There is no mountain too high to climb as long as you understand your “Why.” Adam Nugent and Kate Strong welcome Mary Crafts to the podcast. Mary built Culinary Crafts into the most celebrated catering company in Utah. They talk about how change happens when your “Why” is bigger than your fears. Learn how to never put limitations on yourself because you are capable of more than you sometimes think you are!
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Mary Crafts is quite simply a culinary legend. She spent more than 30 years building a successful catering company and recently retired. In this podcast excerpt, she talks with Adam Nugent and Kate Strong about what’s next for her and the importance of dreaming big.
KS: Mary, tell us what you’re doing after Culinary Crafts. What Mary crafts is up to these days?
MC: Literally daily I would hear this: “Mary, you’re never going to be able to walk away from this. This is your baby. You founded this. You grew this.” My response was always the same: “Just watch me.” I had the best retirement party. I’m still chairman of the board, so I go to board meetings and I stop in and say hello. And I attend some of their events, but I am not in their daily operations.
I knew that I needed to have something to throw my feet out of the bed in the morning and put them on the floor that would cause me leap up with the same energy and the same passion that I had for all those years at Culinary Crafts. And it took me only a moment to realize what that was. My mission from now on is to continue to empower myself because I think you always have to include yourself in your mission statement. I started my podcast Crafting a Meaningful Life, and I now have over 130 episodes. Then I set some goals for myself like climbing Kilimanjaro and summiting that before I turned 66, which I did two weeks prior to my 66th birthday, and then to come home and write a book, which I did. I got a second chance at life, and I was kind of reborn.
AN: Where do you see yourself five years from now? Ten years?
MC: Well, I will have published my first book and I believe I will have published my second one. And I will definitely be on the New York Times best-seller list. And I will be speaking to a lot of people to inspire them. That is definitely in front of me. For the longest time, I couldn’t claim that because, for crying out loud, I’m just a little farm girl from Iowa and a town of 250 people. Who would ever think that I could do anything?
If the thought crosses your mind, if your brain is open to even have it crossed your consciousness, that means you can achieve it. Flat out, you can achieve it.
