act.

You don’t have to own a company or manage budgets and run a team of people to be a leader. Leadership is within all of us. I think we can all agree on that philosophically—that we can all be leaders—but the problem is that lots of people forget this, choosing for their fallback to be criticism and complaint. In some ways it’s easier to criticize the people “above” us and to complain about the way things are, instead of taking a deep breath and saying, “Okay, this is the situation—what can I do to influence it? How can my great attitude and my ideas and my support play a part in making things better?’

In my mind, the best leaders (whether they have the title or not) are people who consistently show a bias for action and positivity. Instead of stopping their exploration with a negative attitude—“This is too hard,” “I’d never know how to do that,” “I don’t have the time for that,” “I don’t have the answers”—they continue their discovery and instead get fixated on how it might be possible to make improvements and to make them now.

RULE #72: RADICAL ACTION

One of my favorite movies of all time is The Pursuit of Happyness. The main character, Chris Gardner, is played by actor Will Smith. The film is based on Gardner’s life, and his story is the best example of radical action ever. He’s a father who falls on hard times after a failed business venture. His marriage breaks down, and he’s left to fend for himself and his young son. Gardner ends up applying for an internship at a brokerage firm and is one of twenty people to be given the opportunity. The unpaid internship lasts for six months, and they’re told only one person out of the twenty will get a paid role at the end. Even though Gardner is homeless throughout this time, he still gives his all, sometimes sleeping in bathrooms at train stations, sometimes in churches. The story goes on to have a happy ending: Gardner is the last man standing and gets the paid job, eventually going on to create his own firm and become a very wealthy man.

Aerial skier Alisa Camplin also has an incredible story of radical action. Alisa had a goal from a young age to represent her country at the Olympics. She had no idea which sport would get her there, eventually deciding on aerial skiing, even though she’d never actually seen snow at the time she made that decision. Her next goal was to get to the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics. Not being able to secure sponsorship, Alisa had to pay for all of her own training (and aerial skiing is not a cheap sport). Alisa worked a nine-to-five job as a senior executive with IBM, and at night she alternated between delivering pizza and teaching gymnastics to schoolchildren. On the weekends she didn’t stop either—she cleaned houses. “It was a real struggle, but I did it the hard way,” Alisa said. How she actually found time to train is beyond me, but that’s what radical action is: an extraordinary person exhibiting extraordinary efforts to achieve their goal. Remarkably, Alisa’s radical action paid off. She won the gold medal (even though she broke both ankles in a training accident a few weeks before the Olympics). Alisa Camplin has a mind of steel and a focus like no one else I’ve ever met.

My ex-husband and I have my own story of radical action. We got desperate when we first moved to the United States. We had four kids at the time and had just left the comforts of our home country, where we’d worked hard to set ourselves up, living in a comfortable neighborhood with great schools. I ran a successful business and we were growing, and there was no real reason, apart from ambition and opportunity, that we had to move.

We emigrated to Los Angeles, bought a house, filled it with things and pretty promptly ran out of money. Being new to the country and having no credit rating meant that the interest rate on our loan was unreasonably high, and we were probably unreasonably optimistic about how quickly we could scale up, too, which is never a good combo. I’d set aside a budget to move and establish my business in America, and once that was gone, I was staring at a nil bank balance and wondering what to do with this new house and all our things (and the many children living inside of it).

Enter radical action. We needed a solution, and we needed it fast, so we got a photographer in, popped the photos up on Airbnb, and voila, we were on our way to making (some) money. We quickly worked out that we could rent out our four-bedroom house, and whenever we got a booking, we’d go and rent a two-bedroom place.

It was not easy money. Imagine packing up a large family and moving them every time a booking came in—we did it, dammit. Every weekend. We had to. All those dresses, toys, tubes of toothpaste, family photos . . . We turned it into one big adventure and we got it done. Sometimes there would be a few of us in each bed, someone on the couch, and of course there were times when the baby’s cot was set up in the bathroom.

