Undaunted

Moving Forward Despite Doubts and Doubters

Kara Goldin

• Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781400220526
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Women in Business
• Index: Business

Don't let anyone crush your dreams. Undaunted will inspire you to move past your fears and defy the doubters. It doesn't matter whether you feel confident; it matters what you actually do.

A Wall Street Journal bestseller!

CEO of Hint, Inc and author Kara Goldin turned her unsweetened flavored water into one of the most successful beverage businesses of our time. As she started to achieve her goals, Kara found herself being called "fearless", "confident" and even "unstoppable, " but nothing could be further from the truth.

In Undaunted, she shares real stories about her own fears and doubts, the challenges she encountered and what she did to overcome them to eventually build a great business and a life she loves.

This book is perfect for anyone who wants to:

• Get fit and healthy,
• start a company or business,
• break an addiction,
• find a new career,
• just grow in life, and much more!

Part autobiography, part business memoir and lots of insights on self-development, Undaunted offers inspiring stories that impart lessons that any reader can apply to their own path.?While most motivational business and life books try to offer quick fixes, Kara focuses on long-term success, showing you how to take control of breaking down barriers and moving forward.

Undaunted won't solve your problems and challenges, you will. However, it will help you see through other's experiences that it's possible to do so. Accept your fears, but decide to be undaunted.

ONE

open a lot of doors.

I grew up in Scottsdale, Arizona, right next to Phoenix, in view of Camelback Mountain. My four siblings were always busy with school and sports and part-time jobs. My dad traveled a lot for business and, when he wasn’t working, he was coaching baseball or football. When I was in kindergarten, my mom took a job working retail at a local department store and pursued arts and crafts projects on the side. So I was kind of on my own. Not neglected or ignored, just independent.

If I had a dominant trait as a kid, it was persistence. You have to be persistent when you’re the youngest of five. If I wanted something, I had to figure out how to get it. Sometimes I had to argue, pester, or fight for it. Like those bright green pants with colored Life Savers printed on them I saw in a store window. My dad kept saying I didn’t need them, and I kept pestering him to buy them for me until he finally came around.

“Kara,” Dad would say, “you always think that ‘no’ means ‘maybe’ and ‘maybe’ means ‘yes’!”

I drove him crazy sometimes, but he got a kick out of my unwillingness to give up. Mark Twain, who was also known as a feisty kid, said something similar about his mother: “My mother had a good deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.”

I did not give up easily on my interests, even when things got difficult. My best events in gymnastics were the vault and the uneven parallel bars. I wasn’t great at them, but I kept at it. I broke every toe in both feet, some of them more than once, but that never stopped me. My friends and family got used to seeing me on crutches, and my mom and I spent a fair amount of time in the emergency room together.

“Maybe you could be a little more careful, Kara?” she would ask. But she never told me to stop.

I was curious and asked a lot of questions. I liked to hang out with my friends, and I always wanted to learn their stories. I would rain questions on them and their parents. Where did you guys move from? What brought you to Scottsdale? What do you do? I would get so engrossed that Mom would have to call and remind me to come home for dinner.

Throughout my life, especially when I haven’t been certain about my next step, I have asked questions.

I was particularly curious about my dad. He worked for the Armour Food Company, which was later acquired by ConAgra, the big food conglomerate. He had dreamed of being an entrepreneur himself, but ended up taking the corporate job to support the family. I remember going with my mom to pick him up at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport after he flew in from a business trip. There was only one terminal back then and no security, so I could run right up to the gate to meet him as he came off the plane. On the drive home, he’d vent his frustrations about working for a big company and not being recognized for his contributions.

It seemed to me that Dad had a legitimate complaint. He had invented a whole new line of frozen meals that was eventually marketed as the Healthy Choice brand, which became a big seller for ConAgra and is still popular today. It all started when Mom went to work and Dad had to get dinner for us kids. He experimented with frozen TV dinners, but he thought they were awful—tasteless and unhealthy—and figured other people must feel the same way.

