstances were right to take the next step towards my yay.
You don’t have to see the whole staircase to take the first step
The important thing I take away from that time in my life is that every part of your life is a stepping stone or a step up your staircase to yay, even if it doesn’t necessarily feel that way at the time. If you can learn to reframe every part of your life that way and make the absolute best of that situation while you’re in it, you might find that this helps you to deal with feeling directionless. You may also start to be able to make more sense of where you are.
I attended my first entrepreneurial event when I was still at university (see, I was taking a small step many years before I knew about the business staircase I’d end up climbing). My friend Samantha Gash was a guest speaker at the very first League of Extraordinary Women event, so I went along to support her. Even though I hadn’t even started full-time work I had a vague inkling that I might want to go into business one day. I figured I’d continue attending these kinds of events to keep my mind as open as possible. I enjoyed the event so much that I went to the next one a few months later.
The speaker was Kate Morris of Adore Beauty (another hugely successful business started in a humble garage). I remember it as clear as day: it was a breakfast event and I was so impressed and inspired by Kate that I rushed up to be the first in the queue after she spoke (such a keen bean) and told her how I hadn’t even graduated yet but wasn’t sure I was going into a career I’d want to end up in. I never dreamed that I would get to speak alongside her years later and laugh about the roller-coaster life of an entrepreneur. Nor did I understand that the many years of attending these events before I knew why I was doing it was, in fact, laying wonderful groundwork for what would come next.
As I now like to remind myself, baby steps still move you forward. These baby steps moved Adore Beauty forward, too – many times without Kate realising where they would lead. Though her way to yay involves less discrete stepping stones between jobs or whole careers than others, there have still been many times within her business where the next step wasn’t immediately clear. She’s been in business for over 20 years, and has an absolute wealth of knowledge.
To give you some background, Adore Beauty’s story starts in a way that Kate describes as ‘pretty lo-fi’; like pretty much every other story we’ve covered so far, which should be infinitely reassuring. She got her start in beauty working a part-time job on the Clarins counter in a department store, and she founded her business at the age of twenty-one. While working at that Clarins counter, she’d noticed that women didn’t seem enthralled with the department store shopping experience. She thought that online shopping could be a much more empowering way of shopping. So, despite there being no online beauty sites at the time, Kate borrowed A$12,000 from then-boyfriend now-partner’s parents to create the website and buy some stock. As foreign as it may sound now, there were many times when Kate would have to crawl under her desk to unplug the telephone so she could use the internet – and yet she managed to build the first beauty e-commerce site Australia had seen.
There was an endless slew of rejections and many sceptics when she first started but Adore Beauty has continued to thrive over its 20 years in business while many others have bowed out – struggling to adapt to ever-changing times. That original garage office has been replaced by a warehouse and office with about 150 staff, and 2 million customers visit the website every month (including me). The figures have been extraordinary, seeing a six-fold expansion over the past four years, and at the time of writing this is forecasted to rise to over A$100 million in 2020. Even more impressive given the alarming rate of change in the beauty industry over the past 20 days, let alone the past 20 years.
Given this astronomical expansion, you can see how hard it would have been for Kate to know what the next stepping stone in her journey might be. She relies on her superpowers of brushing off rejection and getting stuff done to consistently push ahead. Adore Beauty has recently announced its expansion in Australia and overseas with an investment from private equity firm Quadrant, so I can only imagine what else the future holds. I’m sure Kate never imagined this might lie somewhere along her staircase.
In my case, since I fully appreciated that I had no idea what I would do if I wasn’t a lawyer, I decided the best way to pass the time working at the law firm was to simply learn absolutely everything I could from the situation I was in. I signed up for every possible extracurricular activity and event, including Chinese language classes and corporate triathlons (very watered-down versions of real triathlons, mind you). I did this to interact with as many different people as I could, and to really find out what I enjoyed and what I didn’t. I arranged coffee catch-ups with former uni friends or colleagues who were doing different things with their law degree – pro bono work, going in-house at companies rather than law firms, moving into diplomacy or working at firms overseas – to find out more about their pathways. I also tried to learn as much as I possibly could from the people around me, trusting that at least parts of it would always be useful, even if only to show me that’s not where I wanted to go next.
