Eat Shrink And Be Merry

I came across a quote recently that really resonated with me. It went like this:

And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. (Anais Nin)

Powerful. It reminded me of the feelings that Greta and I had experienced when we quit our safe, secure, full-time jobs ten years ago in order to work on our “secret project,” which turned out to be our first book, Looneyspoons. Risking everything, cashing in all of our savings, selling all of our possessions on the front lawn, going for broke (and literally going broke!), enduring the gut-wrenching stress of the unknown–all because we had a dream: to help North Americans eat more healthfully by creating a cookbook like no other. This was a dream we were just destined to chase, a dream that we passionately and enthusiastically believed in. It seemed like nothing could stop us from following that dream. Nothing.

People say to me all the time, “I’d just love to do x,y,z, or to become a _______, or do ________ for a living, but I have no training or education or experience in that area. I’m not qualified to do that. So I just forget about.” When people say this, I feel sad for them, and I respond with one of my own profound quotes:

“Phooey on that!” (Janet Podleski, 2006)

What most people don’t realize is that Greta and I had absolutely no formal culinary training or previous writing or publishing experience. Greta learned to cook with an Easy-Bake oven at age five. I won an essay contest back in 7th grade. Those were our qualifications. We were unknown, first-time authors without a track record, a literary agent or a hope. We knew nothing about self-publishing, but dove in head-first when the opprtunity presented itself to us. Imagine that I, Janet Podleski, domestic disaster and cooking clutz extraordinaire, the girl who takes an hour to make Minute Rice, am now one of the best-selling authors of all-time in Canadian publishing history with a cookbook that has sold over 850,000 copies. It’s true! My sister and I now have three bestselling cookbooks, a food company, and a TV cooking show in the works. Who’da thunk it was possible?

Me. That’s who! My sister and I truly believed in our project and ourselves, and did everything we could to make our book the best it could be. We read books, asked questions, asked for help, and refused to give up–even when our bank account dwindled down to $1.17 and when every single publisher told us we were nuts. It was like the Kevin Costner Field of Dreams movie, when they said, “If you build it, they will come.” (I’m certain we heard voices, too. I hear them all the time, in fact, but I’ll leave that discussion for a psychoanalyst!)

Sure, we had pretty good jobs before we decided to risk everything. I worked in sales and marketing for a computer software company and Greta worked on Parliament Hill as an assistant to the then-Minister of Revenue. We could have just continued plodding on, deciding that our “secret project” should remain secretly tucked away in the deepest corners of our own little, intertwined pea brains. But our brilliant idea would have been eating away at us from the inside, knawing, knawing, knawing, sucking the life out of us like some kind of disgusting parasite. It would have been the death of our spirits if we had quit, or simply said, “You know what, we don’t have the experience. Let’s forget about it.” It would have killed us.

And we would have always wondered, “What if we had…?”