Armour let him engage Julia Child, who was famous for her pioneering cooking show on TV, The French Chef, and he worked with her to develop the new line of frozen meals. The Healthy Choice line he created made millions for the company, but my dad didn’t benefit from it financially himself.

In the early 1980s, after the Armour acquisition, ConAgra decreed that all managers at a certain level had to have an MBA degree. Dad only had his bachelor’s so, after a lifetime of service to the company, they told him it was time to take early retirement. His frustration, understandably, turned to resentment. Ultimately, the company offered him another job, but he would have to move to Omaha, Nebraska. He decided to take it. The plan was to work for four or five years and save up as much money as he could for retirement.

I wondered why he didn’t go out on his own since he had been so successful with Healthy Choice and had a million ideas for other new products. I asked him why, and I’ll never forget his response.

“Oh, Kara, it would be too hard.”

I’m pretty sure my dad could have been successful if he had just gone for it. I could feel his frustration, but I couldn’t figure out why he held himself back.

My mom, too, was frustrated. She had earned a degree in art from the University of Minnesota in the 1940s, a time when only a tiny minority of women went to college. She loved sewing and was a lover of arts and crafts, but apart from her own projects, she never pursued a career or followed her true passion.

My parents weren’t unhappy, and we were comfortable as a family. But they both had personal dreams and had chosen not to fulfill them.

I had other models to look to, though. My oldest brother, Kevin, knew he wanted to be a lawyer. He needed money for law school tuition and didn’t want to take on any debt, so he started a house painting business and got work all over Scottsdale. When he wasn’t painting, he was running a second business reconditioning and reselling old Volkswagens. His drive and ultimate success made a big impression on me.

My dad had been daunted by what he thought he couldn’t do. Kevin had overcome obstacles to achieve what he could.

As for me, I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do for a career. Quite the opposite. I wanted to try a lot of different things and I ended up having a lot of different part-time jobs during high school. If one didn’t work out, I’d try another. Most of my friends relied on babysitting to earn extra spending money, but I was looking for something different.

I landed my first job at age fourteen. It was totally opportunistic. My mom loved to go to a craft store in Old Town Scottsdale and would usually drag me along. She would spend hours studying yarn or fabric or patterns, so I’d wander out of the shop to the toy store next door. One day, there was a Help Wanted sign in the window. I had gotten to know the owner a bit, so I popped in and asked her for the job.

When I got home that day and told my dad that Nancy, the owner, had hired me, he couldn’t believe it.

“She hired you?”

“Yes, she did.”

“You don’t know anything about running a shop!”

Nancy initially hired me to help out with the paperwork, but I ended up spending most of my time working the cash register. That was fine by me, because it meant I could talk with the customers. I got to know our inventory really well and, since I had played with most of the toys and read a lot of the books, I could advise parents on what to buy their children. I asked a steady stream of questions. What kind of toys does your daughter like? What kind of books does your son read? How much do you want to spend?

Nancy realized I understood what customers were looking for and had a good eye for toys, so she took me along on some of her buying trips to the big toy fairs.

open a lot of doors.

That completely blew Dad’s mind.

“That is super nuts! Now you’re helping her buy the toys?”

“Yup.”

From my first retail job experience, I learned how important it is to really understand what customers want.

In my sophomore year of high school, I was a little more deliberate about my choice of jobs. I had gotten seriously into beauty and was quite proud of my long red hair, so I decided it would be interesting to work at a hair salon. I wanted to make some money, but mostly I was eager to learn the fine points of hair styling and makeup. I did a year as a receptionist at a local salon called Butter. Not only did I pick up a lot of beauty knowledge, but I got to talk with a lot more customers and to learn about their jobs, their families, what they enjoyed, and the challenges they faced. The job I liked best was working as a waitress at a local Mexican restaurant called Tee Pee, just a couple blocks from my high school. I knew nothing about waitressing and I only got the job because I agreed to take the Sunday morning shift, which nobody else wanted. The place was a local institution, and the job brought me into contact with a lot of interesting people who came to Phoenix from all over the world. The restaurant is still there, all these years later, and some of the same people I knew are still there, too. I made a lot of connections at the restaurant, many of them businesspeople.