When I look back now, I’m proud of us. The “adventure” was completely disruptive and thankfully short-lived (if you call a year short-lived). Would we ever do it again? Absolutely. This radical action got us through a really tricky time and taught me a lot. It taught me about what I didn’t want and what I didn’t need, and the suffering and effort shaped me in ways that success was never quite able to. If we hadn’t taken these steps, I guess we would have had to move back to Australia with our tails between our legs, which wouldn’t have killed us, but it wasn’t our goal.

During our intense Airbnb survival tactics, an opportunity to rent a much cheaper home came up, and we jumped at it. It was a little more inconvenient—a further commute to the kids’ schools, and the airport and so on—but the point is this: we learned we can do almost anything for the short term, and the radical action of saying yes to this downgrade allowed us to build the home we’re now in.

I have a girlfriend who’s thirty-two and was desperate to get into the property market and buy an apartment. She looked at her situation, consulted a financial planner, did her research, crunched her numbers and worked out that it wasn’t going to happen at her current rate. For like ten years or so. That timeframe was unacceptable to her, so instead of resigning herself to accept it, she moved into radical action. She gave up the room in the apartment she was renting at $370 per week and moved back in with her parents. She cut up two credit cards and sold her car. She sold clothes on eBay. She stopped buying cocktails, opting for house wine instead, and she got more conscious of her spending. She spoke with her employer and came up with a plan to give them more output (designing a profitable product that they didn’t yet offer), and asked for a pay raise if the product worked out. An agreement was struck that if she could get this product to market and make it a success, her employer would give her the pay raise she was asking for. After eight months, she’s now sitting on a deposit of $60,000, has secured finance and is currently scouring the market for a place she can call her own.

I recently heard a very similar story from one of our young members, a twenty-six-year-old woman, named Eloise Abraham who wrote, “Christmas 2018 I received Winging It, devoured it in two days and signed up to become a Business Chicks member immediately. I took every sentence to heart and put it into practice, elevating myself in my 9–5 job and taking up a side hustle. I went to 9 to Thrive Summit (the Business Chicks one-day conference), and the fire inside of me further ignited me to smash all my goals. This weekend, after seven months of hard work, I put the sold sticker on my dream property in my dream suburb.”

Most people don’t really want to take radical action. It can be utterly exhausting. It takes effort. It takes persistence and willpower and smarts and sacrifice. It means having hard conversations, and it means going up against people who won’t always understand your drive. But it works, and with a good reframe (“This is exhilarating!” “I’m getting there!” “I’m actually doing this!”) it starts to become really, really fun.

You can use radical action for whatever your goal. I’m always going to encourage you to look beyond short-termism (that holiday you want next year) and instead aim for something that your future self will benefit from (property like Eloise, for example).

I ache to see more radical action. I live for it. The world would be such a better place if we had half the commitment of Chris Gardner or a quarter of the determination of Alisa Camplin. Instead, we settle. We lose time. We survive on autopilot. We talk ourselves out of opportunities and convince ourselves we don’t have what it takes. Close your eyes for a moment and think about what you really want. What’s that one thing you’d strive for if you knew there was no chance you could fail at it?

If you’re struggling with your work-life balance and kids are part of that equation, your radical action could be to bring an au pair into your lives. This was life-changing for our family (even though I resisted for a while there), and now I couldn’t live without that extra pair of hands around. It could be negotiating one day off a week with your employer, or it could mean, gasp, quitting that job and going elsewhere.

If you’re not getting the support you need from your partner, the radical action could be to leave. You’re allowed to. You have one life, and your purpose is not to stay unhappy and unfulfilled. If you’re single and wanting to meet someone, your radical action could be to go on fifty dates in the next three months. Radical, I know, but life can sometimes be a game of chance, and the more you play it, the luckier you get.

If you’re under financial pressure or have a big financial goal to achieve, consider renting out a room in your house to a student. Or taking on a second job. Or starting a little business on the weekends—friends of mine rent out jumping castles and popcorn machines as their side hustle, and another friend clears an extra $1,000 a week with a weekend market stall. Your radical action might look like buying bunk beds and sharing a room with a friend, halving your rent. You could stop buying new clothes (we all have enough, you know) or finally work out how to get organized to bring your own food into work each day.