While I reached out to many connections I already had, I also got a little overzealous and started setting up coffees with clients I’d never actually met – the ones I knew had also started out at law firms. I’d chat to them about potential career pathways and find out how they had ended up where they were. One such client was Neil McCann from ANZ bank. I can’t recall the exact details of the file we’d worked on together, but we had exchanged some emails, so when I asked him to meet me for a coffee to pick his brain, he very graciously agreed. I was asking about this long before I really knew why I was asking, but it turned out to be worth doing. It was Neil who a little while later introduced me to Adam Schwab, who became a wonderful mentor for us in business. Adam is in the start-up world and has not only been an invaluable source of guidance and a friend, he has also connected me with many others who have helped us along the way.
The most important thing I remind myself now is that no situation is ever a waste of time unless you let it become that. Even if you don’t want to stay where you are forever, there is always something you can learn or some way you can grow yourself that will be useful in your next chapter, whatever that may be. It could be acquiring more skills and taking advantage of training resources if you’re working in a big company, or even more broadly, simply investing time in networking and building relationships before you know what you’ll need them for. If you don’t know where you want to end up, it’s going to take you some time to figure that out. But time is going to pass anyway, so you might as well spend it as usefully as you can.
You don’t have to like each step
If you’re in a job or a phase of your life that you find you don’t like, take comfort from the fact that it is a wonderful thing because it shows you where you don’t want to be. There’s always a bright side if you look hard enough at a situation, even if the situation isn’t enjoyable at the time you’re going through it. Finding out that a pathway isn’t for you puts you one step ahead of those people who are still entirely neutral towards their options. You have one more piece of the yay-based puzzle to redirect your next step.
I often say during keynotes or on the podcast that people will be encouraged to make a change in their life when they are actively unhappy or negatively impacted, but rarely will any action be instigated when they’re simply indifferent or feeling ‘blah’ towards a situation. That’s what scares me the most looking back now is that I wasn’t actually actively unhappy with my life as a lawyer at the time. If it weren’t for the happy accident that birthed Matcha Maiden, I would never have been exposed to the ways I could be better ignited and the entire other world of possibilities that were open to me. This is why I am now so passionate about encouraging you to actively investigate your strengths, weaknesses and passions and take control over your pathyay rather than just accepting what feels okay and never knowing how much better it could have been.
'There’s always a bright side if you look hard enough at a situation.'
Having said that, I have many friends who have found the perfect balance in nine-to-five jobs they’re not necessarily passionate about or feel a little ‘blah’ towards, but which allow them to pay for the joyous life they live outside of work and that is their pathyay. Sticking with a situation you don’t love (or don’t feel much about either way) is absolutely fine provided it is a choice you are making in order to find your joy elsewhere, rather than a situation you end up in for lack of considering any other options. Importantly, having a seize the yay philosophy definitely doesn’t mean that you have to find yay within your work, even though I was lucky enough to do so myself. It’s only recently that we’ve adopted the assumption that work always has to be enjoyable and fulfilling but historically it’s called ‘work’ for a reason. Your yay might necessarily exist outside of your work and lie more in your hobbies or voluntary activities, such as in the case of artists or creatives who find their buzz killed when they have to create to a professional brief or strict schedules. I also want to reiterate that leaving my job to start a business was what brought me fulfillment but that won’t necessarily be true for others.
I even have some friends who reversed earlier decisions about starting businesses to step back towards their yay, returning to their former positions of employment after finding that the peripheral parts of running a business distracted them from using their talents and stripped them of their joy. Many of them have, instead, chosen to embrace a more intrapreneurial mindset focusing on creating, innovating and building their business within their employment structure. The important thing is that they tried other things to make that decision consciously rather than ending up there by default. Whether it be within or outside your work, in business or in leisure, yay can come from anywhere so long as you are looking for it to begin with.