As a junior in high school, I heard that Arizona representative John McCain (later Senator McCain) sometimes hired high school students to work in his Tempe office, mainly answering phones and corresponding with voters who needed his help. After a quick screening interview, I found myself sitting across from John McCain. His first question: “Why do you want to work here?” I took a deep breath and told him the truth, that that my parents were both Republicans and that I wanted to figure out whether I was a Republican or not. He chuckled, then hired me. While I was one of many working in the office over the next six years, he never seemed to forget who I was or what my authentic answer had been. Occasionally, he would ask, “Have you decided yet?” Once, I accidentally walked into a meeting where he happened to be sharing my response to his interview question. When I turned bright red with embarrassment, he quickly said, “Kara, never be afraid to tell the truth.” When it was time for me to move on from that job, Senator McCain again asked, “So, have you decided?” I hesitated for a moment and then told him the truth. “No, not yet.” I’ll never forget his response: “I’ve always appreciated your honesty and I want you to know something else. It’s okay to agree to disagree. Most of the people in both parties are deep down good people.” This has stuck with me throughout my life. John McCain was a good person who believed that we make progress by advocating what we believe in and working toward a common goal. I use this philosophy to lead my company and my life every day.

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I loved figuring out people, what would make them happy and what they would value and that I enjoyed their appreciation of what I had done for them.

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The most important takeaway from those early jobs was not what I learned about toy stores, beauty salons, restaurants, or government.

It was what I learned about myself: that I loved figuring out people, what would make them happy and what they would value and that I enjoyed their appreciation of what I had done for them. That is what drove me to start Hint three decades later, and it’s what still drives me today.

TWO

create your own opportunities.

In 1985, following in the footsteps of some of my older siblings, I enrolled at Arizona State University. I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to do for a career, but I chose to major in communications at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Telecommunication.

I also thought it would be smart to learn more about the business side of things, so I signed up for some classes in finance, even though the subject didn’t interest me and I don’t have a natural inclination for numbers.

It was in my finance classes, oddly enough, that I began my lifelong reading habit. One of my economics professors liked to illustrate his points by referencing articles in the Wall Street Journal. I had never even heard of the Journal, but I soon developed an obsession with the paper, and I still read it religiously every day. I was fascinated by its analysis of companies, products, and market trends. My roommates teased me about my Journal addiction. One day when I was at class, they ripped up a copy of the paper and taped the pages on my bedroom wall. They thought it was hysterical. I liked it and refused to take the pages down.

One of my classmates suggested that, if I liked the Journal so much, I should check out Fortune magazine. I loved its focus on people’s stories—narratives of leaders and their companies, and of customers and their behavior. I read Fortune just as religiously as the Journal. I refused to throw out a single copy, and they stacked up in our dorm room, which also drove my roommates a little crazy.

That reading habit continues to this day. I make it a goal to read for at least thirty minutes every day. I scan, flip through, skim, check out all kinds of materials—magazines, news sites, blogs, and books. I want to stay current on market trends, and learn about how other entrepreneurs, especially in other industries, run their companies.

Most ent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• If I Can Do It …
• 1. Open a Lot of Doors.
• 2. Create Your Own Opportunities.
• 3. Show Up.
• 4. Know Where You Stand.
• 5. Know When to Move on.
• 6. Figure It Out.
• 7. Explore New Possibilities.
• 8. Find the Personal Path.
• 9. Just Get Started.
• 10. Test the Market.
• 11. Build the Airplane While You’re Flying It.
• 12. Find Partners You Trust.
• 13. Believe in Your Product.
• 14. Persevere.
• 15. Celebrate the Wins.
• 16. Transform Setback Into Opportunity.
• 17. Define the Meaning of Your Brand.
• 18. Expand the Mission.
• 19. Align With a Cause.
• 20. Share Your Knowledge.
• 21. Face Your Fears.
• You Can Do It
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author