The Cracks Are Where The Gold Goes
There was something Steven Bartlett wrote this week that I’ve been mulling over in my head ever since.
He said the gap between average and exceptional people is mostly about pain threshold – that the world-class people he’s interviewed weren’t smarter or luckier, they just sat in discomfort longer than anyone else was willing to. The willingness to keep going when the rational thing looks like quitting.
My ADHD brain read it a few times. So much of what he said makes sense for me, deeply and a little uncomfortably so. But I also felt there was something he’d missed and I think it’s something many of you might already know, even if you haven’t quite put words to it yet.
Let me share a little story, because I’m not sure I would have understood his piece as fully if I hadn’t lived such an unreasonable version of his argument across the last twenty-something years.
Life before Escape Haven had a few bumpy turns… I left a job I loved and a city I didn’t – Head of Marketing at Selfridges in London back in 2003. I was 30, and I had every reason to stay and one reason to leave that I couldn’t fully express. So I did the unreasonable thing and went on a tour of Africa, sailed across the Atlantic, and spent the next year working on super yachts in the Caribbean and the Med, living barefoot on islands. It was the freest I had ever been.
Then in the dead of winter 2004 I made what I thought was the sensible decision. Gave up the yachts, single, moved to New Zealand. It was the year of the national headlines about the man shortage in NZ, which I now find a lot more amusing than I did at the time. The sensible thing took me from there to Sydney for a Marketing Manager role at David Jones – a return to the exact kind of life I had just walked away from in London. Same job, different city.
Heart broken and now fearing the man shortage I threw myself into work and worked crazy hours with stress building one fashion launch after another running on adrenaline I had stopped being able to read. A gap opened in my schedule in 2005 and I was out the door and on the plane to Bali before I could say byeeeeee.
I ended up in Ubud – mostly because someone suggested it. I tried yoga and Ayurveda for the first time and I’d love to tell you I loved them. I didn’t. I actually hated them both! But I showed up anyway, because I had nothing left to lose. And about five days in, after a meditation class, I sat down at breakfast and felt something I hadn’t felt in years. Peace. Space. Happiness. Right behind it came this bittersweet ache, because if those feelings were so foreign to me, how long had they been absent. I guess you could say my flight and fight indicators were broken!
I recognised the transformation I had been experiencing and thought surely there were other women around the world busy pursuing their dreams that would benefit from an escape like this but one that was dedicated to a retreat for women only. So I scribbled the idea for a women’s retreat on a scrap of serviette from my breakfast table (I so wish I phones were around back then so I could have captured a photo of it) #dreamsincoming.
Sadly that tea stained serviette got shelved for almost three years due to getting back to Sydney and a head-hunting offer at NZ’s largest retailer that was too good to turn down came up. 3 years on after making it through a promotion my executive coach asked me one question at a celebratory dinner – *what’s stopping you from chasing your dream* – and I quit the next day, sold everything I owned, threw a Brazilian-themed leaving party, and went to Brazil to try to build the retreat there. I lost almost everything.
In 2008, I arrived in Bali with ten thousand dollars and not a single contact. The first year was hard. Then the press came, and the women came, and almost twenty years later here we are with fifteen thousand women through our doors at Escape Haven, the most awarded women’s retreat in Bali, with Palm Treehouse beside it and Mana about to open.
It wasn’t all candy coloured skies, cold coconuts and fluffy clouds though.
Christmas 2013, five years in, the business nearly broke me and I went back to NZ feeling defeated (and almost bankrupt – another blog, another day) In 2016, I almost died from bacterial meningitis eight weeks after Indii was born. The pandemic came and we kept ninety staff paid through two years of closed borders. And right now we’re opening Mana with Trent mid-Gulf crisis, while a war on the other side of the world is causing some countries to hesitate coming.
I have absolutely stayed in the room. Bartlett would be pleased i think! Like many of you who also stayed in the room when times got tough.
But the part I think he missed is this.
The most extraordinary chapters of my life have never come from the *staying*. They’ve come from something actually breaking and what got rebuilt afterwards being far more beautiful than what was there before.
In Japan, where I went to university, I studied an art form called kintsugi that many of you may be familiar with. The practice of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, where the cracks become the most beautiful part of the piece, not the thing to hide. The pot is considered more valuable for having been broken, because the breaking is part of its story now, and the gold is part of the form.
I have thought about kintsugi often over the years, and even more since I started building Mana. Bartlett’s argument is about tolerance – the discipline of sitting in discomfort. But what he missed, I think, is what happens when the tolerance reaches its limit and something does actually break. Because in my own life, every extraordinary thing has come from there.
Escape Haven was born from the corporate breaking. Trent, my husband, arrived after the business nearly broke me at Christmas 2013 – seventeen years after we’d first been in the same cities together around the world without ever meeting. Our daughters arrived against one percent odds, twice. Mana is being built from what almost dying taught me about recovery.
The cracks aren’t damage to hide. They’re where the light gets in.
And where the gold goes.
It’s the same thing I’ve watched in the fifteen thousand women who have come and stayed with us. They’ve been carrying expectations, uncertainty, depletion – the invisible weight of holding everything together – for far longer than their bodies are designed to. Exactly what Bartlett describes – out-tolerating their own warning signals because that’s what high-functioning women do.
But the women I love watching most aren’t the ones who push through.
They’re the ones who finally let something break, then come and sit with us for a week, and discover that the breaking is exactly where the next chapter begins.
So if you’re somewhere in the middle of a hard one right now – if the rational thing is looking a lot like quitting and you’re not sure what to do – please know I see you. And something so beautiful is emerging whether you can see it or not.
The best IS yet to come.