Radical action in your workplace might be about letting some people go. I met a lady named Roula, who told me about the charity she’d started a decade ago. They did great work and made a difference, but Roula was completely worn down. What wore her down more than anything was not the consistent fundraising required to keep the charity alive or the hard work needed to fuel their efforts. No, what wore her down was the internal politics and constant bickering that came from within her team. They feuded endlessly, with two staff members having not spoken to each other for the best part of a year. It was exhausting for Roula. She’d tried everything within her power to resolve the internal culture dynamic, but nothing would budge. Roula told me how she simply woke up one day with a resolve to change. Something in her had shifted, and she now knew what was required. She walked into the office that day, and one by one fired every one of her four employees. Roula told me it was traumatic for all of them at the time, and two of them don’t speak to her at all anymore, but her radical action transformed her life and the future trajectory of her organization. Roula went on to hire a brand-new team, and her mojo for what she does is well and truly back.

Similarly, I have a friend who leads a small team and is constantly complaining about her workload and stress levels. Looking in, I can see that her radical action right now would be to let one or two people go from that team, replacing them with better performers. That would free up her workload, reduce her stress and make her role more enjoyable. Will she be willing to take this radical action? Time will tell, but unfortunately the need to be liked and not rock the boat sometimes means we all miss out on a better way of being.

The real question is, how far are you willing to go to achieve your goals and get the job done? Business Chicks member Amanda Stevens told me her beautiful story of radical action.

It was early December 2019, and I was flying from Queenstown to Sydney, via Melbourne, for my hundred and fifth keynote presentation for the year. I was suffering from physical and emotional burnout.

Landing into Melbourne at about 7 p.m., I got a text message from the airline advising that my connecting flight to Sydney had been canceled due to smoke and that I was rebooked on a flight the next day which would have me land into Sydney at midday. I was due on stage for five hundred people at 9:30 a.m., so that wasn’t going to work. My assistant was madly trying to grab flights, but they were disappearing as fast as she could book them.

I rang my driver, Yilmaz, who’s been my driver for sixteen years, and asked him if he was up for a road trip to Sydney.

“Um, when?,” he said.

“Um, now,” I said.

Thirty minutes later he arrived at Melbourne Airport to pick me up with a pillow, a blanket and a packet of Tim Tams. He drove me through the night to Sydney. We arrived at 6 a.m., I got a couple of hours sleep and was on stage at 9:30 a.m.

I was probably overcompensating for being tired, because I believe it was my best presentation of the year, and I got a standing ovation.

So there you have it, my friends. Getting into radical action could just earn you a standing ovation or two. Go get it.

RULE #73: STOP MAKING EXCUSES

We’ve all got something, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, holding us back.

It could be that you believe you’re not smart enough. Perhaps it’s that you think you don’t have the right skills. Maybe deep down there’s a sense that you don’t deserve success. It’s different for all of us.

Uncovering self-limiting beliefs is hard but powerful. As challenging as it is, I’ve always found it useful to talk with someone about the stories I’m telling myself and the excuses I’m using that are holding me back. Through this work, I’ve recognized that if I can name the belief, then I’m on my way to clearing it.

Here are the excuses I hear people use the most (and that I’ve been guilty of voicing from time to time too).

I don’t have enough time You have the same number of hours in your day as Michelle Obama. You can choose how you spend your time. You have the right to say no to things that are taking up your time. You have the right to claw back your time by asking for help. You have the right to work with other people who can give you some time back, and you have the right to give up tasks that don’t fulfill you.

I’m scared Fear is real, and it’s debilitating. Dale Carnegie once famously said, “If you want to conquer fear, do not sit at home and think about it. Go out and get busy.”

I’m not ready yet You and me both. You’re never really ready.

I don’t know how to start I didn’t either. So I just started. While very few of us ever know the exact path we have to walk to reach our goals, we can all think of one small action we can take now to get going. Just one. Make a phone call. Book a coffee in with someone who might be able to help. Research something. Write down your idea or vision. Open a bank account. Buy a new pen and notepad. Anything, just start!

