I was recently interviewed for a publication about my career, and one of the questions was: What have been your keys to success?
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. I just found it surprisingly difficult to answer.
How long is a piece of string?
I’ve spent nearly two decades building businesses, brands and ideas. I’ve made some excellent decisions and some spectacularly questionable ones. I’ve had mentors, lucky breaks, periods of extraordinary momentum and many moments when I’ve wondered what the fuck I’m doing. I’ve built things, broken things, sold things and started again an ugly amount of times.
How do you attribute an outcome to any one part of that?
And then there’s the word success, which I’ve always found a little slippery.
From the outside, success tends to be measured in milestones. Revenue. Recognition. An exit. The size of the business. The happiness of your family. The impressive things you can point to and say, Look what I did. Look what I have.
But I’ve never reached a particular milestone and thought, Right. I’ve made it.
For me, success has become something much less theatrical.
It’s the freedom to spend my time how I want. The ability to follow an idea because I find it interesting. The flexibility to arrange my working day around my brain, my children and whatever I’m excited about creating. Having the resources to pursue something without needing somebody else’s permission.
It’s being able to wake up on a Tuesday and decide entirely myself what this particular Tuesday looks like.
I don’t think I was ever chasing success as much as I was chasing autonomy.
And somewhere along the way, I built a life that gives me quite a lot of it.
But the interview question stayed with me. Because while I couldn’t point to a single defining moment or extraordinary talent, I could identify something else.
Habits.
Quite a lot of them, actually.
Some are boring. Some are obsessive. A few might be considered mildly concerning to some. But collectively, they’ve become a kind of personal operating system that allows me to make things happen.
And I suspect that operating system has contributed more to my career than any particular talent ever has.
First, a confession about hard work.
I genuinely believe I’m the hardest-working person I know.
I realise that’s an enormous statement. I don’t say it lightly, and I’m not suggesting hard work makes somebody morally superior, or that everybody should aspire to work the way I do.
But I know my own capacity.
When I decide I want something, I become almost unreasonable in my pursuit of it. I have an unusually high tolerance for work, an unusually high tolerance for stress, and a brain that can become completely consumed by whatever problem I’m trying to solve.
I’m never particularly interested in whether something is going to be difficult.
I’m interested in what it will take, and perhaps more importantly, who I will become in the process.
With Land Lab, for example, I want to build the best supplement brand in Australia. That’s the ambition. In my mind, there isn’t really a question about whether we’re going to get there. The question is what we need to do next to make it happen.
Of course, ambition isn’t a guarantee of an outcome. There are a thousand variables I can’t control. But I can control the amount of energy, attention, creativity and resourcefulness I’m willing to put behind it.
And that’s where I tend to become quite relentless.
I think some people wait until they feel certain they’ll succeed before they fully commit.
I’ve always been more inclined to commit first and work out how to succeed afterwards.
That probably explains quite a lot about the rest of this list.
1. I start at 4:40am.
This began as a practical solution to having children.
I do the school drop-offs and pick-ups on my own which means my conventional working day is relatively short. Add a couple of meetings and suddenly you’ve got four or five hours left to run multiple businesses, develop new ideas and do the actual work.
The maths wasn’t working.
So I started getting up at 4:40am.
And I bloody loved it.
There is something almost intoxicating about having two uninterrupted hours before the rest of the world starts asking things of you. My brain is on fire at that time. Nobody needs me. Nothing has gone wrong yet. My inbox hasn’t had a chance to hijack my priorities.
I can just work.
I also love the psychological advantage of having already accomplished something before the kids wake up. That early dopamine hit of crossing things off a list makes the rest of the day feel like it’s happening from a position of momentum rather than catch-up.
I know the internet loves romanticising 5am routines, and I don’t think waking up early makes you inherently more successful.
But I do think knowing when your brain does its best work, and protecting that time ferociously, is an enormous advantage.
Mine just happens to be before the sun rises.
2. I structure my week like a slightly obsessive project manager.
For someone who values freedom as much as I do, I’m extraordinarily particular about structure.
Every week, I look at what needs to happen and start grouping tasks according to the kind of thinking they require.
I might have a day dedicated to all the annoying little administrative jobs. Another for deep, uninterrupted work. Another for creative production, writing, concepts and ideas.
