I was looking for something else entirely in my photo album, the way these things always start, and there she was. Me, four years ago, at an international entrepreneur exchange in Taiwan. New business, new name cards, and a smile doing its best to hide the fact that I mostly hoped nobody would ask a question I could not answer.
I remember the feeling of that trip precisely. Everyone else seemed to speak the language of business fluently. Revenue models, scaling, pitch decks, growth loops. I was a clinician who had wandered into a founders’ room, translating everything twice: once from Mandarin or English, and once from business language into something my dietitian brain could use. I took notes like a student who suspects everything will be on the exam. In a way, everything was.
What four years actually changed
The scoreboard looks different now. The startup nobody was sure could survive earned a Top 10 recognition among new businesses, and the contest named me its Top Female Entrepreneur. The solo dietitian became a multidisciplinary healthcare team, working alongside medical doctors in health screening and preventive care. The woman who hoped nobody would ask her a hard question now gets paid to answer them on stages.
But here is what the scoreboard hides. None of it arrived as a breakthrough. There was no single day where confidence showed up and stayed. There were only years assembled out of ordinary weeks: consultations delivered well, proposals rewritten after rejection, one more workshop, one more hire, one more small promise kept to a client who had been let down by health advice before.
Confidence never arrived. Passion just kept outlasting the self-doubt, one unglamorous year at a time.
That is the honest version, and I keep the photo because of it. Not as a before-and-after. As evidence that the person in that frame had no proof anything would work, and did it anyway. Proof only ever shows up afterwards, which is the great unfair joke of building anything.
If you are currently standing in your own Taiwan photo, somewhere new, slightly terrified, fluent in the wrong language for the room: take the picture anyway. Future you will want the receipt of how it started.
First shared on LinkedIn.