When I was around 12, my sister and I came home to no lunch on the table. Tuition class in two hours. I opened the fridge, found some leftover rice, and called my grandmother, “Can you teach me how to cook fried rice?” She walked me through it, garlic, shallots, oil, stir until golden, add the rice, cracked in some eggs, a splash of light and dark soy sauce. I hung up and got to work.

When I poured the rice into the pan, there was a strange metallic sound. Odd, but I carried on. When we sat down to eat, my sister frowned. “Why is the rice so hard to chew?”. We had a few bites, grabbed some snacks, and headed to class.

It wasn’t a great meal. But we made something. We showed up.

The same instinct showed up years later in my career journey.

A colleague, I’ll call him Rob, came to me looking lost. “Wendy, do you know how to fix the product pipeline chart on the company website?” I had no idea but I said, “I’ll find out”. I tracked down our IT vendor, worked out what they need and got it fixed.

When the person who normally handled the website came back, she pulled me aside. “Wendy, do you want to manage the company’s website?”

I said YES.

That one moment led to more projects that I’d ever planned for.

Over the years, the same approach had brought me places from fashion industry to retail sales, then biotech/ pharmaceutical industry; from sales operations to marketing; from launching fashion product launches, fitness, to peer-to-peer programs, clinician engagement events, and now marketing communications focusing on events.

Hard rice. Imperfect fix. Same principle.

That’s how I work. Whatever the industry, whatever the brief. All it takes is curiosity. Everything will figure itself out.