I’ve lost count of the ideas I sat on because I was waiting to feel ready. Waiting for the plan to be tighter. The offer to be perfect. The timing to be right.
That moment never arrives the way you think it will. You just get older, and the idea gets quieter.
Both men in this edition started before they were anywhere near ready. They backed themselves anyway, and worked out the rest on the way.
The two episodes below will make you rethink how ready you actually need to be before you start.
I sat across from Vee. He left a running business in the middle of COVID to start a coffee company everyone told him would fail. Nearly six years on, Cuppa Cartel is still standing.
I asked him what he said when a client rang and asked if he did valet service.
He told me “yeah, of course we do.” They absolutely didn’t. He went to the meeting, found out what she needed, and built the service from there.
Then I sat across from Laki. Former military operator, two deployments to Afghanistan, now co-owner of a company keeping WA’s roads together. Off the tools, he coaches men.
I asked him what he’d learned about love.
He told me that when you’re never fed it on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off a knife. For years he rationed scraps of affection and told himself it was enough.
Here’s what I’m sitting with.
Ready is a feeling that shows up after you start, not before.
Neither of these men had the plan, the perfect offer or the safety net. Vee said yes to a service that didn’t exist yet. Laki walked straight into his own wounds long before he felt ready to. I see it in me too. The things I’m proudest of all started before I felt ready for them.
So the homework I’m giving myself, and you, is small.
Write down the one thing you’ve been waiting to feel ready for. Then work out the smallest version of starting it this week.
Ready will catch up. It always does once you move.
One backed himself with a business that didn’t exist yet. The other backed himself into the hardest work there is, looking at everything he’d buried. Vee first.
EPISODE 137: Vee Gunasegaran
With Vee Gunasegaran, co-founder of Cuppa Cartel, Perth’s premium workplace hospitality company, and sponsor of The Real Biz Life Chronicles
Vee and his wife Heidi arrived in Perth two days before Christmas to launch a medicinal cannabis company. It went sideways and took their money, their car and their home with it. They started Cuppa Cartel from scratch, in lockdown, and turned it into a business that runs offices like business class lounges. The brand, he says, does the hard yards before anyone has even spoken to him.
What you’ll take away:
- Why you don’t need the perfect offer to win the work, he said yes to a valet service he didn’t yet run, went to the meeting, and built it around exactly what the client needed
- What to do when someone successful tells you your brand is wrong, he kept the name “Cartel” against the advice and taught the market what it meant instead of shrinking himself to fit
- The small, unscalable things that keep clients for years, why he still drops a pandan cake every Wednesday and picks up the phone himself every time
EPISODE 138: Laki Mafi
With Laki Mafi, former military operator, co-owner of AU Profiling and men’s coach
Laki did two deployments to Afghanistan, left the military, and worked his way up from operator to co-owner in WA’s roading industry. A divorce cracked him open and made him face the wounds he’d carried since childhood, the ones that taught him to settle for scraps of love and call it enough. Now he coaches men to do the same work, and he’s running a retreat called the Disruption of Man this winter.
What you’ll take away:
- The line about love he still can’t shake, “if you were never fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off a knife,” and what it explains about why we accept scraps of affection and tell ourselves it’s enough
- How a man starved of closeness learns to cope, he could ration a single kiss to last six months, then worked himself into the ground chasing the approval he wasn’t getting at home
- The difference between sharing your pain and spitting your venom, the boundary his wife Leslie drew, and why one brings two people closer while the other slowly poisons everything