An example I love to share of the many forms that seizing your yay can take is the case of a delightful woman I interviewed for the podcast, Michelle Birkett, a senior zookeeper at Adelaide Zoo. Michelle always knew what she wanted to do and now she wakes up to her dream job every day. She reminded me that yay doesn’t have to involve an insatiable ambition to keep climbing the ladder or moving forwards for the sake of it. She has simply jumped off the forward-pushing hamster wheel altogether and no longer succumbs to society’s need for perpetual forward movement. She has found a job that makes her yay every single day, and I was fascinated to hear that she isn’t setting her sights on climbing the ladder within the zoo hierarchy and doesn’t see herself as ambitious in that way. Progressing up the ladder would, in fact, change her role in a way that would detract from why she loves it so much, and it would mean much more administrative and oversight work, taking her away from hands-on time with the animals.
'Your yay might necessarily exist outside of your work and lie more in your hobbies or voluntary activities.'
Instead, her ambition is focused on doing the job she does have as best she can, to give the animals under her care the best life possible and to always keep learning how to do it better. It was quite new for me to encounter someone who didn’t feel pulled to take any other stepping stones and in fact resists those because she knows they would change her role dramatically. I loved finding someone who was absolutely content with where they already were – how delightful to know those people are around. Above all, yay isn’t something that takes one particular form. My ultimate goal is just to encourage you all to find it in some form or another that brings depth and fulfilment to your life rather than just an existence.
Not all steps will make sense at the time
Given that most of us probably haven’t quite reached zookeeper Michelle’s kind of yay (based on you picking up this book), let’s assume you are still dealing with some stepping stones. As well as not needing to be thrilled with each one, I’ve found that they also don’t necessarily have to make immediate sense at the time to be a step in the right direction. The more experimenting you do with different structures and options in your life, the more you will discover about your likes, dislikes and what fulfils you. This will then lead you to your next part of the staircase.
When we let the need for speed and ‘busy’ creep back in, we often feel like these diversions and experiments are a waste of time because we need to do everything as quickly as we possibly can and rush to the end. However, there are so many examples of people who have only really stumbled upon their passions much later in their lives, proving that, sometimes, the preliminary stepping stones are lengthy (and often unrelated to your ultimate yay) but totally worthy passages of time. The visionary Vera Wang didn’t start designing clothes until she was thirty-nine, Clint Eastwood directed his first film at forty-one, and IBM was started by a sixty-one-year-old. Closer to home, an example of late career blooming I absolutely love to share is that of Nic’s former training partner and our dear friend, Jana Pittman.
You may have heard of Jana through her incredible international hurdling career. She fell in love with athletics at the tender age of nine, and is a two-time world champion in the 400-metre hurdles as well as a gold medallist at the 2002 and 2006 Commonwealth Games (and the 4 × 400-metre relay in both). She competed in her first Olympic Games in Sydney at just seventeen years old and was the favourite for her event when the 2004 Athens Olympics came around, but torn cartilage in her right knee meant she couldn’t compete. And a week before the 2012 London Olympics, she underwent surgery and still finished up by placing fifth in the final.
At that point, Jana changed sports completely, and ended up competing in the two-woman bobsleigh event at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, making her the first Australian female athlete to compete in both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games. It would be easy to assume Jana’s many athletic achievements comprise her whole way to yay, but what comes next is my favourite part. Jana considers her sporting career to be the warm-up for the new, and entirely unrelated, career chapter she has recently embarked on. While training for the Sochi Winter Olympics in 2013, Jana began a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS), which she has since completed.