I don’t have enough money Yeah, that old chestnut. Very few of us, the trust fund babies excluded, start out with a limitless checkbook. The good news is that money is relatively easy to come by these days. There are ways to get money, keep money and grow money. Go spend some time investing in yourself on how to do that. Get creative. Ask lots of questions. Do without something you’re spending money on now. Read. Educate yourself.

It’s not the right time When I first offered the chief executive officer role to Olivia Ruello, she hesitated. She told me it wasn’t the right time. One of the excuses she used was that she was trying to get pregnant. I told her there would never be a right time to start a big new role, and there’d never be the right time to start a family either. If she wanted both of these things, she’d just have to walk toward them. Standing still wasn’t going to get her there. Of course, Liv took the role and is excelling at it. She’s also now excelling at parenting her four-year-old daughter and eight-month-old son.

This excuse really interests me, because I think at some level we all know that life doesn’t work in some perfect order where the gates suddenly open and you’re met with more money or more time to do the things you actually want to do. We all get that, yet we hide behind this excuse the most.

I’m not confident enough I get it. Very few people are born with the self-confidence of Kanye West. Generally, you’ll find that most people who have a lot of self-confidence have worked really hard on it. I know I have. There have been many periods in my life where I’ve struggled with confidence and have experienced imposter syndrome, and it can be crippling. I’ve found the only answer to overcoming a lack of self-confidence is to put yourself continuously in situations that scare the heck out of you. That’s how I did it, anyway. Saying yes to giving speeches in places where I felt like the most unaccomplished person in the room. Speaking up in meetings where it felt like I was the only one who didn’t know the answers. Leaving relationships even though I didn’t know where I’d go next. You only get confident through practicing doing the things that scare you until they don’t.

I don’t have enough experience Everyone started with no experience, and anyway, experience can often be prohibitive. Being naïve can be a beautiful thing, and it helps you become curious about attacking problems in ways that haven’t been thought of before. Don’t buy into this excuse, and don’t let others curb your enthusiasm (unless you’re a neurosurgeon, and in this case, I’d love it if you’d go get quite a few years of experience under your belt, thanks).

It’s just too difficult Most great things in life present some complexity and difficulty. Love is complex and difficult, and yet we keep searching and longing for it. Traveling with toddlers is difficult, and yet we persist because the adventures we experience outweigh the short-term pain of dealing with a person on a plane who hates children and can’t understand why they’re there.

I’m afraid of what others might think I’ve always found this to be a comforting thought: mostly, people are so caught up in their own worries that they’re not thinking very much about you. Also, once you get clear on the fact that you can’t control what people think of you, you’ll stop obsessing about it. It’s completely natural to want to be liked, accepted and thought highly of. That’s human nature, and it plagues us all. It’s also completely natural for you to want to strive to be the best version of yourself, and if you’re paralyzed thinking about what others think of you, then you’re not going anywhere fast. Living your life according to the rules and expectations of others who you feel are judging you at any given turn is a fast way of not truly living.

Perhaps it’s time to take a hard look at the people in your life and decide whether they’re really supporting your growth? Surrounding yourself with positive people who believe in you and will back your dreams no matter what will surely lessen the amount of time you spend worrying about what others think. If this is a problem for you, then go talk with someone about it—getting clear on your motivations and self-limiting beliefs with a therapist or someone else you trust might help shift this one out of your way.

I might fail At some stage, you probably will. Oprah Winfrey was once fired for being too “emotionally invested in her stories.” Louisa May Alcott was told to stick to her teaching and not bother writing, and Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper, being told he lacked creativity. Milton Hershey started three candy companies before going on to found the Hershey’s chocolate empire, and I bet if I gave you ten minutes on Google you’d be able to find dozens more. We cannot let the idea of failing get in the way of starting, but so many people do.

RULE #74: HOPE IS NOT A STRATEGY

I want to share what went down in our company when the pandemic hit. A good chunk of our business is large-scale in-person events, so when the world came to a halt, I knew we were screwed. I had no idea how long we’d be screwed for, of course, but it was undeniable: we were screwed.