I don’t want to spend forty minutes immersed in something highly conceptual, stop to answer an supplier query, jump into a meeting, then expect my brain to immediately return to where it was.
That kind of context-switching is expensive.
So I batch.
And I make lists. Handwritten lists, specifically. I spent a few years trying a ridiculous array of productivity tools, but something about physically writing things down remains the only system that truly works for me.
There’s no particularly sophisticated explanation for this. I just know it works.
And I think that’s an underrated part of building an effective working life: understanding your own brain well enough to stop forcing it into systems designed for somebody else’s.
My structure isn’t there to make my life more rigid. It’s there to make my creativity less interrupted.
3. I’m ruthless about what deserves my attention.
I have an ongoing list of things I want to achieve.
Some are immediate. Some are weekly. Others live somewhere in the much bigger vision I have for my life.
But they’re always there.
And I’ve become very good at looking at an opportunity, a task or an idea and asking whether it actually moves me towards something I want.
If it doesn’t, I’m increasingly comfortable leaving it alone.
This doesn’t mean everything in my life needs to be productive. I’m talking about the way I allocate my working energy.
Because I have a lot of ideas. A lot of interests. A lot of things I could pursue.
The challenge has never been finding something to do.
It’s deciding which things deserve to be done.
I’ve come to think that prioritisation is less about managing time and more about managing ambition. If you want to do big things, you have to accept that you cannot do every interesting thing.
Every yes spends attention that could have gone somewhere else.
And attention is probably my most valuable resource.
4. I’m obsessively curious.
If I had to identify one genuine superpower, this would probably be it.
I’m interested in everything.
I read constantly, although exclusively nonfiction. I consume information, follow rabbit holes, study culture, observe people, collect references and ask an unreasonable number of questions.
I want to know why something works.
Why somebody made that decision. Why a particular business is growing. Why one brand feels magnetic and another feels completely forgettable. Why someone wants what they want. Why something that shouldn’t work somehow does.
I think curiosity has given me an enormous advantage because it means I’m constantly collecting information without necessarily knowing what I’ll use it for.
And then, six months or six years later, two seemingly unrelated things connect. (thank god for ADHD pattern recognition).
An idea emerges.
Something makes sense.
What looks like instinct in the moment is often curiosity compounded over time.
I don’t think the most interesting ideas necessarily come from knowing more about one particular subject.
Sometimes they come from knowing a little about an extraordinary number of things.
The more interested you are in the world, the more material you have to think with.
5. I collect inspiration like it’s my job.
Because, in many ways, it is.
My camera roll is ridiculous. My reference boards are enormous. I’m constantly saving images, ideas, sentences, objects, places, campaigns and things I can’t quite explain my attraction to yet.
I don’t always know what I’m looking for.
That’s part of the point.
I’ve learned not to demand that inspiration justify itself immediately. Sometimes I’ll save something simply because it makes my brain do a little somersault. I might not understand why I like it until much later.
But eventually, patterns emerge.
And I think this is one of the most practical ways I’ve trained my creative instincts.
Taste doesn’t develop through passive consumption. It develops through paying attention, interrogating what you’re seeing and noticing the relationships between things.
I’m not collecting references so I can copy them.
I’m collecting raw material for connections that haven’t happened yet.
6. I always have a mentor.
I’ve had mentors throughout my career, and I can’t imagine ever reaching a point where I decide I no longer need one.
Because no matter how capable or experienced you become, you are still trapped inside your own perspective.
And objective clarity is extraordinarily valuable.
My current mentor is the delightful, wise and just pure ‘good' human that is Leonie Faddy - CMO of Go-To Skincare, and having someone with that level of experience to help me think through Land Lab’s marketing and growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. She is my guru.
I want someone who has been where I’m trying to go.
Someone who can recognise a problem I’ve never encountered, challenge an assumption I’m overly attached to, or tell me when I’m being an idiot.
I don’t think seeking mentorship contradicts being instinct-led.
Quite the opposite.
The more confident I become in my own judgement, the more interested I am in exposing it to people who might make it better.
7. I let instinct decide what to test. Data decides what to scale.
I’m obsessed with data.
I love numbers, performance, patterns, conversion rates, growth trajectories and the little clues hidden inside a spreadsheet.