Following many years of blood, sweat and tears studying, raising her three beautiful children, competing, speaking all over the country, writing her book Just Another Hurdle and everything in between, Jana has officially become a doctor, hoping to move into obstetrics and gynaecology. Fertility is a cause close to Jana’s heart with two of her three children being conceived through IVF. She is such a fabulous example of how drastic your diversions along the way to yay can be – as big as an entire international athletics career that most would consider more than enough for one lifetime. Just because you’re on a different pathway to the one you end up on, it doesn’t mean you’re lost and it doesn’t mean you can’t find a new one along the way.
As we touched on earlier, so many people we have spoken about also have huge phases of their life before or in the middle of the journey we now know is their pathyay. Lisa Messenger had been running other businesses for 11 years before she started the Collective Hub empire with all its various offshoots. Other examples include Hugh Jackman, who was a PE teacher at Uppingham School and a party clown before his stellar acting and stage career. Jeff Bezos, best known as the founder, CEO and president of the ever-growing Amazon, had a lucrative career in computer science on Wall Street until he founded Amazon at thirty-one years old. And Sara Blakely, the billionaire founder of revolutionary underwear brand, Spanx, was a door-to-door office supplies saleswoman for seven years in her twenties before launching her business in 2000.
There are many more fun examples of diversionary stepping stones on the way to yay, and some of the best are the phases that ended when people got fired. Kate Morris was fired from two of her earlier jobs at a national retailer and from an independent pharmacist, and then there’s the great Oprah Winfrey, who was fired when she was an evening news reporter (who fires Oprah?!).
Another way your yay might surprise you is by manifesting in a different form than you expected. As you know, mine came after a stint in Hong Kong, but I had, in fact, decided to stop trying to find my purpose at that time. I’d decided to just enjoy the beautiful experience of living in a different country, entirely unburdened by the obligations and responsibilities back home. Side note: if you get the chance to do an expat stint, do it! I can’t recommend it enough.
Another great friend of ours, Michael Ramsey, started out in marketing for the oil and gas industry. He also had a boating technology start-up on the side that he launched with his dad. Michael ended up seizing his yay in a completely different industry after getting his personal training qualifications on the side, which ultimately led him to build an incredible health and fitness empire. It started with six award-winning F45 studios that really put that workout style on the map in Melbourne. After he sold them, he continued on the fitness path with Journey Retreats, a wonderful health and wellness retreat business that allows him to collaborate with some of the biggest names in the industry to create week-long meaningful escapes. He’s also launched Strong, the first rowformer studio in Australia. He credits his success to the marketing and community-building skills that he developed in his formative energy career.
The three-year itch
Even if you are more certain of your way to yay and have already made a big leap towards it, yay is not so much a destination as it is an ever-unfolding journey. If I had reached my ultimate destination by starting Matcha Maiden, I would have been committing to stay statically in that role from that point onwards, without ever evolving again.
Instead, this was another step taken on the staircase without knowing of the many steps that were still to come – in directions I wouldn’t have dreamed of until much later (one of those being the drastic move of opening Matcha Mylkbar). Even though the first few years of being on the matcha mission with both businesses felt fiercely passionate and full of direction, around the three- to four-year mark I found myself feeling a little lost and unsure of my direction once again.
For a little while, I fell back into the speed trap of just ticking off seemingly productive goals to appease that feeling. Nic and I went down a year-long path of business growth for the sake of growth. We prepared to open more venues and release more products without really assessing if that was the right direction for us. In fact, we have since scaled back on most of what we spent that year doing. We realised that we should have slowed down and reflected more deeply on why we were feeling unsure of our direction and the best way to address what came up. I have since been told this is a very common experience around the three- to four-year mark of a start-up.
Around that three-year mark, the crazy, head-down-bums-up phase of growth starts to stabilise. You officially become a ‘started-up’ business. This is the point when you can finally come up for air and start to think less reactively and more proactively about what might come next. As we were approaching the cusp of this new chapter, I remember feeling all the uncertainty and doubt of the beginning flood back in, and I was desperately seeking some guidance or quick answers from a more ‘adultier’ adult than me.