The first thing I did was get together a group of advisors—some from inside the business and some external people who knew me well and knew I’d be losing a lot of sleep at this stage. The first thing I said to them was this: “Give it to me straight. How many months of cash do we have left?” We played out several scenarios in these first few sessions, but whichever way you sliced and diced it, I knew we had to do something, and I knew we had to do it quickly. Two words kept repeating over and over in my mind about what we needed to do to survive this time: urgent action, urgent action, urgent action. Hope was not a strategy.

During these first few weeks, I was running on a few different tracks. One was a cost-saving track, and we were running fast. We sat down and interrogated every single line item on our profit and loss statement and made difficult decisions quickly. Some were easier to make—we’d have to downgrade our printer plan, for example, which made sense as no one was in the office anyway—and some were much, much harder—as I mentioned before, we couldn’t afford to keep some of the people who were hired to create the experiences we could no longer deliver.

Knowing cost-cutting alone wouldn’t be enough to save the business, I was also running on a revenue-making track. I was trying to mobilize everyone in the team to come up with ways we could turn our skills and expertise into something that we could actually sell and make meaningful for our amazing members and customers. Again, speed was important here. We had to be seen as leaders in this space, and we had to do it quickly.

The team rallied, and I was so proud of how they were able to get a massive online event together with an incredible line-up of international speakers in just a few days. We called that event AllStars, and it was a combination of some of the best speakers we’d heard from in the fifteen years of Business Chicks’ history. We gave ourselves a week to sell that event, calling on every person we knew to buy a ticket.

From a dollars perspective, that event meant we were able to keep the business running for a few more weeks. And when that event proved successful, we rallied and did it again with an entirely new set of speakers; from there we just kept trying to keep things fresh with other digital offerings and brand extensions.

I’ll always be grateful for all those speakers who shared their wisdom and all the people who bought a ticket and jumped online to support us. During this time, I was unshakable in my resoluteness about what we were trying to do. I needed to ensure the security and future of our business, because I knew exactly why we existed and why we held a place in the lives and hearts of our customers and our team.

When we were in the depths of the pandemic, our “why” was something I kept returning to time and time again. During those fifteen-hour days, our why, our reason for being, had never before appeared with such clarity. We’re here to make the journey easier and more fulfilling for others. We’re here to provide a space for people to come together and support one another and to continue the learning and the growing, and most importantly, we’re here to help everyone feel a sense of possibility: that there is a light at the end of tunnel, that we can get through this and that we are going to do it together.

We shouldn’t need a pandemic to teach us these lessons. If there’s one thing I’m always talking about with my team (and my family), it’s that hope is not a strategy and we can’t wait for opportunities to fall from the sky and drop in our laps. I mean, there’s luck and there’s divinity, and all that can conspire to create cool shit from time to time, but for the most part, if we want to make magic happen, we’ve got to do that ourselves. It’s a lesson in being proactive and not just mindlessly going through the motions, thinking that our past hard work will manifest in future similar results. For my kids, that might mean working a little harder on their chores so they can save for our next holiday, and for my colleagues and my team at work, it means getting out there and making stuff happen.

At times I’m sure I’m exhausting to the people around me, but I’ve never been one to sit back and say, “Hopefully next year is going to be a good year.” No way. There’s no hope. I believe in plotting and scheming to create opportunities so I can live intentionally and with purpose.

So, how do you create opportunities? I think it starts with thinking like an entrepreneur, no matter what your actual role is. Entrepreneurship isn’t a career choice. It’s a way of thinking. It’s about getting into action. It’s knowing the ideas won’t manifest by themselves, and you have to take some responsibility for dreaming them up.

Almost fifteen months later, as I write this chapter, we’re still not completely back to business-as-usual, nor can I imagine we will be for a long time. That said, my business is still standing, and I’m proud of the way we handled ourselves. We’ve grown as leaders, and we’ve taken the lessons learned through the pandemic and turned them into other opportunities. I’m now grateful for the fifteen-hour days and the nights where I only managed a bag of corn chips for dinner.

After all, we didn’t just hope, we did.