At the very start of the year, someone I am rather fond of asked me one of the best questions I have ever been asked: “choose one word to describe your 2020”. It took me a little while to choose wisely, but in the end, I chose the word: ambitious!
To my regular readers, you won’t be surprised at this response with the marathon (literally and figuratively) race calendar I had already described for the first half of the year: Tokyo, Boston, Everest. Subsequently due to the world crisis, Tokyo has long since been cancelled and Boston and Everest are both postponed... where it will not be possible to run both this year.
No 6-star medal this year, a dream I had excitedly thought was to be a sure thing for 2020. However, in reference to “well, that wasn’t in the plan” and trying to build a life with certainty within it, I find myself yet again wondering what worldly life lessons I meant to be learning... I suppose it has something to do with my tendency to want to make a plan to get ahead of the game (of life) somehow.
Anyways... What I deeply describe as my most “ambitious” task for they year is NOT the three marathons in three months, nor that the last marathon would have started at an altitude with half of the amount of available oxygen as a “normal” marathon after an 8 day/ 60km acclimatization trek in... no, I was not even phased about completing those tasks because for some reason (obviously based on past experiences), they feel like perfectly natural and safe progression patterns.
Although these three races did form part of my initial answer to describing my ambitious year ahead, and with running not actually the most ambitious task in my mind, what warrants the description of ambitious?
Instead, moving on with life in the “normal” sense is! Which is driven mainly by me trying to carve out a successful chocolate consulting business AND launch Seven Summit Snacks. THESE are the two tasks that I find deserving of the word “ambitious”. These are the two tasks that have the most unknowns to me. These are the tasks with the biggest personal risk, causing me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.
Instead, moving on with life in the “normal” sense is! Which is driven mainly by me trying to carve out a successful chocolate consulting business AND launch Seven Summit Snacks. THESE are the two tasks that I find deserving of the word “ambitious”. These are the two tasks that have the most unknowns to me. These are the tasks with the biggest personal risk, causing me to stretch outside of my comfort zone.
Living in the space of uncertainty around where your next pay check is actually coming from is terrifying to many people. Trusting that you have the ability and skills and hustle to put food on your plate and pay your rent when you don’t actually have a physical contract is the epitome of the concept of blind trust in yourself and the universe. Ambition in this sense is of the definition to have “intended to satisfy high aspirations and (is) therefore difficult to achieve”. Okay!! I get it!!
My aspirations are high! They always have been, and when I have achieved what would have been an aspiration, I am naturally looking to what is next, bigger, better. Having the opportunity to try this (chocolate) out for myself, without the safety net of a large corporation, is a leap that not many can make when they have the security of a pension, benefits, regular pay check, etc. But for my own personal values, I knew I would be doing a disservice to myself by taking a corporate job in a location away from my family, or else a job near to my family in an industry I am not passionate about. A heartfelt door closed in my life and several exciting, new ones opened. I have chosen to walk through those doors. I’ve given myself a period of time to make it work, where I will rationally evaluate if I need to jump back on the safety bandwagon or not, but at that point I will know deep down that I tried my best.
So what makes 2020 the year of ambition to me? Queue one of the official unveilings of Seven Summits Snacks!
I, and my two other co-founders, have started a chocolate business!
We are official (only official businesses have websites, apparently), with a national incorporation and everything!
How are we making this happen?
Well, somehow we just are!
We are not starting completely from scratch as many entrepreneurs who we have connected with over the past month are. I have worked in the industry at a global scale for the past 10 years (again, this seems to be more experience than most new start-ups), and Leanna has often been my muse for new product developments. My family as a whole has always had some of the first tastes of the work-in-progress (without context, of course). Our third co-founder is a new business strategist who now gets to put into effect her years of training.
In effect, Leanna came to me with the consumer problem; empathetically I thought this problem was solvable; and from there we have been ideating, prototyping, and testing steadily over the past months. Good product development is rooted in Design Thinking.
We now have a range of products visualized and are currently working out how to make scalable, sale-able product for the summer! We will test your tastebuds and we will also take your monies- as investment cash, and by the end of this year, for product. We endeavour to build a Kickstarter platform in the next little while as we work out our supply chain.
I won’t go into more detail than that right now as future blogs will warrant details and specifics of the how. I will however leave you with our website to peruse which introduces our story and products.
I will closeout though, with a note on grace.
For Christmas, Leanna gave me a hoodie with the word Grace and the following note:
"To the best big sister ever... I love you so much, you have been my saving grace this year. Your strength is courageous..."
I was deeply touched by her note as grace is a value I have long held on a pedestal, aspiring to have embedded within my daily life. An ambition, of sorts. And to be regarded as someone else's saving grace is a great compliment. Since then, and of course as I seem to come to many epiphanies of sorts through podcasts, I listened to a Tony Robbins podcast about the gift of Grace.
“Grace is not something you earn. It’s not a reward, or something you pray or ask for. And it has nothing to do with karma, or your past actions. You don’t deserve grace – it just falls on you.
What’s remarkable about grace is that the more you acknowledge it, the more it appears. Grace can be a guiding force when your intent is pure and your will is strong, but something else pushes you through.”
I had previously recognized that grace is about acknowledgment rather than wanting or earning or deserving, thus resonating with the sentiment. I can honestly say that I am here today because of accepting what has befallen me over the past 15 months. Rather than list all of the negative events I have experienced, where one of these events often causes people to spiral into a depression, I choose to acknowledge where I am today because of these events. I choose to be grateful that I am healthy, happy, and alive. With that, I welcome what challenges are still yet to come, and whichever life lessons I have yet to learn.
In this time of global difficulty, I invite you to invite grace into your life; to be grateful you are where you are when you are, and to be creative and open to the doors that are opening in front of you. If you look, you will see them. Be brave and use this opportunity in front of you.
In this time of global difficulty, I invite you to invite grace into your life; to be grateful you are where you are when you are, and to be creative and open to the doors that are opening in front of you. If you look, you will see them. Be brave and use this opportunity in front of you.