Around this time, we were very lucky to be part of the inaugural Chobani Food Incubator program which gave us six months of hands-on guidance and intimate access to the expertise of the executive team and resources of the booming yoghurt business to help us scale up. While this allowed us some fast-tracked learning and upskilling, for which I’m forever grateful, the pressure of what we ‘should’ do next started to creep back in.
After the program, Nic and I decided to follow in Chobani’s footsteps by aggressively scaling and expanding. We spent the next year or so focusing purely on growth and volume with a view to ultimately blowing things up massively and having our products stocked in the major retailers. But, ultimately, bigger was not better for us, and the nagging inkling that this wasn’t our next stepping stone continued to strengthen. It turned out that what I’d been feeling was a sense of distance between me and our ultimate customer, and that was worsening as our company was getting bigger.
The more both businesses grew, but particularly Matcha Maiden, the less involved I was in the day-to-day operations and direct interactions with people. I started to play more of an overseeing and coordinating role to make sure all the pieces were fitting together. I’d handed over direct customer service, community building and digital marketing to Ang, and given Mum the responsibility of managing all of our wholesale portfolio and supplier relationships. At the time, delegating more to make more space for working on the business and not always in it had felt like a relief. But I hadn’t realised that the shift was taking me further away from the parts of the business that I enjoy most.
The oversight function I moved into is still hugely challenging, stimulating and necessary for the business to grow, and I had come nowhere near to mastering it, but it isn’t the area of our work that indulges or harnesses my passion for people or love of building relationships. However, it didn’t make sense for me to do anything else at that stage of our growth. A mentor once told me that you should focus on the tasks that only you can do and delegate the rest. It was by reflecting on ways that I could introduce more of that close interaction back into the mix in other ways (back to the journalling and mind-mapping) that the idea to start a podcast was born. And so, before I knew it, I was approaching the next step on the staircase that I hadn’t seen coming. This reminded me that the uncomfortable sense of losing direction is perhaps the best alert you can get to start evaluating how you might pivot next.
For me, I think there can be a lot of guilt wrapped up in moving on from something that is already pretty wonderful and working relatively well. I’m always conscious of being grateful and actively appreciating how lucky we are to live in a world with endless choices and opportunities, which isn’t a bad thing at all if it stops there. I think along with self-doubt, though, a bit of gratitude-induced guilt held me back from leaving the law firm sooner. More recently, guilt prevented me from doing any kind of work outside of the matcha mission with Matcha Maiden and Matcha Mylkbar. But, as we will come to in the next chapter, just as you grow and evolve so should the things you invest yourself in. Your first big step towards your yay will always feel a bit like your baby. But you don’t have to feel bad for approaching a new chapter when you’ve developed and transformed to the extent that you’ve outgrown where you are. Being aware that this might happen and staying open-minded to the next possible steps is what makes room for new opportunities to fall in your lap.
'The uncomfortable sense of losing direction is perhaps the best alert you can get to start evaluating how you might pivot next.'
You can see from my story alone, the pivotal discussion points of which only really cover a five-year period so far, that the staircase cannot be bypassed to simply end up at the top from the beginning. I would never have been able to jump straight into recording Seize the Yay when I finished university, nor would anyone have listened to me having had no life experience to base anything on at that point. I now feel more aligned and directed than ever thanks to the balance of different things I’m able to work on. And I’m still learning about my purpose and passion in the process. Your staircase is ever unfolding. It’s malleable and will bend to your will if you let go of needing to see all of it at once.
I’m completely open-minded and appreciative of the fact that what I need and what needs me is likely to change many times in the coming years and throughout my life. That’s the beauty of the dynamic life we are so lucky to live today. I’ve gone from having a five-year plan to barely having a five-minute plan. As Rachel Kelly, one of our mentors, so perfectly expressed, ‘Every next level of your life demands a different you.’ It’s just about staying patient and open-minded while you figure out what those levels and versions of you are.