I had to dig deep to find this picture on my phone.
I have written before about bad advice. I have received enough of it to fill a book that nobody would want to read.
But there is one that keeps coming back. Not because it hurt the most, but because it became the image I return to every time I think I might fail.
I had just finished university. I was working as a barista while I looked for work in marketing. I was good at the coffee. I genuinely loved it. The rhythm of it, the regulars, the particular satisfaction of a well-made flat white at seven in the morning when the world is still waking up.
A manager from a different department sat me down and told me something he clearly thought was helpful.
He said I should stay and keep making coffee, that I should not go after the marketing job I had studied for because people in Australia did not like immigrants and I would not be able to get a job in marketing anyway. Save myself the hustle.
I want to be fair to him. He probably believed he was being kind. He probably thought he was protecting me from disappointment. He was looking at me, a Brazilian woman with an accent, and doing his own maths about what the market would do with that.
His maths were wrong. And I could not have felt more welcomed.
I went after the job, got work in marketing, built a career, moved countries again, and wrote books. I am still writing them.
And every single time I think I might fail — every time a launch feels uncertain, every time the blog numbers are smaller than I hoped, every time I wonder if this is the moment the whole thing stops working — I go back to that conversation and I smile.
I have done it once, I have done it multiple times, and I know I can do it again. And every time someone told me the door was not for me I walked through it anyway and found out it was.
The barista job was never the problem. The coffee was excellent and I would make it again tomorrow. The problem was someone else's ceiling being offered to me as my floor.
I am glad I did not stay.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