But interestingly, data is never where my decisions begin.
Instinct is.
I’ll get a feeling about an idea, a product, a campaign or a direction. Something tells me it’s worth pursuing.
So I test it.
And then the data comes in.
Was the hypothesis correct? What actually happened? Did customers respond? What surprised us? Is there enough evidence to double down? Should we invest more? Is this ready to scale?
I think this combination has served me particularly well because it allows me to move quickly without becoming reckless.
Instinct creates the experiment.
Data informs the next decision.
I don’t need to spend six months proving an idea is worth trying before I try it. But I also don’t need to keep throwing money at something simply because I liked the idea.
My instinct tells me where to look. The numbers tell me what I found.
8. I love money.
I love making money. I love talking about money. I love understanding numbers, identifying commercial opportunities and imagining what might be financially possible.
I want big things from my life, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending those things don’t require money.
For me, money represents independence.
It’s the ability to pursue creative ideas without asking permission. To take time away when I need it. To invest in something I believe in. To build the kind of life I want for my family.
For me, money provides access to creative freedom.
I wasn’t always as commercially minded as I am now. But business has a way of forcing you to develop that muscle.
You can have the most extraordinary creative ideas in the world, but if you can’t understand how money moves through a business, your ability to bring those ideas to life will always be constrained.
I also have a fairly expansive relationship with earning.
I often say that the universe is my bank.
Not because I believe money will magically appear if I think positively enough, but because I genuinely believe there are almost infinite ways to create value and generate income.
If I need to make more money, my immediate thought isn’t where am I going to find it?
It’s how am I going to make it?
Over time, I’ve developed the skills, relationships, confidence and commercial imagination to see possibilities that I might once have overlooked.
I don’t see my earning capacity as a fixed number.
I see it as something I can expand almost daily.
And that belief changes the way I behave.
9. I’m an upside girl.
I’ve always been a glass-half-full person.
Actually, I’m probably more of a there must be another glass somewhere person.
My brain naturally looks for opportunity. If something isn’t working, I want to know what else we could try. If a market looks crowded, I’m interested in where the gaps might be. If something goes wrong, I tend to move quite quickly towards what can be done about it.
I think some of this comes from my upbringing.
My parents gave me a strong sense of security and possibility. I grew up feeling that the world was something I could participate in, rather than something I needed to protect myself from.
I’m very aware that this is a privilege.
And I think it shaped my willingness to take risks.
Over the years, I’ve also spent a lot of time on self-development. A multitude of practices have given me different ways to think about identity, alignment, self-worth and possibility.
I don’t treat every idea from other people’s self-development concepts as scientific fact. I use them as frameworks for examining my own thinking.
Because I do believe our mentality shapes our reality, not necessarily through some mysterious cosmic mechanism, but through the decisions we make, the opportunities we notice, the risks we’re willing to take. the behaviours we repeat and the subconscious stories we’ve accepted as our reality.
What you believe is possible has an enormous influence on what you’re willing to attempt.
And I’m very committed to keeping that ceiling as high as possible.
10. I surround myself with expansive thinkers.
One of my favourite things about my closest friendships is that ambition doesn’t require an apology.
My best friend has enormous goals. So do I.
We egg each other on.
We talk about what we want to build, experience, earn and become without feeling the need to make those desires sound more socially acceptable.
There’s something incredibly energising about spending time with people who don’t automatically respond to an ambitious idea by explaining why it might not work.
They might challenge the strategy.
They might ask difficult questions.
But the ambition itself isn’t the problem.
I think the people around you quietly influence the size of the life you imagine for yourself.
Not because you should only spend time with people who share your goals, but because possibility is contagious.
Sometimes the most valuable thing another person gives you is permission to want more.
11. I’ve learned to draw the bow back.
Every quarter, I book in a week away from my normal working rhythm. Sometimes I go somewhere, sometimes I stay at home.
I think of it as drawing the bow back.
If you’re constantly pushing forward, producing, responding and executing, eventually you run out of the space required to see anything differently.
Sometimes my week off is a proper holiday.
Sometimes it’s painting, writing, reading or immersing myself in something creative. Sometimes it’s self-care, pottering around the house, rearranging furniture or getting lost in some low-pressure project that has absolutely nothing to do with generating revenue.
I never do nothing though.
I’ve accepted that about myself.
But there’s an enormous difference between being active because you’re curious and being active because something is a mark in your calendar or email in your inbox is demanding an outcome.
The most interesting thing is what happens afterwards.
I return with ideas.
Clarity.
Energy.
Connections I couldn’t quite see before.
I’ve stopped treating these weeks as an indulgence and started treating them as part of the creative process.
Sometimes you have to move further away from the work to see what the work needs.
12. I use AI like a team of employees.
This has become one of the most significant changes to the way I work.
I don’t think of AI simply as a tool for writing an email faster.
I think of it as access to an extraordinary range of capabilities that previously required hiring people, engaging specialists or spending hours figuring something out myself.
I use it to interrogate ideas, analyse information, challenge assumptions, develop systems, research unfamiliar territory and move projects forward.
It’s not replacing my thinking.
It’s extending what my thinking is capable of.
And I think this is an important distinction.
I’ve spent years building the judgement, taste, commercial understanding and instincts that inform my decisions. AI doesn’t magically supply those things.
But it dramatically reduces the distance between having an idea and being able to do something with it.
For someone who has always had more ideas than time, that’s an extraordinary development.
I don’t want AI to think for me. I want it to make more of my thinking possible.
13. I write. A lot.
Writing has become one of the most valuable ways I organise my thoughts.
Not because everything I write needs to be published.
But because writing forces me to work out what I actually think.
An idea can feel perfectly formed inside your head until you try to explain it to someone else. Suddenly you discover the gaps, the contradictions, the assumptions you’ve been making without noticing.
Writing exposes all of that.
And in the process of trying to articulate something clearly, I often discover an idea I didn’t realise I had.
I think this is why I’m loving this little Substack, Extra Curricular, so much.
It’s not simply an outlet for the things I’ve learned.
It’s a place to keep learning by thinking out loud.
Writing doesn’t just communicate my ideas. It helps me find them.
The part I’m still figuring out
Of course, none of this comes without a cost.
My capacity for work can make switching off difficult. My tendency to become completely consumed by an idea isn’t always particularly convenient for the people around me.
And my relentless orientation towards the future means I sometimes have to remind myself to be grateful for the present.
My children are particularly good at this.
They don’t give a flying fuck what’s on my vision board.
They don’t care about a five-year revenue target or whether I’m having an unusually productive Tuesday.
They want me to sit on the floor and build Lego.
And for someone whose brain is almost always moving towards the next thing, that can be challenging… to say the least.
But I’ve had to learn that being present is also something worth practising.
That not every moment needs to contribute to a bigger objective.
That sometimes the thing I’m working so hard to create (the freedom to spend my time however I want) is already here, right in front of me.
I think that’s one of the stranger contradictions of ambition.
You can become so good at building the future that you occasionally forget to enjoy the life you’ve already built.
And perhaps that’s the habit I most want to keep developing.
So, what are my ‘keys to success’?
Coming back to that interview question, I still don’t think there’s a particularly elegant answer.
I haven’t uncovered some revolutionary formula or productivity framework. I don’t have an extraordinary natural talent that explains everything. And I certainly don’t think my way of working is the right way for everybody.
But I do think I’ve become very good at a collection of relatively ordinary things.
I work hard. I protect my attention. I feed my curiosity. I ask questions. I seek advice. I follow my instincts, then interrogate the results. I understand and have a great relationship with money. I make room for inspiration. I surround myself with people who expand my thinking.
And I do those things over and over again.
Perhaps the real advantage isn’t any one habit.
It’s what happens when they begin reinforcing each other.
Curiosity improves my instincts. Instinct creates experiments. Data improves my judgement. Better judgement makes me more commercially effective. Commercial success creates freedom. Freedom gives me more space to be curious.
The whole thing becomes a rather beautiful feedback loop.
And maybe that’s what I’ve been building all these years.
Not just businesses.
But rather, a way of working that makes more of the life I want possible.
Which brings me back to where I started.
Success, for me, isn’t a particular revenue figure, an exit or a headline.
It’s being able to spend my Tuesday however I want.
And having built enough confidence in myself to know that, whatever I decide to do with it, I’ll probably find a way to make something happen.
Anyways,
Happy Tuesday ;)
See you at 6am on gchat :)